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Horde #01

We talk about Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse 10, CrUX, DevEX vs UX and more.

Welcome to the first edition of Hordes! My weekly and monthly round-up of performance resources and tools. We kick off 2023 strong with a bunch of useful articles, tool updates and more.

Optimize Time to First Byte

A great article by the Chrome DevRel team on optimising Time to First Byte. This particular web vital is an incredibly important metric to focus on improving, as it precedes every other meaningful Core Web Vital.

Time to First Byte…measures the time between the request for a resource and when the first byte of response begins to arrive.

The article goes into depth about what factors affect Time to First Byte and how to consider improving them. The biggest culprits are typically hosting, content delivery networks and page redirects that can have a significant impact on Time to First Byte.

Read: Optimize Time to First Byte

Speed For Who?

An opinion piece by Andy Bell, founder of Set. Andy discusses the discrepancies between frameworks being blazing fast for developers vs end-users. He puts it out that even Remix and NextJS: two frameworks which are incredibly well-known for their speed and efficiency, still output monstrous bundles and do nothing but spoil developers in their engineering experience. I don't think he's far off there.

Worth a read if you feel like taking a different perspective on JavaScript Frameworks and Performance.

Read: Speed for Who?

What's New In Lighthouse 10?

It's always exciting to see a new Lighthouse version release. February the 9th marked v10 of Lighthouse with some significant changes to scoring. TTI (Time to Interactive) has been removed from Lighthouse, and its 10% weighting score has been attributed to Cumulative Layout Shift - which now accounts for 25% of the overall performance score Lighthouse returns.

In more exciting news, we now see audits for bfcache (Back/Forward Cache) an incredibly important tool for improving page experience.

Read: What's New in Lighthouse 10

Introducing the CrUX History API

It's been a busy month for the Chrome team. On February 7th we saw the introduction of the CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) History API.

The API allows you to view 6 months of performance data history, covering 25 data points. Your site must feature in the CrUX to be eligible for this API.

Read: Introducing historical web performance data via the CrUX History API

Welcome, NextJS v13.2

One calendar month of the year cannot get better when both the Chrome and NextJS teams release major functionality updates. NextJS recently released v13.2 of the powerful JavaScript framework that has become the go-to tool for hundreds if not thousands of developers.

NextJS 13.2 features some rather fancy new features:

  1. Built-in SEO support using the new NextJS Metadata API

  2. Improved error reporting

  3. Statically-Typed Links

  4. Improvements to Turbopack

Read: NextJS 13.2 Release