Performance Newsletter |
Issue 2 |
POSTER
Back the #perfmatters movement
Despite the huge impact that performance has on whether you’ll be successful on the web, it can often be an afterthought. Many of you are surely used to doing performance tweaks in your own time, after a project is launched or worse—when something goes wrong.
That’s exactly why we've commissioned this poster by CJ Melegrito for you to print and hang in your office. You can buy a ready-made, high quality print if you wish to do so too!
TALK
How AMP acheives it’s speed — Google I/O
Malte Ubl, tech lead of Google’s
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project talks about how they’re working to improve performance in plenty of every day user interactions.
A great introduction if you’ve not yet had a look 👀
ARTICLE
Perhaps rather unsurprisingly, stats that the AMP project have unveiled show that when ads are fast, users see them more, and also interact with them a lot more too.
Compared to non-AMP pages, ads on AMP have led to:
- 80%+ of the publishers realising higher viewability rates
- 90%+ of the publishers driving greater engagement with higher CTRs
LIGHTNING TALK
‘Making React initialise faster’.
Two weeks ago at React Europe, Sebastian McKenzie (founding author of babel) gave a lightning talk showing a JavaScript compiling optimiser that yielded a 3X performance improvement for initialising React in the browser.
The project is still experimental, and by no means production ready, but it’s an interesting insight into possible transformations babel will be able to make.
It looks as though ReactEurope have uploaded all of the conference videos to their youtube channel.
BROWSERS
Safari 10 webfont enhancements & more
There’s plenty of new things in the upcoming Safari 10 release, but in respects to performance, there's a couple of webfont enhancements that are particularly exciting. Here’s the tldr;
- Safari 10 will stop loading a webfont if it has not completed within 3 seconds.
- Fallback fonts will be shown until the webfont has completed loading — no longer blocking users from reading content.
- WOFF 2.0 (which allows for a better compression algorithm — said to be around 30% better than WOFF 1.0) is now supported.
- Added support for the CSS Font loading API.
TALK
Katie Kovalcin’s “The path to performance”
This wonderfully designed deck by Katie discusses strategies for making performance a reoccurring theme throughout the lifecycle of a project, rather than it being an afterthought. Couldn't agree more. A+ Katie.
PERSPECTIVE
You might not know your users
A wonderful (kind of terrible) story as told by the self-proclaimed “Accidental IT guy” who is working for an anti-poaching pilot project in the Central African Bush, deep in the Chinko Reserve.
In short, the famed Windows 10 auto-update downloaded 17GB between various Chinko project computers — over a per-megabyte-billed satellite internet connection. Sad face.
A prudent reminder that we don't know how, where from, or on what connection type our customers will access the things that we build.