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JavaScript Bloat in 2024

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Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#101

Post by xk_id »

iamsaitam wrote: post #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 (hi…

> What's the point of it? What's the alternative?

An absurd, idiotic situation that is endemic to the whole industry deserves every bit of scorn and ridicule. Developers need to be educated about this so they can make the right choices, instead of remaining complacent agents of a shameful situation. It also strengthens my own resolve to support (through my use) those websites that abide by the original principles of the web: they either deliver actual documents (instead of javascript apps), or offer public APIs to access the plaintext data. There is always an alternative out there.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#102

Post by diggan »

djtango wrote: post #77

I recently came back from a road trip in New Zealand - a lot of their countryside has little to no cell coverage. Combined with roaming (which seems to add an additional layer of slowness) and boy did it suck to try to use a lot of the web. Also if any spotify PMs are here, please review the Offline UX. Offline is pretty much one of the most critical premium features but actually trying to use the app offline really…

> Also if any spotify PMs are here, please review the Offline UX. Offline is pretty much one of the most critical premium features but actually trying to use the app offline really sucks in so many ways

Also, Spotify (at least on iOS) seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking there is only "Online" and "Offline", so when you're in-between (really high latency, or really lossy connection), Spotify thinks it's online when it really should be thinking it's offline.

But to be fair, this is a really common issue and Spotify is in no way alone in failing on this, hard to come up with the right threshold I bet.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#103

Post by jjav »

user432678 wrote: post #98
djtango wrote: post #77

I recently came back from a road trip in New Zealand - a lot of their countryside has little to no cell coverage. Combined with roaming (which seems to add an additional layer of slowness) and boy did it suck to try to use a lot of the web. Also if any spotify PMs are here, please review the Offline UX. Offline is pretty much one of the most critical premium features but actually trying to use the app offline really…

Re: Spotify So much agree here, the offline mode is so beyond being annoying so I even started building my own iOS offline first music app.

> my own iOS offline first music app

Sadly ironic that apple used to sell this, in the shape of an ipod!

I hold on to mine, it is perfect in every way that a phone is terrible.

It is tiny and 100% offline, just what I need.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#105

Post by diggan »

devjab wrote: post #52
wruza wrote: 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.

I never really understood why SPAs became so popular on the web. It’s like we suddenly and collectively became afraid of the page reload on websites just because it’s not a wanted behaviour in actual web applications. I have worked with enterprise applications for two decades, and with some that were build before I was born. And I think the React has been the absolute best frontend for these systems compared to every…

> But for something like pornhub? Well PHP serves them just fine,

Kind of fun to make this argument for Pornhub when visiting their website with JavaScript disabled just seems to render a blank page :)

> how many people still vastly prefer the old.reddit.com site to their modern SPA

Also a fun argument, the times I've seen analytics on it, old.reddit.com seems to hover around/below 10% of the visitors to subs. But I bet this varies a lot by the subreddit.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#106

Post by panstromek »

SebastianKra wrote: post #4

Any reason why we're looking at uncompressed data? Some of the listed negative examples easily beat GMaps 1.5mb when compressed. Also, I'll give a pass to dynamic apps like Spotify and GMail [1] if (and only if) the navigation after loading the page is fast. I would rather have something like Discord which takes a few seconds to update on startup, than GitLab, which makes me wait up to two seconds for every. single.…

Interesting that you mention GitHub file tree. I recently encountered a periodic freezing of that whole page. I've profiled for a bit and found out that every few seconds it spends like 5 seconds recomputing relative timestamps on the main thread.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#107

Post by jjav »

wruza wrote: post #35
jkoudys wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I have bookmarks on the bookmarks bar

Must be fun at work zoom meeting when you share the browser window!

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#108

Post by Tistron »

djtango wrote: post #77

I recently came back from a road trip in New Zealand - a lot of their countryside has little to no cell coverage. Combined with roaming (which seems to add an additional layer of slowness) and boy did it suck to try to use a lot of the web. Also if any spotify PMs are here, please review the Offline UX. Offline is pretty much one of the most critical premium features but actually trying to use the app offline really…

Offline is still miles and miles better than patchy Internet. If spotify thinks you have Internet it calls the server to ask for the contents of every context menu, waiting for a response for seconds before sometimes giving up showing a menu and sometimes falling back to what would have been instant if it was in offline mode. I really loathe their player.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#109

Post by nox101 »

thiht wrote: post #80
wruza wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t think you’re speaking for the majority here, no one has pornhub in their bookmarks bar

When I said I didn't watch porn on company laptops, only my personal one, the 5 Apple employees at a party all said they watched porn on company laptops. I was in the minority.

Re: JavaScript Bloat in 2024

#110

Post by veeti »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #14

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

It's easy to test with adblock in place. For instance, the Gitlab landing page went from 13 megabytes to "just" 6 megabytes with tracking scripts blocked. The marketing department will always double the bloat of your software.
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