Are You Smarter Than A Web Browser?

A presentation at Wix Engineering Conference 2019 in in Rishon LeTsiyon, Israel by Yonatan Mevorach

As Web Developers we tend to think we understand how a Web Browser works and write our code accordingly, but as it turns out in there are cases where our mental model of how the browser works tends to be overly-simplistic. In this talk we’re going to take a look at some known Web development best-practices, and explore why because of how modern browsers work they might be anti-patterns causing more harm than good. Throughout the talk we’ll gain a better understanding of the various optimisations that modern browsers perform like optimizing scrolling, preloading assets, etc., and pair each one with an innocuous piece of code that blocks the optimization which ends up hindering the user-experience.