Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress. Update: After further investigation, an even better solution has presented itself, which is documented in the next post. The new content-visibility CSS property finally allows browsers to intelligently decide to defer layout and rendering work for content that isn't on-screen. For pages with large DOMs, this can be transformative. I

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress. TL;DR: performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Most partners we work with are not aware of the real-world operating environment and make inappropriate technology choices as a result. We set a budget in time of <= 5 seconds first-load Time-to-Interactive and <= 2s for subseq

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress. Mikeal Rogers reached out last week to talk about Web Components, which surprised me, but his follow-up blog post is essential, timely reading. Dimitri Glazkov, Alex Komoroske, and I started the project that designed and (for many years) iterated on Web Components with a few primary goals in mind: Enhance component portability Shrin

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress. Since Frances and I published a blog post last year introducing Progressive Web Apps, a healthy conversation has started about what is and isn't a PWA. There are a lot of opinions and many shades of gray. What are the hard requirements? Which requirements are marginal? What's aspirational? This article outlines these requirements, a

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress. A lot of smart folks keep asking me why AppCache isn't a good enough solution for "offline" and why it was necessary to invent Service Workers. It's a great question! Motivated by the regrettably uneven browser support landscape for Service Workers, there's a real incentive to "just make something work offline" on iOS or old-IE. Thi