Cargo Cult Web Performance Optimization
summary
Browsers are an open white box: the WebKit/Chromium codebase is ~4.5GB, and browsers implement DNS prefetch and TCP preconnect plus a Chrome predictor that pre-resolves hosts and subresources. Real pages average >1MB, ~30 hosts and ~80 requests, so the loader builds a DOM while a preload scanner extracts critical resources; scripts block parsing unless marked async or defer. Rendering uses multiple trees, 60fps needs ~16ms per frame, GPU layer promotion (translateZ) helps some animations but costs texture uploads and battery.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 8:44WebKit Powered Browsers Small sample of the many differences
- 10:50(Chrome) Network Stack
- 18:56Preload Scanner to the rescue!
- 22:59Welcome to the Render forest!
- 27:13Hardware Acceleration 101
- 30:36The browser is not a black box...
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