PUBLIC MARKS from Spone with tag speed

Your website is slow, but the backend is fast. How do you diagnose performance issues on the frontend of your site? We'll discuss everything involved in constructing a webpage and how to profile it at sub-millisecond resolution with Chrome Timeline, Google's flamegraph-for-the-browser.

It's an interesting time to be working on the frontend now. We have new technologies such as HTML5, CSS5, Canvas and WebGL; all of which greatly increase the possibilities for web application development. The world is our oyster! However, there's also another trend I've noticed. Web developers are still stuck in the request/response mindset. I call it the 'click and wait' approach - where every UI interaction results in a delay before another interaction can be performed. That's the process they've used their entire careers so it's no wonder most developers are blinkered to the alternatives. Speed matters; a lot. Or to be precise, perceived speed matters a lot. Speed is a critical and often neglected part of UI design, but it can make a huge difference to user experience, engagement and revenue.