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.
Alex Russell ( @slightlylate ) is Partner Program Architect 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.
Buried at the end of this year’s installment of my semi-annual series on network and device reality is a mystery: multiple, independent data sets from the Web Performance community indicate sites built as Single-Page Applications (“SPAs”) receive, on average, only one (1) “soft navigation” for every “hard” page load.
The RUM Archive and Michal Mocny’s early analysis from the Chrome Soft Navigations Origin Trial data agree: users of SPAs don’t generate long sessions on average:
Taken at face value, this appears to indicate an industry-wide failure of technology selection, implying huge accretions of complexity for very little payoff. Is that what’s happening? I believe this is the most important mystery for the web performance community to get a handle on in 2026.
In strange congruence, this mystery is partially modeled by the definition of web performance I haltingly offered four years ago in these very pages:
The mission of web performance is to expand access to information and services.
We expand access by reducing latency and variance across all interactions in a user’s session to more reliably return the system to an interactive state.
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