27 items tagged “alexrussell”
2023
Someone asked me today if there was a case for using React in a new app that doesn’t need to support IE.
I could not come up with a single reason to prefer it over Preact or (better yet) any of the modern reactive Web Components systems (FAST, Lit, Stencil, etc.).
One of the constraints is that the team wanted to use an existing library of Web Components, but React made it hard. This is probably going to cause them to favour Preact for the bits of the team that want React-flavoured modern webdev.
It’s astonishing how antiquated React is.
— Alex Russell # 15th August 2023, 9:15 pm
2022
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. [... This is] what we should be aiming to send over the wire per page in 2023 to reach interactivity in less than 5 seconds on first load
— Alex Russell # 20th December 2022, 9:54 am
2019
Y’all decided you could send 6x as much script because the high-end could take it...but the next billion users can’t. There might have been budget for 2x, but not 6x. Not by a long shot.
— Alex Russell # 9th August 2019, 6:53 am
2018
A Netflix Web Performance Case Study (via) Fascinating description of how Netflix knocked the 3G loading times of their homepage in half for logged-out users by rendering the React templates on the server-side and using the bare amount of vanilla JavaScript necessary to get the homepage interactive—then XHR prefetching the full React code needed to power the subsequent signup flow. Via Alex Russell, who tweets “I’m increasingly optimistic that we can cap JS emissions by quarantining legacy frameworks to the server side.” # 6th November 2018, 8:54 pm
2017
Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets. Alex Russell’s magnum opus on web performance budgets in 2017. He proposes a baseline testing device equivalent to a $200 Android phone on a slow 3G network emulated at 400ms RTT/400Kbps transfer and encourages a goal of 5s time-to-interactive on first load and 2s TTI for subsequent views. This means around 130kb of gzipped JavaScript—challenging but not impossible with modern JavaScript frameworks. # 23rd October 2017, 1:51 pm
2010
Why, for a decade of experience, can we not seem to see the IE 8 zombie coming? It’s not like it’s going to be some big surprise that unless we do something different, we’ll still be supporting it in 2015. That’s right: in 2015, you’ll still be thinking about a browser that doesn’t support canvas or video and doesn’t even have a JITing JS engine.
— Alex Russell # 11th October 2010, 11:01 pm
If HTML is just another bytecode container and rendering runtime, we’ll have lost part of what made the web special, and I’m afraid HTML will lose to other formats by willingly giving up its differentiators and playing on their turf.
— Alex Russell # 17th March 2010, 10:37 pm
Dojo: Still Twice As Fast When It Matters Most. Alex Russell shows how Dojo out-performs jQuery on the TaskSpeed benchmark, which attempts to represent common tasks in real-world applications and has had code that have been optimised by the development teams behind each of the libraries. # 28th January 2010, 10:40 pm
2009
SPDY: The Web, Only Faster. Alex Russell explains the benefits of Google’s SPDF proposal (a protocol that upgrades HTTP)—including header compression, multiplexing, the ability to send additional resources such as images and stylesheets down without needing the data:uri hack and Comet support built in to the core assumptions of the protocol. # 13th November 2009, 1 pm
It’s interesting to me how much [Closure] feels like a more advanced version of Dojo in many ways. There’s a familiar package system, the widgets are significantly more mature, and Julie and Ojan’s Editor component rocks. The APIs will feel familiar (if verbose) to Dojo users, the class hierarchies seem natural, and Closure even uses Acme, the Dojo CSS selector engine.
— Alex Russell # 6th November 2009, 7:35 am
WebKit, Mobile, and Progress. Alex Russell responds to PPK’s analysis of the many different WebKit variants in today’s mobile phones, pointing out that the replacement cycle and increasing quality of WebKit in more recent phones means the situation still looks pretty good. # 10th October 2009, 12:28 am
Introducing Google Chrome Frame. Here’s what Alex Russell has been up to at Google: An IE plugin (for 6, 7 and 8 on all Windows versions) which embeds the Google Chrome rendering engine—sites can then opt-in to using it by including a X-UA-Compatible meta tag. Seems to be aimed at corporate networks which mandate IE for badly written intranet applications—they can roll this out without retraining users to use another browser or breaking their existing in house apps. # 23rd September 2009, 9:57 am
Years ago, Alex Russell told me that Django ought to be collecting CLAs. I said “yeah, whatever” and ignored him. And thus have spent more than a year gathering CLAs to get DSF’s paperwork in order. Sigh.
— Jacob Kaplan-Moss # 21st September 2009, 6:35 pm
CSS 3: Progress! Alex Russell on the new exciting stuff going in to CSS 3 based on real-world implementations in the modern set of browsers. Of particular interest is the new Flexible Box specification, which specifies new layout primitives hbox and vbox (as seen in XUL) and is already supported by both WebKit and Gecko. # 22nd August 2009, 11:52 am
JavaScript cannot save you. Even if it could, you should not let it, for the price of this short-term salvation is the end of what you like about the web.
— Alex Russell # 19th August 2009, 11:33 am
And Now For Something Entire... Oooh! Shiny! Alex Russell on O3D, the new 3D browser plugin from Google that makes OpenGL accessible to JavaScript (and embeds V8 so performance won’t suck even on slower browsers). # 22nd April 2009, 12:19 pm
2008
Making queries faster isn’t in the critical path for improving the real-world performance of any Dojo apps I know of, and I bet the same is true for JQuery users. Reducing the size of the libraries, on the other hand, is still important. Now that we’re all fast enough, it’s time that we stopped beating on this particular drum lest we lose the plot and the JavaScript community continue to subject itself to endless rounds of benchmarketing.
— Alex Russell # 22nd August 2008, 8:12 am
Open Web Podcast Episode 1. I haven’t listened yet, but Alex Russell, John Resig and Dion Almaer all at once? Awesome. # 8th August 2008, 11:59 pm
The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles? Alex Russell calls for a constructive step towards better gender balance in open source: make it clear that misogynistic, offensive and lewd behaviour will not be tolerated by open source communities and bake that policy in to community codes of conduct. # 28th July 2008, 12:44 am
2007
Boxing Day toy discovery: Mega Bloks not compatible with Duplo! See, Alex Russell? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU INNOVATE AHEAD OF STANDARDS
— Yoz Grahame # 26th December 2007, 5:58 pm
To get a better future, not only do we need a return to “the browser wars”, we need to applaud and use the hell out of “non-standard” features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow “bad” is to work against your own self-interest.
— Alex Russell # 16th December 2007, 11:33 pm
Sweet Gig. SitePen seek “R&D Associate” to have fun hacking on Open Source software and researching whatever they think is important. # 7th August 2007, 2:47 pm
Dojo 0.9 Update. Big changes are under way in the Dojo camp. # 29th April 2007, 8:18 pm
The website to web application gradient. Jeremy snapped this cunning illustration at my JavaScript Libraries panel at the Web 2.0 Expo. # 20th April 2007, 12:30 am
If you are subject to an XSS, the same domain policy already ensures that you’re f’d. An XSS attack is the “root” or “ring 0” attack of the web.
— Alex Russell # 8th January 2007, 10:48 pm
2006
Bayeux. Comet might just make Java relevant for web development again. # 7th August 2006, 11:51 am
Rewind. Alex Russell quits Jot to work on Dojo full time. # 9th May 2006, 7:40 am