Tag: Chrome

Good little case study on how YouTube optimized their First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint by applying preload and fetchpriority to their poster image.

My favorite nugget is that they tested using an actual video thumbnail for their poster image versus a solid black poster image, and the black image performed better in user studies:

Using a solid black poster image showed the best results in user studies. Users found the transition from solid black to the first frame of the video to be a less-jarring experience for autoplay videos.

Alex is back at it with another very well written and important post, this time focusing on the state of mobile browser choice and how each major contributor is undermining user choice.

The mobile web is a pale shadow of its potential because the vehicle of progress that has delivered consistent gains for two decades has silently been eroded to benefit native app platforms and developers. These attacks on the commons have at their core a shared disrespect for the sanctity of user choice, substituting the agenda of app and OS developers for mediation by a user’s champion.

Apple’s iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store.

Heckuva leading assertion from Alex, but he brings some serious data to back it up, including some pretty compelling results from the Web Platform Tests.

There’s a lot of criticism levied at Chrome and how they move through the standards process (or don’t). Some of that criticism is fair, some of it isn’t.

But it’s pretty clear, I think, that we have a mismatch of resources creating an imbalance. On the one hand, we have Google funding the heck out of their web-focused efforts. On the other hand, we have Apple that just never seems willing to invest in it much.

The result isn’t particularly healthy for the web or for anyone who uses it. Alex’s point here rings true:

It’s perverse that users and developers everywhere pay a subsidy for Apple’s under-funding of Safari/WebKit development.

An in-depth, well researched guide to measuring Core Web Vitals from Barry (par for the course for him).

In this post, we’ll look at the new loading attribute which brings native <img> and <iframe> lazy-loading to the web!

Exciting to finally see this ship! Folks have been asking for a standards-based way to support lazy-loading images for years.

Gives me hope that maybe, someday, we’ll have element queries.

I always like seeing how other folks handle performance audits. Here, Jake walks through 10 F1 sites, auditing them primarily with WebpageTest and a smattering of Chrome Dev Tools.

Handy little reference from Addy Osmani showing how Chrome handles JavaScript scheduling.

Here’s the thing: the more we experience how other browsers work, the more we learn about how different users experience our websites.