Modern web dev is ridiculous. Most websites are an ad ridden tracking hellacape. Seeing sites like hn where lines of js are taken seriously is a godsend. Make the web less bloated.
The 49MB web page
101–110 of 389 posts
Re: The 49MB web page
#102When working at the BBC in the late 90s, the ops team would start growling at you if a site's home page was over 70kb...
Re: The 49MB web page
#103Modern web dev is ridiculous. Most websites are an ad ridden tracking hellacape. Seeing sites like hn where lines of js are taken seriously is a godsend. Make the web less bloated.
I agree with this. Just because a website can eat all my RAM doesn't mean it should...
Re: The 49MB web page
#104Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…
I'm pretty damn sure those videos were put on the page because someone in marketing wanted them. I'm pretty sure then QA complained the videos loaded too slowly, so the preloading was added. Then, the upper management responsible for the mess shrugged their shoulders and let it ship. You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which is actually…
The devs are the subject matter experts. Does marketing understand the consequences of preloading all those videos? Does upper management? Unlikely. It’s the experts’ job to educate them. That’s part of the job as much as writing code is.
Re: The 49MB web page
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Craptop duty”[1]. (Third time in three years I’m posting an essentially identical comment, hah.) [1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
I now wonder if it'd be a good idea to move our end to end tests to a pretty slow vm instead of beefy 8 core 32gb ram machine and check which timeouts will be triggered because our app may have been unoptimized for slower environments...
For blocking presubmit checks, getting the fastest machine you can is probably reasonable. Otherwise, the advantage of the craptop approach is that it needs basically no infra work and gives an immediate impression of the site, and not CI, being slow.
If you’re willing to build some infra, there’s probably a lot more you can do—nightly slow-hardware runs come to mind immediately, browser devtools have a convincing builtin emulation of slow connections, a page displaying a graph of test runtime over time[1] isn’t hard to set up, etc.—but I don’t really have experience with that.
[1] See e.g. https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3....
Re: The 49MB web page
#106Modern web dev is ridiculous. Most websites are an ad ridden tracking hellacape. Seeing sites like hn where lines of js are taken seriously is a godsend. Make the web less bloated.
What really blows my mind is how unusable it is. How often do you visit a web site and there’s so much crap overlaid on the page that you can barely see the actual content? Surely that can’t be good for their ability to make money, yet they persist.
Re: The 49MB web page
#107Allowing scripting on websites (in the mid-90s) was a completely wrong decision. And an outrage. Programs are downloaded to my computer and executed without me being able to review them first—or rely on audits by people I trust. That’s completely unacceptable; it’s fundamentally flawed.
Of course, you disable scripts on websites. But there are sites that are so broken that they no longer work properly, since the developers are apparently so confused that they assume people only view their pages with JavaScript enabled.
It would have been so much better if we had simply decided back in the ’90s that executable programs and HTML don’t belong together. The world would be so much better today.
Re: The 49MB web page
#108This is why people continue to lament Google Reader (and RSS in general): it was a way to read content on your own terms, without getting hijacked by ads.
RSS and feed readers still exist! All hope is not lost.
Sure, I use Feedly myself, but RSS is increasingly marginalized. I use to follow blogs, but it's not usable for mainstream media, Reddit, HN, etc etc.
Re: The 49MB web page
#109These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript. They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opport…
I'm about to go full cycle.
For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.
Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.
Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.
Re: The 49MB web page
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a magic word that can be used in scenarios like this: “No.” Failing that, interpret the requirements. Nobody can watch a bunch of videos at once that don’t even show up until you scroll! That’s a nonsense requirement and the dev’s failure to push back or redirect in a more viable direction is a sign of their incompetence, not that of the non-technical manager that saw YouTube’s interface and assumes that that…
It's not a sign of their incompetence, it's a sign of the realities of many corporate environments. But hey, if you want to rail against incompetent developers who exist in a make-believe world where they hold all the power are simply too lazy and incompetent to 'do the right thing' then go ahead!
> realities of many corporate environments
Stop making excuses and start taking ownership and responsibility of your craft.
I work in huge government departments, large financial orgs, and other "enterprise" places that are the poster child for the "realities of corporate environments".
Automatically saying "yes" to everything makes you a useless meat robot.
If you do everything that the customer asks, without push back, negotiation, or at least a deeper understanding, then you will produce broken garbage.
I see this all the time: "The customer asked for X, so I pressed the button!" is the cry of the incompetent junior tech that will never be promoted.
Nobody wants a uselessly slow website. Nobody wants to piss of their customers. Nobody wants angry rants about their online presence to make headline news.
What the customer wanted was multi media content. That's fine. The technical specifics of how that is presented is up to the engineering team to decide. You're not advisors! You own the technical decision making, so act like it.
If you make the decision to shove nearly a gigabyte down the wire to show the landing page, then that's on you. The manager asking for "video clips" or whatever as the feature probably doesn't even know the difference between megabyte and gigabyte! They shouldn't have to in the same way that I shouldn't have to know about my state's electrical wiring standards if I get a sparky out to add a porch light. If my house burns down, that's the electrician's fault, not mine as the customer!
Similarly, if someone asks for lights inside their pool, an electrician that strings ordinary mains cabling through the water should be jailed for criminal negligence. Obviously, only special low-voltage lighting can be used in water, especially near people. Duh.
Act like an electrician, not like a bored shopkeer who's memorised the line "the customer is always right" without realising that the full quote ends in "... in matters of taste."