How fast is the web? Explore billions of real-user measurements with BEACON
- ID
- 29331
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Sep 2026, 10:43 PM
- Fetched
- 28 Sep 2026, 11:42 PM
- Provider
- Cloudflare Blog
- Category
- infrastructure
- Original URL
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-fast-is-the-web/
- Source URL
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 28 Sep 2026, 11:43 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_startup_founders
What happened
Cloudflare published BEACON (Browser Experience Across Cloudflare's Observed Network), an anonymized dataset of billions of real-user performance measurements drawn from 10,000 of the largest websites on its network, covering every major browser engine, updated daily in Google BigQuery, and using the community RUM Archive schema — which it says expands that project's footprint 100-fold. It reports all three Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) as full histograms rather than single averages, so you can derive any percentile instead of stopping at P75. The post states that WebKit, currently the only browser engine on iOS, performs best overall on P90 Core Web Vitals across iOS and Android, but that its advantage is not universal across the countries examined (the excerpt cuts off mid-sentence at 46 countries).
Why it matters
This is a free BigQuery dataset you can query to check whether your own P75/P90 LCP and INP are normal or bad relative to 10,000 large sites, instead of guessing from your own laptop. Because the data is histograms, you can size the long tail — the slow sessions that averages hide — and the post's own framing (four-year-old budget phones, data plans that throttle after 2 GB) suggests segmenting by device and country is likely a better proxy for mobile users in Malaysia than your dev machine. The caveat is that this is Cloudflare's observed network, not your users, so treat it as a benchmark, not a replacement for your own RUM.
Discussion angle
Pull your own site's P90 LCP and INP, then compare against the BEACON histograms for the same browser/device/country slice — and ask whether the WebKit-on-iOS advantage holds for older iPhones on throttled mobile data, which is the segment most Malaysian web users are likely in. Read the full post before quoting the country breakdown; the excerpt ends before it.