Posts tagged “web performance”

I push back on Alex Russell's "Market for Lemons" post blaming JS frameworks and their advocates for poor mobile web performance. Developers aren't stupid or deceived: React dominates because of rational economics. Frameworks save developer time, enable hiring, and compound via ecosystems. Better frameworks, not fewer frameworks, is the answer.

Nolan Lawson's piece on progressive enhancement is great, but conflates two different use cases: web apps and multi-page sites. For apps, offline-first beats JavaScript-free. For content sites, progressive rendering is essential since half-loaded pages are nearly guaranteed. Graceful degradation means something completely different depending which you're building.

The PHP vs. C battle was decided by Moore's Law: hardware outpaced complexity. But HTML vs. Obj-C is different. Unlike PHP's server-side slowness, HTML's performance gap is visible to users right now. If a competitor can build a better native experience before Moore's Law saves you, you're done.

BitTorrent's P2P magic should apply to websites, not just big files. I'm proposing WebTorrent: a local proxy that lets browsers share cached pages with each other, eliminating the Slashdot effect without requiring any changes from website owners. Someone please build this. I'm begging you.