As the the performance.now() 2025 conference in Amsterdam ended, presentation links started to drip-in around the socials, like:
- Ethan Gardner‘ Web Performance Alliances, where he help explain how we techies can better communicate our message with those that do not speak our nerdy lingo, such as converting:
Our INP went from 370ms to 160ms.
into
Before, users were tapping buttons in frustration and waiting for feedback. Now, they get a smoother experience that’s over 50% faster.
I also love these nuggets of wisdom:
“Marketing opens new doors. Performance keeps them open.”
and
…performance metrics are stand-ins for how a customer sees our product, how quickly they can act, and how smooth the journey feels. Speed can be a product differentiator.
Which was basically the entire point of Core Web Vitals.
- Barry Pollard‘s Speculations on Web Performance, where he talks about Speculation Rules, including how they are handled on mobile!
- Andy Davies‘ Making Sense of LoAF, where he dives down deep into Long Animation Frames, including what they are, how to track them, and how to squash them! Don’t miss the link to his DevTools extension perf-timeline-to-devtools-profile, which “creates a custom track in the DevTools Performance Panel populated with entries from the Performance Timeline”. BAM!
The conference’s YouTube channel typically starts adding videos within days of the conference ending. Such amazing…
Lucas Dohmen offers a great article on font optimization techniques that covers typefaces, compression and subsetting. It should definitely help get your web fonts in order!
Sara Soueidan shows us how a “scrollspy” can be updated to run with no JS! (And to be clear, a scrollspy is when something like a navigation auto-updates to reflect where you are in the page as you scroll up and down.) This has always required JS to monitor the scroll actions, consult IntersectionObservers, and update the DOM; no longer!
Sticking with scroll for a quick bit, you probably know about scroll-margin, but did you know there is also a scroll-padding? Me neither! Luckily, Matthias Zöchling is here to tell us all about it and why it might make more sense!
I love reading Chris Ferdinandi‘s articles… I have listened to his podcasts, so I know his voice, and his tone and style just resonate with me (read: he swears just like me… but you know, only when it is, like, necessary, of course… ). One of his latest offerings, Just use a button, simultaneously cracks me up and infuriates me, because I have had the exact same discussion: Why would you go through so many steps to recreate what the browser gives you for free???? Just. Use. HTML. Stop. Breaking. The. Browser.
While we’re ranting… Stefan Judis shares his favorite single-purpose URLs, such as stopcitingai.com. One of my absolute faves is still letmegooglethat.com… Example use case)… Such snark… So brilliant…
Sticking with AI, a couple performance notes:
- Matt Zeunert of DebugBear walks us through the new DevTools MCP from Google. Matt starts off defining what this is, then walks through how to install, get started, and what MCP can and cannot do. A great starter doc!!
- Tim Kadlec of Cloudflare shares their new open-source, cross-browser performance testing agent, Telescope.
Adam Argyle helps point out that web elements, specifically @containers, know stuff…
For anyone that is trying to create and support PWAs, Charles Wiltgen presents PWAscore, a website that tracks and “scores” how well mobile (and soon desktop) browsers do at supporting PWAs.
And finally, especially for Halloween, but certainly morhpable for anytime, Alvaro Montoro presents Frankenstein’s Monster Toggle Switch… HTML + CSS, no JS… Note that both the eyes and the mouth change as you hover, and when you click. Such fun!
Happy reading,
Atg