291–300 of 467 posts
> Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. Doom isn't in true 3D, its an advanced raycasting engine. The levels are all 2D, there are no polygons, you can't look up and down. Doom has been ported to a TI Calculator. Lets maintain some perspective here.
I see what you did here.
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This argument proves too much. If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money. The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it. Or to put it more elegantly: "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not…
> The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it. True, but if you're talking opportunity costs then I see Apollo, and the space race in general, as a great success story. They took the polotical atmosphere of nationalism, paranoia, one-upmanship, costly signalling, etc. and funnelled some of it into exploration, science and engineering at otherwise…
Sounds like a bargain to me.
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…
Something that would be more effective is if Google began factoring page load speeds in their rankings just like they did for mobile optimization.
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I think a plugin that enables the chrome "regular 2G" throttling (developer tools / network tab), permanently, for anyone that works in marketing or web development might help :) Edit: Joking aside, that throttling feature is a nice easy way to let a dev team, or business counterpart, see what their site is like for say, a customer with a low-end DSL connection: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools…
No need for a plugin if you are running Linux or OSX: # Bandwidth trottling, enabling 150kB/s on port 80 sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 15KByte/s sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80 # Bandwidth trottling, disable sudo ipfw delete 1 More useful stuff here as well, please star the repo :) https://github.com/logotype/useful-unix-stuff/blob/master/us...
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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…
the reason why I prefer to use a cdn is because it is a games theory example come to life here - if everyone used the cdn version then any user coming to your site would most likely have the cdn version in their cache and thus performance would go up, but if you use the cdn version and your competitors don't their performance is slightly better than yours and so on and so forth. Games theory indicates that in most ga…
So you use the one that has both, but one is not canonical, which means more cache misses. That doesn't even count the fact that there are different versions of each library, each with it's own uses, and distribution, and the common CDN approach becomes far less valuable.
In the end, you're better off compositing micro-frameworks and building yourself. Though this takes effort... React + Redux with max compression in a simple webpack project seems to take about 65K for me, before actually adding much to the project. Which isn't bad at all... if I can keep the rest of the project under 250K, that's less than the CSS + webfonts. It's still half a mb though... just the same, it's way better than a lot of sites manage, even with CDNs
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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…
This is why I recommended using the CDN recommended by the project, most do recommend a CDN, for example jQuery has it's own CDN. As for adoption, that is very much a chicken and egg problem.
DNS resolution time is a pretty significant impact for a lot of sites.
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I think you are looking at the past through incredibly rose-tinted glasses. The web has been a mess for a long time, and we used to have to make sure our computer was set to 800x600 and we were using Internet Explorer 6 in order to even use it.
I'm pretty sure I had > 1024x768 graphics and have used nothing but Netscape/Seamonkey (because inertia) since the mid '90s.
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I would say that a possible solution is also to better rank websites that mention the checksums of their external resources and make web browsers keep them in cache much longer... if pretty much every website uses jQuery, perhaps we should ship jQuery with the web browser?
We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with browsers. This is a horrible idea. Browser vendors would then have too much influence on development libraries.
This is still a shame if you're maintaining a heavyweight alternative to jQuery or React which is far too obscure to be a consideration for browser vendors, but it's a big boon for users, especially users on slow or metered connections that download several different version numbers of jQuery from several different CDNs every day.
This video shows how we do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ
This document gives some results (like a GMail client that is 100X smaller): https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE7...