The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript | Ryan Townsend | performance.now() 2023

For the past 10+ years, JavaScript frameworks and Single Page Applications have been marketed as the solution to all our performance, robustness and productivity problems, but things haven’t worked out the way we’d all hoped, have they? Simple marketing and ecommerce sites are still getting heavier and slower. Features fail in weird and wonderful ways meaning we need an ever-increasing array of tooling to monitor and debug problems. Teams armed with the latest Apple Silicon Macs, expensive CI tooling and complex build pipelines still can’t ship effectively. But it’s not all doom-and-gloom: we live in a time of unprecedented opportunity to give our users a fantastic experience – the web platform has never been more capable than it is today. Let’s look at what we can achieve by simplifying our web architecture, utilising new and upcoming Web Platform APIs and getting back to building fast, maintainable, user-friendly front-ends. Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/ryantownsend/... About Ryan: https://twnsnd.com More about performance.now(); https://perfnow.nl Receive conference announcements in your inbox: https://perfnow.nl/subscribe