‘WebPerf’ articles

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

FLIF makes big claims on file size savings but lossless WebP delivers.

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

Established top-level domain resolves faster than newfangled .com domain.

Make AdSense faster with `preconnect`

Reduce Google AdSense’s impact on page-load times using <link rel="preconnect">. Only used by ~350 out of 12 million 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 impact on your website visitors’ low-bandwidth user experience 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 considered copyright infringement?

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.

Secondary authoritative DNS service providers compared

A comparison of the security features and other features offerings at 14 different secondary/slave DNS providers.

Compared DNS caching/TTL of different CDNs

Short DNS TTL times are great for failover but can be detrimental to DNS performance. Here’s a comparison of the DNS TTL caching durations of popular CDNs.