Barry Pollard
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tunetheweb.com
Barry Pollard
@tunetheweb.com
2.8K followers 390 following 1.1K posts
Web Performance Developer Advocate at Google Chrome helping to make the web go faster! All opinions my own.
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Reposted by Barry Pollard
webdevs.firefox.com
Firefox 147 just landed & it's pretty huge in terms of web features:

🎉 CSS anchor positioning
🎉 The navigation API
🎉 View transition types
🎉 Brotli support in Compression/DecompressionStream
🎉 CSS module imports

And more!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/147
Firefox 147 release notes for developers (Beta) - Mozilla | MDN
This article provides information about the changes in Firefox 147 that affect developers. Firefox 147 is the current Beta version of Firefox and ships on January 13, 2026.
developer.mozilla.org
January 13, 2026 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
sturobson.com
The dust of decades settles on your keyboard as you push aside lines of vendor prefixes

Your fedora casts shadows over cryptic CSS hacks from another era. "This belongs in a museum" you mutter

ReliCSS: The front-end archaeologist's tool for navigating legacy CSS

www.alwaystwisted.com/relicss/

🙏🖤
ReliCSS - Web Interface
www.alwaystwisted.com
January 4, 2026 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
tomayac.com
📢 New blog post: A polyfill for the HTML switch element.

Safari 17.4 added the native `` element. This post introduces a polyfill for it, covering accessibility, internationalization, styling, and its HTML spec status.

blog.tomayac.com/2026/01/12/a...
A polyfill for the HTML switch element
The personal blog of Thomas Steiner
blog.tomayac.com
January 12, 2026 at 11:55 AM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
patak.dev
Every time you update your dependencies and see that your deps tree gets slimmer, there is a high chance you're enjoying the relentless work of James or other folks from the @e18e.dev community that he inspired to get into action. Consider sponsoring him if you care about the JavaScript ecosystem.
43081j.com James @43081j.com · 2d
just a reminder that i have github sponsors if you'd like to sponsor the OSS work i do.

i maintain quite a few projects, and contribute to many more. nobody other than these sponsors pay for that. so these help a huge amount, however small 🙏

thanks so much to those who already did ❤️
Sponsor @43081j on GitHub Sponsors
Maintainer of chai, parse5, unjs, vueuse, tinylibs, & more. One of the e18e.dev leads. Core contributor to lit and modernweb.
github.com
January 12, 2026 at 5:41 AM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
ishadeed.com
This feature in @developer.chrome.com's DevTools is so helpful. Every time I get stuck on a calc() or other CSS functions, I solve the bug much quicker with it.

Thanks to everyone who worked on this! 👌
A screenshot of browser developer tools showing a CSS variable called "--space" being inspected. A tooltip displays the step-by-step calculation breakdown of a complex calc() function.
January 9, 2026 at 9:21 AM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
rbyers.net
The Chrome Identity and Payments team in Waterloo Canada is hiring several early/mid-career developers. I'm on the lookout for exceptional candidates with a passion for browsers and/or the identity/payments space! www.linkedin.com/posts/rick-b...
January 9, 2026 at 1:46 AM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
stefanjudis.com
Web Weekly has some free ad slots starting mid-January.

If you want to reach 6.3k Frontend devs who care about the web and build quality websites, you should check it out. 👇

webweekly.email/advertise

And of course, you'll earn karma points for supporting indie publishing. 🫣
Web Weekly — More than your regular Frontend newsletter.
January 8, 2026 at 12:52 PM
tunetheweb.com
Think it’s about time I attended @perfnow.nl ‘s sister conference. Will I see you there?
cssday.nl CSS Day @cssday.nl · 7d
// clears throat

// taps mic

"One two three. Test. One two three"

"Welcome to CSS D ... no, I need more gravitas. Could you turn up the bass just a little bit?"
January 8, 2026 at 11:24 AM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
stefanjudis.com
The first Web Weekly of 2026 is going out. As always, it's jam-packed!

For the first time, the online version won't live on my blog but on the new Web Weekly site.😱 That's wild, isn't it?😅

webweekly.email/archive/web-...

If you're into web dev news close to the platform, you should check it out!
Web Weekly 179 - loadEnvFile() - wbr and &shy; - The new No-Vary-Search header - <dialog closedby="any"> - display: grid-lanes - @scope goes baseline
January 6, 2026 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
stefanjudis.com
Huge congrats and kudos to @stoyan.me for running it and to all the authors for writing articles for this year's Web Performance calendar.

calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/

The quality was very high, and it feels like every second post was a banger!
2025 Archives
The speed geek's favorite time of year
calendar.perfplanet.com
January 5, 2026 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
bram.us
Ow yeah! 😎

FYI: you can start using customizable select *TODAY* because it is the perfect progressive enhancement: in browser with no support you get the status quo which is just a regular select (which you can also style up to a certain extent).
January 6, 2026 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
requestmetrics.com
Missing the viewport meta tag? Your mobile users are waiting an extra 300ms on every single tap. Browsers add that delay to check for double-tap zooming. One line of HTML fixes it.

requestmetrics.com/blog/lightho...

