When a crisis hits, as humans we feel an obligation to respond. Whether we "stand with" those affected, or actually can aid those affected in some way - there is an innate desire to reach out and express our solidarity or willingness to help out in the face of a disaster. In 2020 we have … Continue reading Responding to Crisis: Web Performance Style
Category: Performance
I see 2 common approaches to dealing with video on mobile browsers: Hide the video with CSS "display:none". (This results in a partial video download that the user can literally NEVER see). Serve the same video to both mobile and desktop. This video is typically 720p or 1080p, and designed to look great on large … Continue reading Video Playback on Mobile Devices
Update: March 28, 2020 This weekend, my son asked to play with the LEGO crane. WE pulled it out of the box, and reconnected all the pieces. Then I went to Google Play to download the app - 159 MB! The asset bundle dropped from 245 MB to 120MB Still big, but half the size it … Continue reading Size Does Matter: LEGO’s 300MB Android App
Background videos, and videos that autoplay on websites are becoming more and more popular (and perhaps will soon be the new normal). It is also common to only display the video on larger screens, and to hide the video on small screens. An Anti-pattern emerges However, in my experience of looking at hundreds of websites … Continue reading Hiding Videos on the Mobile Web
Video on the web is now reaching far beyond just linking to YouTube. Thousands of pages are embedding video as an integral part of the website experience: both increasing the interest and engagement of their site to users, but also the size and time to load of the webpage. This is a delicate balance that … Continue reading State of the Web: Video Playback Metrics
Doug Sillars: Performance Expert and Developer Advocate 