Speaking from experience, at shipping time of a new site performance testing is done, and the developers are asked to improve performance until it is just good enough. So it doesn’t matter how big or small the site is, unless by shipping time it is already faster than desired it will only get optimized to run as fast as every other site, but no faster.
Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
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Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#32We can wish that crappy websites didn’t get more bloated every year, but as long as they still load fast enough most people don’t know the difference or care. Everything has an opportunity cost, so once things are good enough the resources that could be spent optimizing will be spent elsewhere instead, and bloat that can be added to solve other business goals will be added. It’s understandable to get frustrated by th…
That would only be true if every one of your customers had fast, loss free, reliable internet 100% of the time they want to access a website. Even in a modern city this is rarely the case. So I'm afraid the real answer is that webdev is just not mature yet.
Businesses don't need to provide a perfect experience to every one of their customers. If they did, they would. Like previously said, businesses are good at satisfying customer needs as dictated by their customers' wallets.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#33I wonder if it is time to explore alternative syntax parsers with a more generic API to accommodate other markup formats. At least initially this could be 1:1 with HTML but eventually could support new functions not limited by HTML itself so that the features and languages can move at separate paces.
Being able to render an enhanced markdown or JSON or YAML page in the browser without any generators would be phenomenal and resolve a lot of long-standing issues with structured data.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#34This website loads an exceptional amount of data for what it is, at least for me. On my browser it makes calls to a site called streamlitapp.com every 100 ms. It appears to be using about 100MB of bandwidth every 10 seconds from what I can see
100MB is a LOT. Do you perhaps mean 100KB? Streamlit is the framework I used to build the app at the bottom of the article with. It does unfortunately load a decent amount of JS. However it should be non-blocking, which means it won't interfere with how quickly you can see or use the page. It pings back to Streamlit to keep your session state alive as it's running a whole Python interpreter on the backend for each se…
Using a wasteful app to complain about bad page design. Oh irony.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#35Sure they do. Just disable ads, and all 3rd party JS.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#36Good enough is good enough. Just like faster computers don’t make new apps any faster (even at the peak of scaling decades ago), they make sure we can write more complex apps without making them too slow, or equivalently, add more things to apps and sites if there is any performance headroom left.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#37Despite faster computers every year, my computers don't seem to run any faster, either
Computer speed is a lot like driving traffic times. The amount of time it takes is pretty fixed as it’s based on what people find acceptable which doesn’t change. With faster computers just comes more features at the same speed.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#38Ironically this page loaded for me in about 500ms on my 1GB fiber connection.
And bizarrely, even though it's a simple blog post it's almost 15MB.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#39Good enough is good enough. Just like faster computers don’t make new apps any faster (even at the peak of scaling decades ago), they make sure we can write more complex apps without making them too slow, or equivalently, add more things to apps and sites if there is any performance headroom left.
>Good enough is good enough.
Oh to be a mere average computer user. I work with files that can still take some non-instant time after hitting save to complete. Conversely, it still takes some non-instant time to open said file. As long as there's such a thing as progress bars, count downs, spinning wheels, beach balls, etc, there is always room to make things faster.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#40Despite faster computers every year, my computers don't seem to run any faster, either
“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.”
Is the quote attributed to Bill "why should I refactor code when CPUs get faster, drives get larger" an internet legend or a terribly paraphrased line said by Bill?