Some Performance Blog Posts I’ve Bookmarked and Read Lately

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  • Back/forward cache — I always assumed browsers just do fancy stuff with the back/forward buttons and us developers had very little control. Philip Walton tells us it’s critical that we understand “what makes pages eligible (and ineligible) for bfcache to maximize their cache-hit rates.” For example, if you use the unload event, the page is instantly disqualified from the cache.
  • Big picture performance analysis using Lighthouse Parade — Lighthouse only tests one page of your site. Lighthouse Parade tests all the URLs of a site, and aggregates the results.
  • Beyond fast with new performance features — Jake Archibald gets into the CSS content-visibility property (and a few other things) and how it can lead to incredible performance boosts (you use it to tell the browser that it’s straight-up OK not to render things). Right this minute, content-visiblity makes me nervous as it has issues with scrollbar jankiness and accessiblity problems. I found it a smidge confusing at first glance, and Tim Kadlec has reservations.
  • Image Decode & Visual Timings — Image performance isn’t only about the size of the image. Different formats take different amounts of time to decode and render. GIF never wins.
  • How to increase CSS-in-JS performance by 175x — The trick, readers, is shipping CSS. You can still use CSS-in-JS as you author, and have the build process create the CSS. They call that “Zero-Runtime” like Linaria.
  • Testing Performance — Kelly Sutton: “The best approach that I have found to preventing performance regressions is to employ qualitative assessments of the code.” Performance is such an unwieldy beast, that only in production will you truly know what happens.
  • Front-End Performance Checklist 2021 — If you’re going to get serious about performance this year, you’d do well to dig into Vitaly’s guide.
  • We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow — HTTP/2 is a huge indicator of good performance.