Although I link to various sites when something interesting comes up, I haven’t done a good job of recommending people and blogs to follow. Time to fix that.
Kicking off my recommended reading list is the High Performance Web Sites blog by Steve Souders. I’ll make this very simple, if you do web development at all this blog is REQUIRED reading. When it comes to front end web performance Steve has literally written the book on the subject (High Performance Web Sites), twice (Even Faster Web Sites).
I was at his WordCamp SF 2009 session where he made changes to a test site during the session and showed how each change improved the page load time. If you aren’t able to make it to an event where Steve is speaking several of his session videos are online, like this 2009 Google I/O session – Even Faster Websites. It’s worth the time to see what his research has turned up on how browsers work.