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**Guillermo Rauch:** Exactly. So the first paint, the browser is just spending all this effort in making that first paint, and then it interrupts itself with all this new JS and CSS and HTML that paints on top... And then the background rendering continues. So this world - we cannot understand it with a single metric. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's an insta-close by me. |
**Amal Hussein:** Yeah, for me too. |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm not even wasting my time with that. I'm on to the next tap, because there's plenty of web pages out there, right? |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah. So the Web Vitals invention for me is a breakthrough... And it's very important to mention here that they're heuristics... Because the only thing that could truly help us here is an AI that tells us "The website feels good." Or you just look at your business metrics, or something like that. B... |
Then we have Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). That one is super-interesting, because with single-page applications one of my personal pet peeves was that they always render into a spinner. So it's like, if you're doing edge JAMstack etc. it's like, the edge is really fast time to spinner. And that's not really gonna hel... |
And the other one that I'm really interested in too, with all this new, modern web tooling that we're talking about, is that if I press Buy, will the website respond at all? Because sometimes it doesn't do anything, because the JS isn't loaded... Or - I don't know if you've ever seen this - it takes you to the top of t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Is that because the anchor doesn't exist yet? Like, that element doesn't exist yet when you're clicking it? |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah, the element has not received the on-click handler yet... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, it hasn't been tied together. Gotcha. |
**Guillermo Rauch:** ...so all it does is just go to the top. People use the anchor tag, but there's not really anywhere to go, because the Buy button is supposed to do something on the page with JavaScript. So First Input Delay refers also to the fact that you might click, and it might not do anything for a very long ... |
\[40:01\] So that First Input Delay Web Vital is like "Okay, I'm gonna tap, and it's gonna respond to my input very quickly", which is what most people want. And I'm gonna caveat this by also saying this \[unintelligible 00:40:18.17\] but at least now we say, okay, these three core Web Vitals we must all agree that the... |
But what's interesting -- and the reason I was never too upset with AMP is that I could tap on those things, and I could tell that they were infinitely faster on the web... At least from my experience. And mostly, it was due to pre-fetching and other things. But what's nice is that what came out of AMP was them realizi... |
So this new Cumulative Layout Shift Web Vital comes from that learning of - look, what makes an AMP page be fast, one of the components is that they thought very deeply about a more constrained layout system that made it less likely to have a layout shifting around when you first load the page. So in some ways, the cir... |
**Amal Hussein:** Wow. That was like a 101 in web performance... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Amal Hussein:** Like a digestion pill in web performance, or something like that. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I'm still chewing on it. |
**Amal Hussein:** Web developers, learn. Wow. |
**Jerod Santo:** Is Web Vitals finalized? Do they agree upon it? Is there argumentation about -- |
**Guillermo Rauch:** I'm pretty confident that they're set, because my understanding is that - and you can fact-check me on this - I think I heard March, but the Google algorithm will start incorporating the core Web Vitals. Web Vitals are many, but the three that I talked about are the core ones... And yeah, I started... |
I can tell you - hey, go to Guillermo's Facebook.com; you've never seen it before in your life, and it can render just in time; with all this amazing code that's been pre-loaded in the cloud, I can render the perfect optimal page for you. And that's a property I think we need to -- if we want the web to win, I think we... |
\[44:05\] Mobile native has opposite advantages. In some ways, raw CPU computation, or maybe GPU access, or whatever - they might beat us. But on that specific super-critical dimension, the code distribution of redeployment and that first initial paint could actually be where we destroy mobile, native. |
**Amal Hussein:** Right. I mean, it matters so much with data usage, especially in... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Totally. |
**Amal Hussein:** ...developing countries, where data is currency. I mean, it's like that in the U.S, as well; I shouldn't really say developing countries. It's more like data is really currency, and people are very conscious of how much their apps are updating, and which websites are "fat". |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Totally. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Amal Hussein:** But I totally agree, the web wins on versioning and distribution, hands-down. It's interesting, this Web Vitals -- I think Google has been playing around with some of these metrics for quite a few years now in terms of what's important, with like time to first meaningful paint... There's several acron... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah, FCP even. We used to talk about First Contentful, and now it's Largest... Which makes sense. But they iterate a lot. |
**Amal Hussein:** First Meaningful... Right. They iterated a lot, and that's fine. It's all good. Going back to your earlier point, nothing is one size fits all with the web. |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Totally. |
**Amal Hussein:** And I think for me, going back to our earlier discussion around what makes a world-class team, or a world-class software project - for me in 2020 or 2021 it's software that's progressive; truly, truly progressive at its core... Which means that you are handling for different capabilities on different ... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Degradation? |
**Amal Hussein:** Right, degradation. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, graceful degradation. |
**Amal Hussein:** Thank you, yeah. Because really, that's how you're gonna win across the reach of the web... Because that's the unique challenge that we have developing for the web - we don't have these known devices and known constraints, right? |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah. What you mentioned about data really resonates with me, because I've heard... I'm from Argentina originally, and I've heard outside of the bubble -- and there's always bubbles; web development is a bubble... In my country, where I grew up, which is outside the city of Buenos Aires, I was outs... |
That's what I think WhatsApp did really well. WhatsApp got massive distribution in Argentina. One of their first clients was a mobile Java-something-like client, that was less than a megabyte to download... You have to really empathize with all these massive numbers of people that actually can consume your content if y... |
**Amal Hussein:** \[48:18\] Yeah, I agree. I would say though, to push that further, there's some really interesting things coming to the web platform, Temporal being one of them... For those of you who use projects like Moment, or other date-time libraries, timezone management tooling, it's being able to actually get ... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** And that's a real example too, by the way, of the power of the browser in so far -- there's a lot of code that has already been written, has already been loaded by the web browser instance, that why would you try to then ship more code that is not loaded yet, that has to be downloaded, parsed, comp... |
This is one of the key things on the web that we also need to leverage. One of the recent optimizations that we made to Next.js was just more advanced polyfilling, such that we are not giving gigantic polyfills to browsers that already support the modern JS syntax features. It's just an example of -- the browser has al... |
When iOS needs to load a new app, it's just basically like a sandbox of untrusted code that is being run by the app developer. And very little of that is shared with other instances of other apps. However, when you leverage primitives of the web browser, the web browser is already optimized for caching and rendering a ... |
The moral of the story is try to use what's already been loaded, and don't try to download it again. You're never gonna beat the software that's already running on a device. |
**Break:** \[51:15\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So where do we think this is all headed? There's definitely things happening, exciting stuff... There's things that we've learned in 2020 and run-up to it, things are happening culturally around the web... We've seen a lot of the large players really take a stranglehold culturally or socially, even jus... |
We've seen people pushing back and trying to decentralize, move things to other places etc. That's on websites. But in terms of the web platform, are there people making moves to provide more opportunity, more tooling, ways of letting the little people have their place, and do things on the web, and flourish like a lot... |
**Amal Hussein:** Oh my gosh, this is such a big question... Do you want us to be here all day, Jerod? |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Answer in 60 or less. |
**Amal Hussein:** Yeah... Okay, do you want my 60-second answer? |
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