131–140 of 467 posts
Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though. 1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images? It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site. For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS an…
Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though. 1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images? It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site. For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS an…
Quite happy with my own web page/blog. Pages hover at around 10kb, 30kb if I include some images. I think the page size can be attributed a lot to there being no JS except for GA. I have taken a lot of inspiration from http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ Of course the size will differ depending on the site's purpose, but I feel like most web pages could stand to loose a lot of…
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The community is the worst. The adds whole jQuery comes from every single js topic on SO in the past five+ years being answered by "just use jquery". Many times they are not even web related at all. > "How do you do something in javascript?" > "With jQuery you do it like this..." I had the worst time ever when I had to work with jscript. I really wonder if my dislike of the language comes from the language itself or…
A long time the web was like this: In IE6, you do it like this. In IE8, you do it like this. In Firefox, you do it like this. Then jQuery came along. And it was like 'Now you do it like this, and jQuery handles it for all browsers perfectly'. Just because some tasks are now performed easily in native javascript on all browsers, doesn't mean it was always that way.
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…
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The problem with caching is that you're sharing the referer with the canonical URL. Another problem is that you're using someone else's bandwidth. And if you combine the two, you can be sure that info about your visitors will be sold, which is why quite a lot of people would prefer to host their own versions of jQuery...
Couldn't the HTTP cache of your ISP be a good in-betweener, in that case? Would he send the referer to the canonical URL?
If web bloat is a problem, I don't think that looking at whether can be removed is the answer. I suggest that at the moment, we have basically two camps of website, with rough, fuzzy boundaries. 1. A place where someone sticks up an insight, or posts a wiki page, or whatever, to share some thought to others (if anyone actually cares). The blogs of many users of HN. Hacker News itself. Wikipedia. The Arch Linux Wiki.…
I dig that you tie this domain-specific problem with that much larger social issue.
I think we have a real issue at the moment with people funneling their efforts into ways of dealing with issues at the micro level, rather than the macro level. Local optima. Something like that.
It makes me happy to see the sort of political revolutions that the Internet can bring about, but sad to see that we're still thinking so small. e.g. "Get x into tech" rather than "Make it so that you don't need to be in tech to live a decent life". That sort of thing.
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I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser. It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN l…
The problem with hosting JS libraries on CDNs is that the cache has a network effect. You only gain performance if the browser already has a cached version of this specific version on this specific CDN. If you don't - you end up losing performance, because now an additional DNS lookup needs to be performed, and an additional TCP connection needs to be opened. Here are a few reasons people choose to avoid CDNized vers…
As for adoption, that is very much a chicken and egg problem.
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…
People have an innate metric for "this thing is slow", it's when lots of time passes between its start and end. Why is color-coding more evident than our own perception of time?