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News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit

Good news and bad news…

The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!

The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.

Native lazy-loading for the web | web.dev

The title is somewhat misleading—currently it’s about native lazy-loading for Chrome, which is not (yet) the web.

I’ve just been adding loading="lazy" to most of the iframes and many of the images on adactio.com, and it’s working a treat …in Chrome.

Distinguishing cached vs. network HTML requests in a Service Worker | Trys Mudford

Less than 24 hours after I put the call out for a solution to this gnarly service worker challenge, Trys has come up with a solution.

The Web Developer’s Guide to DNS | RJ Zaworski

At Codebar the other night, I was doing an intro chat with some beginners. At one point I touched on DNS. This explanation is great for detailing what’s going on under the hood.

Making Sense of Chrome Lite Pages - TimKadlec.com

Tim takes a closer look at this Google Lite thing.

Chromium Blog: Chrome Lite Pages - For a faster, leaner loading experience

My first reaction to this was nervousness. Of all the companies to trust with intercepting and rerouting page requests, Google aren’t exactly squeeky clean, what with that whole surveillance business model of theirs.

Still, this ultimately seems to be a move to improve the end user experience, and I’m glad to see this clarification:

Lite pages are only triggered for extremely slow sites, so we encourage developers to measure how well their pages are currently performing over slow networks.

Lite pages as a badge of shame (much like AMP in my eyes).

Cache-Control for Civilians – CSS Wizardry

Harry breaks down cache-control headers into steps that even I can understand. I’ll be using this a reference for sure.

When 7 KB Equals 7 MB - Cloud Four

I remember Jason telling me about this weird service worker caching behaviour a little while back. This piece is a great bit of sleuthing in tracking down the root causes of this strange issue, followed up with a sensible solution.

The Critical Request - Speaker Deck

There are some handy performance tips from Ben in this slide deck.

In this talk we’ll study how browsers determine which requests should be made, in what order, and what prevents the browser from rendering content quickly.

I discovered a browser bug - JakeArchibald.com

Jake’s blow-by-blow account of uncovering a serious browser vulnerability is fascinating. But if you don’t care for the technical details, skip ahead to to how different browser makers handled the issue—it’s very enlightening. (And if you do care for the technical details, make sure you click on the link to the PDF version of this post.)

CORS

A thorough explanation of the history and inner workings of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

Like tales of a mythical sea beast, every developer has a story to tell about the day CORS seized upon one of their web requests, dragging it down into the inexorable depths, never to be seen again.

Cancelling Requests with Abortable Fetch

This is a really good use-case for cancelling fetch requests: making API calls while autocompleting in search.

Offline POSTs with Progressive Web Apps – Web Dev @ Microsoft – Medium

This is a smart way to queue up POST submissions for later if the user is offline. It’s not as powerful as background sync (because it requires the user to revisit your site) but it’s a good fallback for browsers that support service workers but don’t yet support background sync

The Critical Request | CSS-Tricks

Ben takes us on a journey inside the mind of a browser (Chrome in this case). It’s all about priorities when it comes to the critical path.

How to see through the cloud

This is a great explanatory piece from James Bridle in conjunction with Mozilla’s Webmaker. It’s intended for a younger audience, but its clear description of how web requests are resolved is pitch-perfect primer for anyone.

The web isn’t magic. It’s not some faraway place we just ‘connect’ to, but a vast and complex system of computers, connected by actual wires under the ground and the oceans. Every time you open a website, you’re visiting a place where that data is stored.

Request Quest

A terrific quiz about browser performance from Jake. I had the pleasure of watching him present this in a bar in Amsterdam—he was like a circus carny hoodwinking the assembled geeks.

I guarantee you won’t get all of this right, and that’s a good thing: you’ll learn something. If you do get them all right, either you are Jake or you are very, very sad.