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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

#51

Post by beachy »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #43
magnio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's nice, but also gets boring and restrive quiet quickly in Governmental organisations I've worked for.

If only every government website I visited was boring and predictable.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#52

Post by djitz »

wraptile wrote: post #49
iopq wrote: post #2

When I did web development, I specifically loaded JS lazily so first you got a pure HTML page with just a few lines of code. Those lines of code are normal (not jQuery) JS that loads the rest of the JS lazily in a progressive enhancement. This means the page can start being rendered before the jQuery code loads. But in fact, jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a…

> jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a need to have lots of workarounds for it. As someone who's late to the webdev party I feel that jQuery is pretty awesome (all I ever heard is people poopoo it). The vanilla API for the DOM manipulation is just plainly awful and borderline nonsensical so I'd say jQuery is still very much needed.

jQuery and the many plug-ins people wrote for it were amazing.

What was not amazing was the manner in which many projects utilized them.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#53

Post by myfonj »

CJefferson wrote: post #27
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.

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

From a quick googling, yes, at least some of them. (TIL):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1096907/do-browsers-pars...

>> The third time (i.e. a hot run), Chrome takes both the file and the file’s metadata from the cache, and hands both to V8. V8 deserializes the metadata and can skip compilation.

— https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-dev

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

For first visit with given browser and profile (or incognito mode), sure.

But if you visit more than single page during same session, you probably have more than a "cold cache". That measured page mentioned in the article seems to be guidepost with only most important excerpt of the content, so it seems plausible you would "click around a bit" from there.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#54

Post by amq »

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…

- Ukraine: https://diia.fedoriv.com/

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#55

Post by codedokode »

atoav wrote: post #33
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…

Yeah but for what? I have been writing vanilla js for years now and aside from the sometimes slightly more convenient syntax I haven't missed a thing where using jQuery would have helped me over not using it. I don't say anything against loading useful javascript libraries, but too many websites load 1 MB of libraries just to get a result that they could have achieved with a few lines of handcrafted vanilla js. This…

jQuery is more convenient to use than vanilla JS. Vanilla JS is too verbose. If only jQuery was modular and didn't require to load 300 or 400 Kb of code.

Also it is difficult to find non-jQuery library of a good quality. For example, I was looking for a small library to send and receive JSON via HTTP, and ended up writing my own wrapper around XMLHttpRequest (fetch() is a poor choice, it is not supported well in older browsers and it has no advantages, and fetch() requests cannot be aborted) because there was no good library for this. Other libraries either do not support all necessary browsers or are overengineered and too large.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#56

Post by Frontend_devs »

At the end he said a certain cohort of users, but how many users were actually in that cohort? JQuery is an older technology. I find it hard to believe something made to work on older hardware / internet is affecting performance that much. We have 5G and stupid fast chips in phones now. I’m skeptical. Performance issues are usually database queries or code compiling / “waking up” some server function.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#57

Post by Dalewyn »

wildrhythms wrote: post #46
iopq wrote: post #2

When I did web development, I specifically loaded JS lazily so first you got a pure HTML page with just a few lines of code. Those lines of code are normal (not jQuery) JS that loads the rest of the JS lazily in a progressive enhancement. This means the page can start being rendered before the jQuery code loads. But in fact, jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a…

You have to really do some extra work to make this happen "nicely". Swapping out parts of the page without jerking the user around is a difficult problem, especially if you aren't working with fixed sizes of elements. And creating a "skeleton" system of placeholders during loading is a whole other set of state you have to build out and maintain. I find most sites using this kind of progressive loading are completely…

I remember how it was good practice to assign width and height to tags.

The idea being the browser would know how to render the things around the picture without needing to download the picture first, preventing the page from jumping around as the quicker and lighter HTML was downloaded and rendered first.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#58

Post by bar8uyr »

That's nice but when you load the actual universal credit login page it needs nearly 400kb of reactjs - not sure about after that, don't have an account..

Some (most?) of the other gov uk sites have megabytes of js on them.. eg. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing?areaType=nat...

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#59

Post by kwhitefoot »

Frontend_devs wrote: post #56

At the end he said a certain cohort of users, but how many users were actually in that cohort? JQuery is an older technology. I find it hard to believe something made to work on older hardware / internet is affecting performance that much. We have 5G and stupid fast chips in phones now. I’m skeptical. Performance issues are usually database queries or code compiling / “waking up” some server function.

You have all those things, I have some of them, many people do not.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#60

Post by david_allison »

Frontend_devs wrote: post #56

At the end he said a certain cohort of users, but how many users were actually in that cohort? JQuery is an older technology. I find it hard to believe something made to work on older hardware / internet is affecting performance that much. We have 5G and stupid fast chips in phones now. I’m skeptical. Performance issues are usually database queries or code compiling / “waking up” some server function.

> We have 5G and stupid fast chips in phones now.

The people who need government services the most won't have this

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