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JavaScript Bloat in 2024

tonsky.me

31–40 of 266 posts

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#32
10MB, 12MB, …

Compare it to people who really care about performance — Pornhub, 1.4 MB

Porn was always actual web hi-tech with good engineering, not these joke-level “tech” giants. Can’t remember a single time they’d screw up basic ui/ux, content delivery or common sense.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#33
post #19

This compares how much Javascript is loaded from popular sites (cold loaded). Some highlights: - PornHub loads ~10x less JS than YouTube (1.4MB vs 12MB) - Gmail have an incomprehensible large footprint (20MB). Fastmail is 10x ligthter (2MB). Figma is equivalent (20MB) while being a more complex app. - Jira has 58MB (whoa)

Pornhub needs to be small. Jira will download once then be loaded locally until it gets updated, just like an offline app. Pornhub will be run in incognito mode, where caching won't help.

> Jira will download once

Maybe you should take a look on the Network Tab, because Atlassian sure does have a crappy network stack.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#34
At this point, blog posts like these just look like "rage bait" for web developers.. What's the point of it? What's the alternative?

The biggest reason why this topic is a topic, is due to the browser developer tools letting anyone glance at these details easily. If this wasn't a low hanging fruit blog post, it would also try to figure out if this is isolated to web development or can we see this across the board (hint: look at how big games have become, is it only textures though?).

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#35
post #19

This compares how much Javascript is loaded from popular sites (cold loaded). Some highlights: - PornHub loads ~10x less JS than YouTube (1.4MB vs 12MB) - Gmail have an incomprehensible large footprint (20MB). Fastmail is 10x ligthter (2MB). Figma is equivalent (20MB) while being a more complex app. - Jira has 58MB (whoa)

Pornhub needs to be small. Jira will download once then be loaded locally until it gets updated, just like an offline app. Pornhub will be run in incognito mode, where caching won't help.

Pornhub will be run in incognito mode

It’s not '80s anymore, nobody cares about your porn. I have bookmarks on the bookmarks bar right next to electronics/grocery stores and HN. And if you’re not logged in, how would PH and others know your preferences?

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#37

At this point, blog posts like these just look like "rage bait" for web developers.. What's the point of it? What's the alternative? The biggest reason why this topic is a topic, is due to the browser developer tools letting anyone glance at these details easily. If this wasn't a low hanging fruit blog post, it would also try to figure out if this is isolated to web development or can we see this across the board (hi…

To let us know we are not alone with our disdain. Too many JS enthusiasts paper over this insanity. The remnant lives on.

"But JS is the biggest developer ecosystem in the world!"

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#38

I know the implication here is "too much JavaScript" but we also need to talk about how much of this is purely tracking junk.

Was going to mention this, almost any company's brand site will have tracking and analytics libraries set in place. Usually to farm marketing and UX feedback. Whats worse is some of them are fetched externally rather than bundled with the host code thus increasing latency and potential security risks

im pro privacy, but is it really so bad to get anonymous data about where people clicked and how long they stayed where?

it would be almost impossible to measure success without it, whether it's a conversion funnel or tracking usage of a new feature

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#39
it's always bothered me that this dogma exists. Somehow web apps need to be super frugal with code size, while apps distributed on other (native) platforms never have such a problem. Somehow it's the bloated web that blocks the access for children in Affrica, but they can download bloated android apps just fine?

Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't the size of the javascript, it's how broken the entire web stack (specifically caching & PWA) is, that makes a trivial thing like code size a problem.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#40
post #32

10MB, 12MB, … Compare it to people who really care about performance — Pornhub, 1.4 MB Porn was always actual web hi-tech with good engineering, not these joke-level “tech” giants. Can’t remember a single time they’d screw up basic ui/ux, content delivery or common sense.

> Can’t remember a single time they’d screw up basic ui/ux, content delivery or common sense.

There are many, many cases of porn websites breaking the law.

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