[dgb23]

It's a very specific kind of performance. It doesn't measure long running apps, interactions and visualizations.

When you play a video game you might have to download and install it first, which might take quite a while, but we don't say "this game has bad performance" because of that.

Lighthouse measures that first second or first few seconds after you visit a site at position 0/0. It doesn't care about how much bloat comes after you scroll. It discourages you to pre-load resources (including JS and CSS) which you don't _immediately_ need for that first hit.

It is really about content and marketing websites with low interaction. You can absolutely make good interactive applications that also get a high Lighthouse score, but the overlap is not necessarily always feasible or the best tradeoff to make.

[hoten]

(Note: I work on Lighthouse).

> Lighthouse measures that first second or first few seconds after you visit a site at position 0/0. It doesn't care about how much bloat comes after you scroll. It discourages you to pre-load resources (including JS and CSS) which you don't _immediately_ need for that first hit.

This is true - or rather, was true. We're making lots of progress on a mode to measure performance beyond the initial cold load. Check out https://web.dev/lighthouse-user-flows/

> It is really about content and marketing websites with low interaction.

Well, that isn't our intention at all, but I can see how to might come to that conclusion. We've only recently started investing in how to measure interaction. See https://web.dev/inp/

[cebert]

Thanks for the work you and your team are doing. Lighthouse, while not perfect, is a helpful tool. It sounds like it would be a fun project to work on.

[hoten]

Thanks! And yup, developer tooling at Chrome definitely has a lot of fun things to work on.