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Web Directions Code ’20 session spotlight–Performance versus security, or Why we can’t have nice things

Performance versus security, or Why we can’t have nice things

Yoav Weiss, Co-chair W3C Web Performance Working Group

Performant web sites are critical for your user’s experience. No doubt about that. But keeping our users’ information private and secure is similarly critical to maintain their trust in the web platform and keep them around. Those two requirements are somewhat at odds.

There are many cases where performance optimizations ended up creating security or privacy holes. There are also many cases where privacy and security restrictions introduce significant performance overhead, or prevent us from getting access to performance-critical information in the wild.

In this talk, we’ll discuss different examples outlining this tension, dig deeper into them, understand the underlying principles behind the web’s security model, and hopefully agree that we need both a performant and safe web to keep our users happy.

About Yoav Weiss

Yoav Weiss has been working on mobile web performance for longer than he cares to admit, on the server side as well as in browsers. He now works as part of Google Chrome developer relations team, helping to fix web performance once and for all.

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