Top all-time · #298
Alex Russell
Personal blog · infrequently.orgwebprogramming
Alex Russell writes Infrequently Noted, a personal blog at infrequently.org about web and programming. Since 2010, 166 different Hacker News readers have linked it 306 times, most often “Progress Delayed is Progress Denied (Safari feature lag)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Russell's blog for detailed posts on web performance, Safari and browser choice on iOS, and recommend it to web developers.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- good analysis; excellent in-depth overview; recommended; zero fluff; very detailed; fantastic compendium; worth a look
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
Most-linked posts?
- Progress Delayed is Progress Denied (Safari feature lag)13 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2021-04-30
- The Performance Inequality Gap, 20269 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2025-11-24
- Apple is not defending browser engine choice8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2022-06-24
- The Performance Inequality Gap, 20218 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-03-11
- The Performance Inequality Gap, 20238 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-12-19
- The Performance Inequality Gap, 20247 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2024-01-31
- Hobson's Browser: How Apple, Facebook and Google broke the mobile browser market7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-07-15
- A 4 part series on how JavaScript broke Us public services7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-08-17
- Progressive Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-06-16
- The Market for Lemons (2023)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-02-05
What Hacker News says?
Also related: Performance Inequality Gap 2024 https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
Comment linking /2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/
on “How web bloat impacts users with slow devices”Submitted If not React, then what? as a story · 370 points
HN discussionAlex Russel did a lot of writing on this and posts yearly updates based on the state of the phone market. You can pick median, P75 or P95 device based on the analysis and set up targets based on that. https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-... I did it the simple way and bought a first item in "sort by cheapest" smartphone list. That's Alcatel 1, and it's extremely underpowered. It's maybe a bit…
Comment linking /2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/
on “Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button”Submitted Home Screen Advantage as a story · 330 points
HN discussionSince those class names are repeated, they will be gzipped to a very small size. And on top of that browsers/devices are much happier about HTML sizes than about JS sizes. See Performance Inequality Gap : https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
Comment linking /2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/
on “Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button”Submitted Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly as a story · 300 points
HN discussion1. Even those low-powered Android devices are basically supercomputers 2. The Javascript bloat hurts those devices immensely. See "Performance Inequality Gap 2024" https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
Comment linking /2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/
on “Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button”Submitted The “Developer Experience” Bait-And-Switch as a story · 275 points
HN discussionBut this is exactly the point of the article. That'd be like if I needed to build a car, I started with a rocket blueprint in case I also need to go to space in the future. The cost of speculating a highly interactive site that users will want to interact with is a suboptimal baseline experience until you get there. Provided you get there without losing users, it'll still be a subset of your audience that use your t…
Comment linking /2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/
on “It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA”Submitted Apple is not defending browser engine choice as a story · 267 points
HN discussionAlex Russell has a good analysis about the move: http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/
Comment linking /2013/04/probably-wrong/
on “Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project”Submitted Can You Afford It? Real-World Web Performance Budgets as a story · 214 points
HN discussionApple is almost completely to blame for all of this. https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
Comment linking /series/browser-choice-must-matter/
on ““It works better in the app””Submitted The App Store was always authoritarian as a story · 150 points
HN discussionAgain, this is Apple's work. Developers don't make good web apps when they cant work on iOS. https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
Comment linking /series/browser-choice-must-matter/
on ““It works better in the app””Submitted Washed Up as a story · 149 points
HN discussionThey are fast only on fast and expensive user equipment: https://infrequently.org/2021/03/the-performance-inequality-... More context in older post: https://infrequently.org/2017/10/can-you-afford-it-real-worl... > Partner meetings are illuminating. We get a strong sense for how bad site performance is going to be based on the percentage of engineering leads, PMs, and decision makers carrying high-end phones which t…
Comment linking /2017/10/can-you-afford-it-real-world-web-performance-budgets/
on “I can only think that modern front end development has failed”Submitted Hobson's Browser: How Apple, Facebook and Google broke the mobile browser market as a story · 114 points
HN discussionThank you for posting this! VanillaJSX is refreshingly different, and we desperately need new ideas in the front-end space to reduce the complexity and get closer to the browser. I also feel like the discussion in this thread is very rich and gives people on both sides of the fence a lot of stuff to think about. There were two groups I was hoping vanillajsx would resonate with. The first is people who still buy into…
Comment linking /series/reckoning/
on “VanillaJSX.com”Submitted Platform Strategy and Its Discontents as a story · 105 points
HN discussionThe engine difference does matter, because it prevents other vendors from making iOS a better platform for web apps. It's in Apple's interest to keep web apps an inferior experience to App Store apps: https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
Comment linking /2021/04/progress-delayed/
on “Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1”Submitted Google & the Future of JavaScript as a story · 103 points
HN discussionThat's a deeply fallacious argument. https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
Comment linking /2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine-choice/
on “Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA”Submitted IE 8 is the new IE 6 as a story · 98 points
HN discussionGoogle is paying Apple 20 billion per year in their search deal, which is 40 times more than what Mozilla takes. Safari is funded ENTIRELY by Google's ads, also making a profit, and this is a fact. We can entertain a counterfactual, maybe Safari would still be funded without Google funding it with billions, but that's not the world we live in today. And given Apple's reluctance to advance the web, going against thei…
Comment linking /2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine-choice/
on “Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users”Submitted Bedrock as a story · 91 points
HN discussionAn excellent, in-depth overview of Webkit/Safari issue: https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ Previous HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27019077
Comment linking /2021/04/progress-delayed/
on “For developers, Safari is crap and outdated”Submitted Apple's Assault on Standards as a story · 87 points
HN discussionhttps://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
Comment linking /2021/04/progress-delayed/
on “Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me Sick”Submitted Apple vs. Facebook Is Kayfabe as a story · 72 points
HN discussion
