Thread by @Nick_Craver

Please remember: how fast you're rendering a webpage doesn't matter.

How fast it *feels* is what matters.

Is it slow to actually get to the user? Is there so much CSS and JS work going on it makes the browser sluggish? Measure the experience, not just some server render time.

Frameworks are great, in theory. But the more work they're doing that you don't use or extra work they do under the covers to abstract simple things, the more you and your users pay for it.

Are the frameworks you're using really a net win?
Or just saving your devs some code?

Is the framework you started using because it was new and slim and did just what you wanted...still slim?

Or was it adopted early when it matched your needs, then grew over time for everyone else's, making it the same bloated thing you were trying to avoid? This happens. A lot.

When you're using a thing to save you time, you should try to understand just a little bit of what it's doing under the covers and how much that abstraction is costing you and your users.

If you aren't considering the costs with the benefits, you can't make a good decision.

I've talked a lot about how we measure performance at Stack Overflow lately focusing on the server because that's where we're working right now, but it's not the main thing I keep an eye on.

95th percentiles (the worst user experiences) are what I look at daily. That's the feel:

The white dots in those top graphs are the median and not bad for a website around the world, but the worst experiences still need a lot of love.

You can ask our designers, I constantly fight back bloat of page size and weight - and they get it. The whole experience matters.

Anyway, I just see the web getting slower and slower for users. And that's nuts. No one is adding much new functionality that warrants it. We're talking about pages with text and media, not 3d games. Users shouldn't be lagging for sites we could render without it 8 years ago.

Please, look at your pages. Run some performance profiling - every major browser ships with free tools to do it. See what's lagging your users. See what you can do to improve it.

Care. Just care. That's step 1 to any of this. Care about what your users experience. Please.

Something I didn’t have to say years ago, but here we are:

If your webpage causes laptop fans to turn on, that’s bad.