Happy Browser, Happy User

Performance is fundamental, a UX concern. Sites that are slow to render or janky to interact with are a bad user experience. We strive to write performant code for our users, but users don’t directly interact with our code – it all happens through the medium of the browser. The browser is the middleman between us and our users; therefore to make our users happy, we first have to make the browser happy. But how exactly do we do that?

In this talk, we’ll learn how browsers work under the hood: how they request, construct, and render a website. At each step along the way, we’ll cover what we can do as developers to make the browser’s job easier, and why those best practices work. You’ll leave with a solid understanding of how to write code that works with the browser, not against it, and ultimately improves your users’ experience.

What You’ll Learn

• How to make the browser happy
• Performance problems
  • Network latency
  • Single thread
• Four phases of navigation and goals of each phase
• Parsing problems
  • Dom + CSSOM
  • HTML
  • JavaScript
• The render pipeline
  • Style
  • Layout
  • Paint
  • Composite