Platform Strategy and Its Discontents – Infrequently Noted

October 28, 2024

Web developers and browsers have capped the web’s mobile potential by ensuring it will feel terrible on the phones most folks have. A web that can win is a web that doesn’t feel like sludge. And today it does.This failure has many fathers. Browsers have not done nearly enough to intercede on users’ behalf; hell, we don’t even warn users that links they tap on might take them to sites that lock up the main thread for seconds at a time!

Things have gotten so bad that even the extremely weak pushback on developer excess that Google’s Core Web Vitals effort provides is a slow-motion earthquake. INP, in particular, is forcing even the worst JS-first lemon vendors to retreat to the server — a tacit acknowledgement that their shit stinks.

So this is the strategic logic of why web performance matters in 2024; for the web to survive, it must start to grow on mobile. For that growth to start, we need the web to be a credible way to deliver these sorts of 80/20 capability-enabled mobile experiences with not-trash performance. That depends both on browsers that don’t suck (we see you, Apple) and websites that don’t consistently lock up phones and drain batteries.

Source: Platform Strategy and Its Discontents – Infrequently Noted

Cassandra, the daughter of the King of Troy, was fated to be able ot predict the future, but cursed that no one would believe her.

I’m sure Alex Russell at times feels like Cassandra.

A long time contributor to the Web in numerous ways (developer of Dojo one of the early web frameworks, working on the Chrome and IE teams, alongside Frances Berriman coining the term and fleshing out the ideas behind Progressive Web Apps, a lot of work at the W3C) Alex has for years highlighted the challenges the Web as a platform faces in the era of mobile.

This new piece is not easy reading but not without hope.

Above all Alex lays the responsibility for the Webs success or failure on us who care about it and develop for it.