What about the web browser itself?
AFAIK chrome and other modern browsers use resource-consuming features like preconnect.
Bloated
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Bloated
#12The sad thing is that even if 100% of the people with personal websites would do the same, it probably wouldn't change much. And yeah, I'm firmly in the "this old computer should definitely render web pages if it's good enough to run video games" camp and if the people working on current browsers argue that it's complicated, with all the scrolling and JS and stuff.. Well good riddance, web of 2018 - it was absolutely…
> The sad thing is that even if 100% of the people with personal websites would do the same, it probably wouldn't change much.
Why not? A significant portion of my web browsing is done on people's personal websites, since they often have cool things to share. If I'm going to get better performance on these websites, I might change my browsing preferences to favor these even more heavily.
Re: Bloated
#13Great initiative. Site loads fast, text is readable, adblocker has nothing to block - what more could you want from website? You might want to look into optimizing SVG files, as Inkscape by default leaves a lot of unnecessary metadata.
The image is 8 kilobytes for 10 characters, and actually it could have been done with just HTML and CSS. Speaking of which, don't look too hard at the page's HTML. Still I applaud the message.
P.S. Why do people put "index.php" in the URL? It would be so much prettier without it --- and a little less "bloated." ;)
Re: Bloated
#14Kudos to the author. I think if every technical person with a blog takes the time to reevaluate it will be a good start.
Over the years I've reworked my own blog to not use any third party dependencies (bootstrap, jquery, etc.). And use very few images. My last thing is to get rid of Google Analytics, which piwik (now matomo) has failed to replace but hope is not lost. I also discovered that GA does not respect DoNotTrack, so I modified it to not load in this case.
At the very least, all HNers with blogs should concider doing this.
Re: Bloated
#15This feels like the trillionth time I read a rant like this, but that doesn't make it less true or important. I really wonder from time to time if it's just me, having become and old grumpy "get off my lawn" grandpa unable to cope with the world keeping turning and moving forward. "You can't write everything from scratch every time" "That's just how it's done today" "Cmon, people aren't running IE5 on a pentium 2 any…
As long as advertising corporations keep control of your web browser, the experience will always be optimized for ad tech and maybe some other megacorp interests, but definitely not for you. That's the problem.
I imagine a web browser actually made for the user will try hard to extract content from web pages by default, render them with decent consistent UX and not blindly let third parties display and execute any crap they want. There is no reason to render say articles with comments in thousand different ways for thousand websites. And no reason it can't be blazing fast on RaspberryPi.
Re: Bloated
#16WebP only works on ~73% of browsers ( https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp , no Firefox/Safari/Edge support), so it's a little early to switch all your images to it. MozJPEG is a good JPEG compressor.
You can use the HTML5 element to add a fallback jpeg for all browsers that don't currently support Webp
Re: Bloated
#17I for one absolutely agree with you that the web has gotten too bloated, especially news websites, and I salute your initiative for "debloating" your blog. This is a path that more of us should follow. I think Google's AMP project is a step in the right direction, but it seems to me that it's not adopted enough.
AMP is a step in the wrong direction as it requires you to use js to do stuff that you can do in normal HTML on a non-AMP site.
A step in the right direction would be a proper subset of html/css without requiring more JS to load
Re: Bloated
#18I for one absolutely agree with you that the web has gotten too bloated, especially news websites, and I salute your initiative for "debloating" your blog. This is a path that more of us should follow. I think Google's AMP project is a step in the right direction, but it seems to me that it's not adopted enough.
Curious as to why you think AMP is a step to the right direction.
Because the pages load fast and are not bloated, which is the point of this article.
Unfortunately Google has bound it to other questionable practices like hosting on their domain, but it’s still a step on the right direction. We need something like that plus a way to cache it on the edge servers in a portable fashion so that any CDN like Cloudflare could pick them up.
Re: Bloated
#19With regards to the "usually a news site" part, somebody put me onto CNN's "lite" page the other day, and it's honestly a freaking joy to use.
On the other hand, I think there's definitely a case to be made for rich, application-like presentation of content, when it enhances the delivery of information. For instance:
http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/
The problem is that everyone dreams of making something cool like the latter, when their actual content is much closer to the former.
Re: Bloated
#20I think the race to make the web an application platform is responsible for this. Web features are growing every day trying to match native apps, and the media guys leverage them to make us sad.
We really need to split the web stack in two somehow, differentiate consumption sites with some basic interaction from full blown applications, handle them completely separately down to the operating system integration level. Right now a web application like Facebook runs in a tab (?) or worse is shipped with a whole browser instance (eg Slack). That’s something wrong here.
A Google-AMP like version of the web for things that are not GMail or Facebook (99% of the web, especially in the long tail) is probably good enough.