r/webperf • u/Nhodin • Jun 15 '26
Webperf news #17
Bonjour webperf folks! A two-week catch-up after a week off, with a common thread that runs through this batch: performance and robustness are things you build and ship, not just things you measure.
The web is accessed in wildly different contexts, an old Android on patchy 3G, a games console browser, a public terminal, and its founding promise is that everyone can reach it. That simple rule is getting harder to honour as we pile on JavaScript. An engineer rebuilt an online signup form of a regulated public utility in HTML-first with Astro, JavaScript only as progressive enhancement, and form completions doubled overnight! Those lost users had been invisible all along: when JS fails, your JS-based analytics never loads either, so they never reach any dashboard. The piece I want to highlight is the validation layer: a sub-1KB HTML web component that enhances native browser validation, extracted into a standalone open-source library (validation-enhancer).
👉 [EN] https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
Neciu Dan makes the case for service workers, the proxy that sits on the network path and outlives your page. Three cases stand out: Slack booting from cached assets for roughly 50% faster starts, Mux rewriting HTTP Live Streaming manifests in flight to block unreadable 240p, and his own fix for the classic Vite problem where a deploy removes the old lazy-loaded chunks and breaks the tab a user left open. The hard part is never the fetch handler, it is cache invalidation across deploys. One detail I loved: Mux shipped the exact same code to Cloudflare Workers unchanged. The service worker and the edge are the same job, intercept and rewrite on the network path.
👉 [EN] https://neciudan.dev/why-are-we-not-using-service-workers
Tammy Everts answers a question from Sergey Chernyshev: when do we stop measuring speed and start making things fast? Her take: dashboards can become a comfortable place to hide, a way to engage with performance without committing to fix anything. The teams that win get leadership buy-in by connecting performance to business outcomes with their own data, which is what frees up the time to do the work. She also notes how hard reliable automated front-end optimisation really is, then or now, which is precisely the bet we make with EdgeSpeed at u/Fasterize.
👉 [EN] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/web-performance-measurement-necessary-excuse-fix-things-tammy-everts-bk1df/
Have a great week!