Modern web browsing is all about first impressions. Google’s PageSpeed Insights benchmark declares a website slow if rendering the first contentful paint (FCP) is higher than 3 seconds. In contrast, a fast FCP is 1 second or less. As such, now more than ever, it is vital to focus on page performance just as much as the content. Even a bloated website can engage a relatively larger audience if it prioritizes the visible content first and makes a better first impression in terms of speed and responsiveness.
Move over AppCache, there's a new API for building interactive, feature-rich applications: Service Workers.
When you think of web caching, you might picture a content delivery network (CDN), browser cache, or reverse proxy. These types of caches help deliver web pages and resources to visitors faster. But while these work great for static content, content that changes on each visit can be difficult or even impossible to cache, meaning your origin server has to do more work and respond to more requests.
The release of HTTP/2 in 2015 was a big win for the modern Web. While HTTP/1.1 worked well enough, it was built in an age before full two-way encryption, 1.9 MB web pages, and sub-3 second delivery times. We needed a modern protocol for a modern web, and HTTP/2 promised to deliver.
Brotli is an open source, lossless compression algorithm developed by Google. Originally designed to decrease the size of web fonts, Brotli now works as a general-purpose format for compressed data. Brotli acts as an alternative to gzip and Deflate, generating files that are smaller and decompress just as quickly.