Infrequently Noted

Performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Most partners we work with are not aware of the real-world operating environment and make inappropriate technology choices as a result. We set a time budget of less than 5 seconds first-load Time-to-Interactive and less than two seconds for subsequent loads. We further constrain ourselves to a baseline device and network configuration to measure progress. 2017's global baseline is a ~$200 Android device on a 400Kbps link with a 400ms round-trip-time ('RTT'). This translates to ~130-170KB of critical-path resources, depending on composition; the more JS you include, the smaller the bundle must be.

Web Components have taken longer than any of us would like to emerge as viable alternatives to proprietary systems that lock teams into choices they can't revisit as necessary, but that day is now here, and it couldn't come at a more appropos point in the arc of mobile's growth.