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The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

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Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#21

Post by ejb999 »

ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

I wish more governments would do this to be honest - instead of having hundreds and hundreds of different agencies/localities all hiring different web designers all expressing their artistic preferences of how a website should work.

I applaud the UK for this - the US and its various federal agencies/states/cities/towns should consider the same, not only as a cost saving measure, but making the experience predictable across many different sites.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#22

Post by myfonj »

What I miss in this otherwise excellent article is more insight about methodology. There is just murky

> We run tests every day on GOV.UK pages using specific simulated devices and connection speeds. Because we can repeat these tests every day, it allows us to monitor what the changes we are making to the site are doing for real users visiting GOV.UK.

with no mention whether those were all cold start loads or simulated browsing scenarios.

Not wanting to diminish the effort or challenge the conclusions — I know that jQuery does quite a lot checks and feature detecting stuff when it initializes, even when it is not used (so removing it must have significant impact) — but if those measurements were done with cold start empty cache single loads each time, it might count some "extra" time (download, parse, tokenize, build AST) that usually precedes only initial load and "first run" of static library and is not present in subsequent interactions.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#24

Post by ClumsyPilot »

samwillis wrote: post #5
ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

They all use this design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk . It's much more than just a CSS framework, it's full specifications on how to implement easy to follow and sensible UX. I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.

Every local councill has a different payment system for colecting councill tax, and all of them fail in novel and unpredictable ways.

Last time they collected my name and address over the phone and got both of them wrong.

Then they were sending letter to a person that doesn't exist, to an address that doesnt exist, never used my email or phone number, didn't respond to my email, but still told me it's my fault!

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#25

Post by niea_11 »

magnio wrote: post #16
ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries: - The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ - The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ - Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html - Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/ - Italy: https://designers.italia.it/ - Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/ - Estonia: http…

France: https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#26

Post by Izkata »

rob74 wrote: post #14

> Now I know what you may be thinking, that doesn’t sound like a lot of data, especially compared to images which can be multiple megabytes in size. But when it’s on every page, from a web performance perspective, it equates to a lot of data. Er... the utility of jQuery in 2022 aside, I would say: if it equates to a lot of data when it's on every page (of a single website), you're doing something wrong?! I mean, cach…

Maybe they have a bundle per page and it's in each one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jquery

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#27

Post by CJefferson »

myfonj wrote: post #22

What I miss in this otherwise excellent article is more insight about methodology. There is just murky > We run tests every day on GOV.UK pages using specific simulated devices and connection speeds. Because we can repeat these tests every day, it allows us to monitor what the changes we are making to the site are doing for real users visiting GOV.UK. with no mention whether those were all cold start loads or simulat…

Does any browser cache the parsing, tokenizing and built AST of Javascript libraries between website visits?

Also, I don't visit UK government websites that often -- so I'd suspect I am "cold cache" whenever I do.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#28

Post by ClearAndPresent »

rob74 wrote: post #14

> Now I know what you may be thinking, that doesn’t sound like a lot of data, especially compared to images which can be multiple megabytes in size. But when it’s on every page, from a web performance perspective, it equates to a lot of data. Er... the utility of jQuery in 2022 aside, I would say: if it equates to a lot of data when it's on every page (of a single website), you're doing something wrong?! I mean, cach…

The article goes on to explain that they are optimising for extremely low spec devices used by financially and socially disadvantaged users. The majority of their users load pages in less than 1s (likely due to caching and connection). Some users take 25s or more to load a page. It is for these edge cases they were testing.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#29

Post by cabirum »

magnio wrote: post #16
ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries: - The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ - The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ - Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html - Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/ - Italy: https://designers.italia.it/ - Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/ - Estonia: http…

- Russia: http://gov.design/

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#30

Post by firecall »

rob74 wrote: post #14

> Now I know what you may be thinking, that doesn’t sound like a lot of data, especially compared to images which can be multiple megabytes in size. But when it’s on every page, from a web performance perspective, it equates to a lot of data. Er... the utility of jQuery in 2022 aside, I would say: if it equates to a lot of data when it's on every page (of a single website), you're doing something wrong?! I mean, cach…

Loaded from the Internet once.

So it's cached, but the browser still needs to access and load the file! :)

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