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Adaptive Loading - Improving Web Performance on low-end devices

Addy Osmani on November 18, 2019

Adaptive Loading: Do not just respond based on screen size, adapt based on actual device hardware. Any user can have a slow experience. In a world...

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Ben Halpern • Nov 18 '19

This is fabulous. As soon as we start using any of these adaptive loading signals I can't wait to make a post about it.

Addy Osmani • Nov 20 '19

Ooh! Thanks, Ben! Excited to hear about dev.to using any of these signals :)

One silly idea to start experimenting could be serving even more highly compressed header images if a user is on a slower network connection or has Data Saver turned on 🤓

Abe Dolinger • Nov 19 '19

This solution makes me want to have this problem!

Kenny Whyte • Nov 18 '19

Great post Addy! I saw this presentation live at the Dev summit. It was very informative.

Addy Osmani • Nov 20 '19

Thank you, Kenny!

Josh • Nov 19 '19 • Edited

Before degrading your feature set for lower-end devices, remember to leverage web workers and handleEvent

Nick Taylor • Nov 18 '19

Awesome sauce. I checked out the react-adaptive-hooks repo the other day, but haven't had a chance to watch your talk yet. Definitely on my what to watch next list.

Thanks for sharing Addy!

Addy Osmani • Nov 20 '19

Cheers, Nick! If you end up trying out react-adaptive-hooks, I'd love to hear any feedback you have on it :)

Itachi Uchiha • Nov 18 '19

Thanks. I think this will help. As a full-stack, I never thought about low-end devices. Thanks again. I understand now why our clients leave us :)

Rene Padillo 🇵🇭 • Dec 17 '19

amazing! This is nice!

I hope this would be included in the HTML standard in the future just like how we adapted the media standard for pictures!

Felicia Betancourt • Nov 19 '19 • Edited

This is certainly an exciting development. One question though: is this a departure from Google's drive to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? It is striking that you didn't mention it even once.

Addy Osmani • Nov 20 '19

As I work on Chrome, I tend to focus on more general web performance guidance vs. AMP, but these patterns could very much be used with it :) I recently saw a site that would load their AMP experience as the "light" version if they detected a user was on a slow network connection.