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Yoav Weiss

Yoav Weiss

Yoav Weiss is a principal architect at Akamai, where he focuses on making the web platform faster by adding performance-related features to browsers as well as to Akamai’s CDN. Yoav has been working on mobile web performance for longer than he cares to admit. He takes image bloat on the web as a personal insult, which is why he joined the Responsive Image community group and implemented the various responsive images features in Blink and WebKit. When he’s not writing code, he’s probably slapping his bass, mowing the lawn in the French countryside, or playing board games with his family.

Resource Loading - Past, Present & Future

Loading resources on the Web has always been a performance hurdle. Suboptimal protocols and late discovery caused it to be the common performance bottleneck. In recent years advances in network protocols and performance APIs improved resource loading significantly, there’s still room to make it even faster.

In this talk we will go over resource loading improvements browsers have made in recent years, discuss related best practices and describe various innovations that are being worked on to improve resource loading even further.

In particular we will discuss:

  • HTTP/2 and its improvements (and downsides) compared to HTTP/1.1
  • The QUIC network protocol and its improvements over H2
  • Preconnect, Preload and related best practices. H2 Push in its current state and the Cache Digests proposal that will make it significantly easier to use.
  • Connection coalescing, its performance improvements and different ways to achieve it - Server Alternative Names, Origin frame and Secondary certificates.
  • Proposed improvements to H2 when it comes to compression of small files.
  • Compression API and its potential applications when it comes to resource loading.

Takeaway

Understanding why resource loading is hard, what are the current best practices that can improve loading today, as well as what future improvements are coming down the line.