Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash
If you have spent any time staring at Core Web Vitals, you have eventually realized you are looking at the world through a Chrome-shaped keyhole. It is a useful keyhole, sure, but it conveniently ignores the massive population of people carrying iPhones.
Cloudflare just decided to turn on the lights for the rest of the room. They recently launched BEACON, short for Browser Experience Across Cloudflare's Observed Network. It is a public dataset available via BigQuery that pulls real-user performance metrics from 10,000 of the busiest sites on their network. Unlike Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which stays strictly within its own ecosystem, Cloudflare is now reporting on WebKit. That means we finally have daily, granular data on how Safari and iOS users are actually experiencing the web.
The Myth of the Median User
In the hosting business, we often treat performance as a universal metric—you optimize the server, you cache the assets, and you assume everyone wins. But the reality is that the mobile web is bifurcated. For years, developers and hosters have been optimizing based on CrUX data, which is essentially optimizing for Android and desktop Chrome. We have been flying blind when it comes to the performance impact of iOS, which, as any agency owner will tell you, represents the highest-spending demographic for most e-commerce clients.
This matters because WebKit handles things differently. If your site feels fast on a Pixel but chokes on a MacBook or an iPhone, CrUX isn't going to tell you why. By making this data public and updated daily, Cloudflare is effectively ending Google’s monopoly on the definition of "fast." It forces a more honest conversation between hosting providers and their clients about where the bottlenecks actually live.
It is almost poetic that Cloudflare, the company that sits in front of half the internet, is the one to point out that the other half of the internet has been invisible to our primary measurement tools until now.
Leveling the Analytical Playing Field
We are moving toward a more transparent era of web infrastructure. When we talk about "User Experience," we can no longer afford to exclude a third of the market just because their browser engine doesn't share telemetry with Mountain View. This dataset gives us the ammunition to prove that infrastructure decisions—like which CDN or edge network to use—actually impact all users, not just those in the Google ecosystem.
Optimizing for only one browser is just lazy engineering. Cloudflare just made it a lot harder to stay lazy.