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The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

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Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#11

> The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install It's not really surprising in a world where a graphical driver is > 100 MB (Nvidia driver for Windows).

They mean the original Doom, which ran with a software renderer anyways.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#12

Oh, you just want to add a class to the element? \ adds whole jQuery\ That's what's wrong with the web. Oh, and you need a loop? \ adds underscore.js\

The community is the worst. The adds whole jQuery comes from every single js topic on SO in the past five+ years being answered by "just use jquery". Many times they are not even web related at all.

> "How do you do something in javascript?"

> "With jQuery you do it like this..."

I had the worst time ever when I had to work with jscript. I really wonder if my dislike of the language comes from the language itself or the community around it.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#13
post #7
post #2

With the majority of users moving towards mobile, I really think this is an issue, and I've been consciously building projects as lean as possible. Removing bloated jquery libraries was a big one. With native calls like document.querySelectorAll document.querySelector I've found I can 90% get by without it. For the rest, using something like vue.js, and I've taken care of all the dom manipulation, data binding, etc.

How about not using js at all? I think that for the majority of pages it doesn’t add any value.

With the instant gratification generation, not having dynamic content is going to be a tough sell. I will however agree, there is a gross overuse of it.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#15
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc.

Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculated for the top N URLs on the web (or perhaps, an estimate based on the top M domain names and other signals) and downloaded to the client (so no privacy issues). People will very quickly learn to associate red URLs with the feeling "ugh, this page is taking forever". So long as the metric was reasonably robust to gaming, websites would face a greater pressure to cut the bloat. And yet, it's still ultimately feedback determined by a user's revealed preferences, based on what they think is worth waiting how long for, rather than a developer's guess about what's reasonable.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#17
In the late 00s I remember turning on an old computer with a 650 MHz Athlon CPU and being surprised that web browsing performance in Firefox wasn't bad. Now if I try that with a 1 GHz Pentium 3, performance is absolutely horrible. Is this why?

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#18
post #9

The average Web page now does more than the average Doom install, I don't see the relevance of this. Although I get really annoyed when I visit a blog post whose page is 100x larger than Dostoevsky's novels in .txt format. On my blog ( https://pljns.com/blog/ ), JQuery and genericons are often my largest file transfers, but I still clock under 500kb.

Displaying text on screen with some crappy ads & animations is not doing more than Doom, not even close.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#20

Oh, you just want to add a class to the element? \ adds whole jQuery\ That's what's wrong with the web. Oh, and you need a loop? \ adds underscore.js\

I totally agree - I love raw JS too, and I hate seeing underscore used instead of stdlib - but the stdlib and DOM API has been getting better very slowly:

- element.classList is relatively recent

- NodeLists still don't have .forEach()

- string.includes() and array.includes() was only added in ES6 and ES7

- As of a Chrome 50 a few weeks ago you can now see the values inside FormData.

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