Addy Osmani's Blog

In Chrome Canary, we recently introduced hover cards that show the memory usage for each open tab. When you hover over a tab, a popup will display the tab’s RAM usage and whether Chrome’s Memory Saver feature has frozen the tab to conserve memory.

This feature provides transparency into Chrome’s tab throttling behaviors and gives users insight into a site’s memory consumption.

The current usage indicates memory consumed by the page itself along ...

Enabled by WebAssembly + Emscripten, Web Components + Lit, Service Workers + Workbox & new Web APIs. Chrome & Adobe enjoyed collaborating on it.

Bringing the Photoshop desktop application to the web (photoshop.adobe.com) represents an enormous milestone in bringing highly complex and graphically intensive software to the browser. This was made possible through years of effort by Adobe engineers and collaboration with browser vendors like Chrome to push the web forward.

Optimizing the performance of eBay’s sites and apps for a faster user experience.

Speed was a company-wide initiative for eBay starting in 2019, with many teams determined to make the site and apps as fast as possible for users.

For every 100 milliseconds improvement in search page loading time, eBay saw a 0.5% increase in “Add to Cart” count.

Through the adoption of Performance Budgets (derived after doing a competitive study with the Chrome User Experience Report) and a fo...

A case study of changes the YouTube Web team made to improve performance, increase their Core Web Vitals pass rates and lift key business metrics.

The Chrome team often talks about “building a better web”, but what does that mean? Web experiences should be fast, accessible, and use device capabilities in the moment when users need it most. Dogfooding is part of Google’s culture, so the Chrome team has partnered with YouTube to share lessons learned o...

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The “Managing Complex Change model” is an effective framework that can be used in any organization to initiate change.

The model was created by Dr. Mary Lippitt, a leadership and management consultant who specializes in helping organizations navigate through change. In this blog post, we briefly examine each step of the model and how it may apply to your organization’s unique situation. Here’s the model:

You may also come across anot...

Interested in more regular content from me? I’m also on LinkedIn .

“High Output Management” is a book by Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, that helps people to understand how they can manage their teams more efficiently towards high-leverage tasks. I found this book relevant for software engineering organizations and thought I’d share some notes on it that may be relevant to others.

Leverage = impact produced / time invested.

It is the ability to get more done with less effort, time ...

How browsers schedule and execute scripts can impact the performance of web pages. While techniques like (and others) influence script loading, knowing how browsers interpret them can also be helpful. Thanks to Kouhei Ueno, we now have an up to date summary of script scheduling in Chrome.

Note: Loading priorities are not guaranteed to be consistent cross-browser so use this knowledge wisely and measure when unsure. Ideally, aim...

Performance is a constant process, not a one-time checklist. It requires continuous monitoring and work. A useful workflow when investing in performance is Measure, Optimize & Monitor.

A few tips:

tl;dr: There are no silver bullets to web performance. Simple static pages benefit from being server-rendered with minimal JavaScript. Libraries can provide great value for complex pages when used with care.

Netflix is one of the most popular video streaming services. Since launching globally in 2016, the company has found that many new users are not only signing up on mobile devices but are also using less-than-ideal connections to do so...

If you’re building a web experience and want to stay fast, a performance budget can be critical . For success, embrace performance budgets and learn to live within them. Network & CPU limits on mobile can require asking hard questions like, “what is really important to my users?”

When we talk to Fortune 500 companies that put in the work to improve performance, perf metrics will often rapidly regress once they return to feature development. Performance budgets help teams prioritize features, op...