The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript

For the past 10 years, JavaScript frameworks and Single Page Applications have been marketed as the solution to all our performance, robustness and productivity problems, but things haven’t worked out the way we’d all hoped, have they?

* Simple marketing and ecommerce sites are still getting heavier and slower.
* Features fail in weird and wonderful ways meaning we need an ever-increasing array of tooling to monitor and debug problems.
* Teams armed with the latest Apple Silicon Macs, expensive CI tooling and complex build pipelines still can’t ship effectively.

But it’s not all doom-and-gloom: we live in a time of unparalleled opportunity to give our users a fantastic experience – the web platform has never been more capable than it is today.

Let’s look at upcoming Core Web Vitals to identify performance problems with our JavaScript, how we can simplify our web architecture and utilise new Web Platform APIs to get back to productively building maintainable, user-friendly front-ends.