Ctrl blog

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome

Google Chrome for Android gives Google Search (when set as the default search engine) a network performance-boost over competing search engines.

A technical and privacy review of Cloudflare Web Analytics

Cloudflare has launched a new free web analytics/visitor-counting service. It promises to put end-user privacy first. The service has plenty of room to improve.

Chrome to remove HTTP/2 Push

Chrome intends to remove support for server push; an underutilized performance feature introduced in HTTP/2. It cites low usage and implementation complexity.

Twitter preconnects to the wrong domains

Twitter tried to reduce load times for external links, but made things slower instead. It mistakenly normalizes domains to a point where they’re no longer useful.

Comparing file sizes of lossless WebP vs FLIF vs PNG

The FLIF lossless image format makes big claims on file size savings, but lossless WebP actually delivers smaller lossless image files.

Comparing AVIF vs WebP file sizes at the same DSSIM

I got impressive results when comparing AVIF and WebP images at the same visual quality (using DSSIM). AVIF’s 85th percentile was the same as WebP’s 15th!

Make native lazy-loading images load more eagerly

A tutorial on how to load native lazy-loading images earlier in Safari and Firefox. Speed up page loading while keeping visitors from seeing loading images.

Inconsistent user-experiences with native lazy-loading images

The various web browsers focus on different priorities and user experience trade-offs in their lazy-loading image implementations.

Smarter reusable IPFS chunks from HTML documents

IPFS splits files into chunks. Smarter splitting points in HTML files can create more reusable/deduplicatd chunks with higher availability.

.blog vs .com TLD performance

Traditional and established top-level domain resolves faster than the newfangled .blog top-level domain. Unsurprising, but worrisome.

Make AdSense faster with preconnect

Reduce Google AdSense’s impact on page-load time using <link rel="preconnect">. Optimization only used on 350 out of 12M AdSense partner websites.

What to <link rel=dns-prefetch> and when to use preconnect

Learn the difference between dns-prefecth vs preconnect, how to work around browser bugs, and when to use which? iOS and Safari requires special attention.

Progressive JPEGs make a meaningful impact on perceived performance

Make a meaningful improvement in user experience for your website visitors, especially those with slow internet, with semi-progressive JPEG loading.

Safari’s Beacon API problems

You must implement the Beacon API the way WebKit deems to be “the right way” to make it work on iOS, Safari, and WebKit browsers.

Compressed favicons are 70% smaller but 75% are served uncompressed

The majority of websites don’t compress their favicon files despite an impressive average file size reduction of over 70 %.

Aren’t AMP Caches committing copyright infringement?

How can mass-copying pages from web publishers without a license not be mass-copyright infringement? The weird copyright law exemption that enables AMP Caches.

Chrome is right to remove the webRequest extension API

As an extension developer, I support Google’s controversial decision to remove of a slow and over-powered extension API favored by ad-blocking extensions.