Hi everyone! I'm doing my first AMA to get people thinking about the state of the web.
My day job for the past ~2 years has been web developer relations at Google. Prior to that I worked on web performance for ~4 years at YouTube. In my current role I'm a steward of web transparency datasets like the HTTP Archive and Chrome UX Report projects. Web transparency is all about cultivating a public body of knowledge about how the web is built and experienced. I also host a video series called the State of the Web where I interview members of the community about web trends and technologies. My job takes me all around the world to meet with developers at conferences, share transparency data, and hear their stories about building on the web.
The big project I've been working on this year is the Web Almanac, the first annual edition of HTTP Archive's report on the state of the web, which launched at Chrome Dev Summit last week. I led the project and coordinated with 80+ community contributors to build everything from scratch (planning/writing content, researching stats, developing the website, etc). The end result is a massive resource that sheds a light on how the web is doing at the scale of millions of websites.
Here are some of the interesting insights from each chapter:
- jQuery is found on 85% of web pages
- the largest known z-index is 780 digits (!important)
- there are only 11 types of HTML elements that are found on 90+% of web pages
- the median web page is two-thirds images
- 94% of web pages contain at least one third party
- Google Fonts makes up 75% of all pages' web fonts
- 13% of websites deliver consistently fast performance
- Content Security Policy is used on 5% of web pages
- 78% of mobile pages have color contrast issues
- the median desktop web page contains 346 words
- 0.4% of pages register a service worker
- one third of mobile web pages disable zooming
- 10% of pages use an ecommerce platform
- 40% of pages use a CMS
- 56% of HTML resources are uncompressed
- 72% of HTTP responses include a cache control header
- 20% of web pages use a CDN for their HTML
- the median desktop page weighs 1,934 KB
- 29% of web pages are using
dns-prefetch
- 54% of HTTP responses are served over HTTP/2
If you find any of this interesting, I'd love to hear your questions about web transparency, the state of the web, the Almanac project, or anything. AMA!