Trys Mudford avatar Trys Mudford

I wasted a day on CSS selector performance to make a website load 2ms faster

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It was at this point that the second penny dropped and I realised I’d been duped by a graphing misunderstanding and my own enthusiasm for improving frontend performance.

This is the Observer effect, “the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation”.

I've been fooled several times by this effect, despite having been taught it early on in my school career. 😅

  1. Note from 2 July 2020

    I guess we'll (unfortunately) see a lot of turtles in Firefox soon, while browsing the Web with devtools open… 🐢

    JUST LANDED in Firefox Nightly:

    🐢!

    Appears when the server response time for a request exceeds the recommended limit of 500 ms (adjustable in about:config).

    Awesome dev work by @b4bomsy and planning by @digitarald & @janodvarko!
    If you spot it and it helps, let us know!H

    Image from Tweet