Patrick is a Web Performance Engineer at Fastly where - amongst other things - he is helping to build a faster web for all. Prior to Fastly, he helped architect some of the worlds largest media websites including The Guardian and The Financial Times. When not speaking or ranting about performance he enjoys spending his spare time discovering new food and craft beer.
Remember CSSconf EU 2014? Patrick introduced his work on the concept of CSS and the Critical Path, which has since become a key ingredient in every web developers toolkit. Much has happened in the world of browsers and performance since then, and this year, Patrick comes back to give us an update.
CSS and the first meaningful paint
To render a webpage browsers needs to go through the complex dance of networking, parsing and painting before any content can be displayed to your user. Over the years, we've developed mechanisms and hacks to aid the browser at each stage of this process, but these have always come at some cost or trade-off.
How can we utilize modern web platform features to load our CSS as fast as possible? Should we still be inlining our critical content into the document or instead, how can HTTP/2 server push and Service Workers help us?
In this talk we will take a journey exploring the current, past, and future best-practices for loading CSS in the browser and how we can achieve a first meaningful paint within 1000ms. Ultimately creating a faster, more resilient experience for our users.