Meet Your Users Where They Are with Obs.js

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

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One thing I encourage all of my clients to remember is that web performance happens somewhere between you and your user. The exact same page on the exact same infrastructure can feel vastly different to two different people, and knowing where the two meet is key to designing truly fast experiences.

Over the last few years, I’ve written a fair bit about high latency environments and low- and mid-tier mobile, and one of the recurring themes in both is that site-speed is only partly a property of the site itself. A large part of it is a property of the conditions under which that site is being consumed.

Sometimes, web performance really is a them problem.

It’s not our fault that someone is on a struggling connection, a weaker device, or a battery that is nearly dead, but it is still our responsibility to design around those scenarios where we can. To help, I built Obs.js, a tiny library which tells us a large amount about our users’ context.

It’s not our fault that someone is on a struggling connection, a weaker device, or a battery that is nearly dead, but it is still our responsibility to design around those scenarios w...