Alex Russell

Alex is Partner Program Manager on the Microsoft Edge team and Blink API OWNER. Before joining Edge in 2021, he worked on Chrome’s Web Platform team for a dozen years where he helped design many new features. He served as overall Tech Lead for Chromium’s Project Fugu, lead Chrome’s Standards work, and acted as a platform strategist for the web. He also served as a member of ECMA TC39 for more than a decade and was elected to three terms on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group. His technical projects have included Fugu, Progressive Web Apps, Service Workers, and Web Components, along with ES6 features like Classes and Promises. Previously he helped build Google Chrome Frame and led the Dojo Toolkit project. Alex plays for Team Web.

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Frontend’s Lost Decade and the Performance Inequality Gap

JSNation 2025

Upcoming

Frontend’s Lost Decade and the Performance Inequality Gap

The promise of the web is universal access to services across OSes and devices without gatekeepers, but like all systems, the web isn't what it promises – it's what it does. And today, the web is increasingly exclusionary. The roots of this exclusion are a mismatch between the reality of the hardware and networks users access our services from versus our expectations of those same devices and networks. The trends that put wind into JavaScript's sails on the client side in the early 2010's have long since stopped blowing. So, what now? This talk digs into the network and device reality we must confront, and why our future as web developers depends on what we do here and now.