Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell
My blog discusses browsers, web standards, web performance, and how they relate to the competition between the web and native app ecosystems.
July 2026
August 2026
Top Words
- performance
- apple
- reckoning
- inequality
- store
- antitrust
- standards
- safari
- management
All posts (36)
For most of the past decade, I have spent a considerable fraction of my professional life consulting with teams building on the web. It is not going well. Not only are new services being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, existing experiences are pervasively re-developed on unspeakably...
TL;DR: To serve users at the 75th percentile (P75) of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight improvement on last year's budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. Meanwhile, sites continue to send more script than is...
Gentle reader, I made a terrible mistake. Yes, that's right: I read the comments on a MacRumors article. At my age, one knows better. And yet. As penance for this error, and for being short with Miguel, I must deconstruct the ways Apple has undermined browser engine diversity. Contrary to claims of Apple partisans,...
Since 2015 I have been lucky to collaborate with more than a hundred teams building PWAs and consult on some of the world's largest sites. Engineers and managers on these teams universally want to deliver great experiences and have many questions about how to approach common challenges. Thankfully, much of what once...
If you work on a browser, you will often hear remarks like, Why don't you just put [popular framework] in the browser? This is a good question — or at least it illuminates how browser teams think about tradeoffs. Spoiler: it's gnarly. Before we get into it, let's make the subtext of the proposal explicit: Libraries...
Note: This post first ran as part of Sergey Chernyshev and Stoyan Stefanov's indispensible annual series. It's being reposted here for completeness, but if you care about web performance, make sure to check out the whole series and get subscribed to their RSS feed to avoid missing any of next year's posts. In a...
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