#WebPerf #SEO
Understanding Lighthouse: Has a Viewport Meta Tag
What does "Has a meta name viewport tag with width or initial-scale" mean in Lighthouse? This audit checks if your page is mobile-ready. Missing it...
requestmetrics.com
January 6, 2026 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
43081j.com
time to get back into everything!

if you know of a tool or library you use which has perf issues, please do nerdsnipe me 😂
January 5, 2026 at 4:51 PM
tunetheweb.com
I wrote these docs!
developer.mozilla.org MDN Web Docs @developer.mozilla.org · 14d
TIL: Compression Dictionary Transport 💡

A new HTTP feature that can dramatically shrink the size of your responses, especially when serving content that changes often but includes a lot of repeated structure (think: JSON, JS, CSS).

Learn more 👇
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/...
Compression Dictionary Transport - HTTP | MDN
Compression Dictionary Transport is a way of using a shared compression dictionary to dramatically reduce the transport size of HTTP responses.
developer.mozilla.org
December 30, 2025 at 10:51 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
duffeh.bsky.social
My article for Performance Calendar is live, looking at tips to help focus when doing performance traces.
December 28, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
infrequently.org
Lots of great stuff in this year's Perf Planet Advent/December series:

calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/
December 28, 2025 at 3:39 AM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
stoyan.me
Web Performance Calendar day 27 with @nucliweb.net on using Chrome DevTools for fun and profit: inspect heavy files in Network panel, monitor Core Web Vitals, record performance traces, validate optimizations, and more.

calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/chrome-...
Chrome DevTools for Debugging Web Performance
This is a step-by-step guide on how I use Chrome DevTools (DevTools from now on) to detect Web Performance issues on a website, as well as validate hypotheses to fix some of the problems found. Discl...
calendar.perfplanet.com
December 27, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
stoyan.me
Web Performance Calendar day 26 with Sébastien Mischler on HTML streaming/flushing and how this old trick (featured in the first edition of the calendar) applies to today's CSR world. Show content now, not after JS finishes thinking. Fast pages, happy users.
calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/revisit...
Revisiting HTML streaming for modern web performance
Introduction Modern web performance issues often come from delayed rendering rather than network speed. Client-side hydration and heavy JavaScript pipelines can prevent browsers from showing content ...
calendar.perfplanet.com
December 26, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
malwarejake.bsky.social
Just wow. @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy came out swinging in this article. He's right though and that's the coolest part.
In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, in many cases—to modify devices and services without permission from their manufacturers. Over the past two decades, the office of the US Trade Representative–which is responsible for developing and coordinating US international trade, commodity, and direct investment policy—has pressured most of the world into adopting these laws, hamstringing foreign startups that might compete with Apple (by providing a jailbreaking kit that installs a third-party app store), or Google (by blocking tracking on Android devices), or Amazon (by converting Kindle and Audible files to formats that work on rival apps), or John Deere (by disabling the systems that block third-party repairs), or the Big Three automakers (by decoding the encrypted error messages mechanics need to service our cars). The rents that these digital locks help American companies extract run to hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. The world’s governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws serve no useful purpose.
December 26, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
web-standards.dev
Fixing the URL params performance penalty. @tunetheweb.com introduced No-Vary-Search, a new HTTP header that helps browsers and CDNs ignore irrelevant query params and improve caching efficiency. For now, supported only in Chrome 141. #performance #http

calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/fixing-...
Fixing the URL params performance penalty. 23rd Dec 2025. By Barry Pollard.
December 24, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
5t3ph.bsky.social
Oh hey, come work with me!

We're seeking an earlier-career front-end dev who is able to work in-office (multiple US locations).

Check it out if you have interest and experience in: #designsystems #CSS #a11y #webcomponents

adobe.design/jobs/job-pos...
Design Engineer, Spectrum Web
Join us and help build the next generation of our world-famous tools.
adobe.design
December 23, 2025 at 5:28 PM
tunetheweb.com
This one got released rather quietly and I think could do with a bit more attention!

Read about how to avoid caching performance penalties due to tracking query params and the like!
December 23, 2025 at 1:57 PM
tunetheweb.com
Good explanation of fetch priority!
December 19, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
stoyan.me
Web Performance Calendar day 18 with Amrik Malhans on breaking down LCP to pinpoint what's slowing down the page exactly and where to focus your UX-optimizing efforts

calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/the-ana...
The Anatomy of LCP - A Deep Dive into Sub-Parts
Optimizing LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is not just reducing the file size of your images, there's a lot more that goes into optimizing the loading strategy - and you can only grasp where the bottle...
calendar.perfplanet.com
December 18, 2025 at 11:37 PM
Reposted by Barry Pollard
una.im
What are your biggest complaints about using the web right now?
December 17, 2025 at 12:07 AM