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The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

161–170 of 283 posts

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're testing against a hypothetical user on a 2G cellular connection. I can't see many situations where that would happen. Being poor doesn't mean you can't afford 3G because every data plan in the UK includes 4G as a mimimum. Often 5G is included too. You have to be extremely rural to drop down to 2G and rural people are often better off. Poorer people tend to be in urban areas that have better digital infrastruc…

You're conflating having a 5G connection with a 5G connection running fast. Now, I live in the US, so maybe the UK has much better infrastructure, but cell phone internet service can be slow anywhere. I've had that 5G link with full bars in the middle of a city and could barely pull anything. The difference with me having money to spend is I can easily do any number of things about it, such has have a different internet service at home, or pay to stay get something in an internet cafe while 'working from home'.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're testing against a hypothetical user on a 2G cellular connection. I can't see many situations where that would happen. Being poor doesn't mean you can't afford 3G because every data plan in the UK includes 4G as a mimimum. Often 5G is included too. You have to be extremely rural to drop down to 2G and rural people are often better off. Poorer people tend to be in urban areas that have better digital infrastruc…

Sounds like you live in a big city? In the rest of the UK, there are many many places, even in large towns of 100k+ people, where the mobile signal is absolutely terrible. Whether it's 4G or not doesn't matter if the signal is too weak to sustain a reasonable speed.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're testing against a hypothetical user on a 2G cellular connection. I can't see many situations where that would happen. Being poor doesn't mean you can't afford 3G because every data plan in the UK includes 4G as a mimimum. Often 5G is included too. You have to be extremely rural to drop down to 2G and rural people are often better off. Poorer people tend to be in urban areas that have better digital infrastruc…

They're testing against actual RUM data collected from the site and linked in the article.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're testing against a hypothetical user on a 2G cellular connection. I can't see many situations where that would happen. Being poor doesn't mean you can't afford 3G because every data plan in the UK includes 4G as a mimimum. Often 5G is included too. You have to be extremely rural to drop down to 2G and rural people are often better off. Poorer people tend to be in urban areas that have better digital infrastruc…

Quoted post unavailable.

I can't downvote you, and being as dismissive of you as you are of these efforts would simply create more rudeness.

Instead, consider why a governmental agency might want to be as inclusive of as many users of its services as possible, and how your miniscule slice of the world, advantaged as it is, might blind you to that motivation.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#165
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is outdated, all modern browsers support fetch cancellation, look up `init.signal`. it wasn't available from the start, but at this point it's supported everywhere.

"Fetch cancellation" is where the browser tells itself "Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen," right?

> Browsers have started to add experimental support for the AbortController and AbortSignal interfaces (aka The Abort API), which allow operations like Fetch and XHR to be aborted if they have not already completed. See the interface pages for more details.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API#a...

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#167
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I had the fun experience of my local (UK, major city) council sending debt collectors after me for non-payment of council tax while simultaneously (literally same week) asking what bank account to send the several thousand pounds they owed me for overpayment - because they failed to acknowledge that despite having moved address, I was still the same person, and their systems treated each address as an account not eac…

This is the difference between “council tax” a tax on property and “poll tax” a tax on individual people, and that went quite badly when it was tried... So it makes sense for the primary accounts to be per property. However you are quite right they should have a better understanding of a second layer of accounts being individual people.

The IT infrastructure around tax/HMRC is ridiculously complex. The “making tax digital” initiative is trying to fix that. The aim for business taxes, for example, is that each individual business will have a single tax account eventually, rather than separate once for each tax type as they currently do.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#168
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?

greece https://gov.gr explicity mimicks the UK style

On that note, i expect in the coming years some UK startup will be selling "government as a service"

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#169
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, the Germans, of all people, don’t have a standard government design system? Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one, and I’ll have to throw out my entire set of national stereotypes!

1. Our population is quite old thus many people in key positions are quite old and missed the transition to the digital world. 2. So. Much. Bureaucracy. 3. Another factor that doesnt help is that the government pays quite poorly compared to the private companies. Any semi talented dev will find a better position than working for the government

The bureaucracy can be a good thing, because it also makes it harder for the government to get information on its citizens, and I think this is deliberate after WW2. Making it hard to exchange information is annoying (I've heard fax machines were still in use during the corona pandemic) but serves as an additional layer of protection from hostile governments. Time will tell if digitizing everything in for instance Denmark (my country) was a good idea.

Number 3 is the same in Denmark. You can almost double your salary if you work for the private sector.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#170

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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