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0 pointstroupo2y ago0 comments

Funnily enough I clearly remember typing Largest Contentful Paint. But it turns out I typed First :)

My point still stands.

"The First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page's content is rendered on the screen." [1]

Unless your server is overwhelmed, and can't send back data fast enough, there's literally no way to call "1 second before anything is rendered on screen is fast".

In the context of the tweet this is even more egregious. They were talking about Reddit's yet another redesign, and how it was fast. Reddit is a website that displays text and images. Their server responds in 200 milliseconds max. And yet, they were talking about how spending 0.9 seconds to display some info (menu on the left?), and 2.4 seconds to display actiual content is fast.

And that comes from "engineering leader at Chrome". We are at a point in time where people literally don't understand what fast is.

[1] https://web.dev/fcp/

0 comments

beeandapenguin2y ago

He’s referring to the P75 from Chrome’s field data. Now, Reddit definitely could do more here and get that LCP at the same time as the FCP (eliminate load and render delay). But a big purpose for these metrics is to make the web more accessible/usable, and the reality is most of the world doesn’t have iPhones or fast networks[1].

[1] https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/

troupoOP2y ago

Indeed, most of the world doesn't have iPhone.

And yet these metrics literally optimize for Reddit's 109 Javascript files to render a page of text with images in 2.4 seconds. And they call it fast.

However you slice, dice, or interpret these metrcis, none of these shenanigans make it fast.

What these metrics and "75p" show is that modern web sucks for everyone, and they have to pretend that 2.4s to render a page is fast because everyone is even slower.

Or, to put in context: Reddit's servers serve that page in under 200 milliseconds. There's literally no justification in the world that make it ok to say "2.4 seconds to render that on screen is fast". None.

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