1MB Club • Hacker News Board

Re: 1MB Club

#201

Post by mNovak » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

How much of these bloat libraries / frameworks does the browser cache, vs how much is downloaded fresh each time (looking across multiple sites)?

Are there no tools to extract only the portions of js / css etc that your site actually uses, and just host that mini package yourself?

Re: 1MB Club

#202

Post by CyberDildonics » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

mark242 wrote: post #43

Here's the disconnect, which is why these "webpages need to be slim!" sites tend to make me think they're greybeard nostalgia for an internet that doesn't really exist anymore. Your 1mb webpage is approximately 60ms worth of Disney+ streaming. Your 1mb webpage is approximately 1.7s worth of Zoom chat. Your 1mb webpage is approximately 1.9s worth of Tiktok video. Unless you are specifically targeting low-bandwidth use…

You are not only conflating megabytes (MB) with megabits (mb) but you are also conflating latency (a site loading) with throughput (a buffered video playing).

Re: 1MB Club

#203

Post by arendtio » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

1MB seems to be a bit much...

A few years ago I wrote a little blog software which is based completely on JS functionality (including i18n and page transition animations) and doesn't work without it. So much so that no search engine ever finds the posts (my mistake, if you would do it right, that should not be a problem nowadays).

And yet, loading a page is less than 1 MB. In fact, loading the HTML and JS only, the page would fit in 100kb. The Webfonts are responsible for most of the traffic.

Re: 1MB Club

#204

Post by deergomoo » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

mattbk1 wrote: post #181

What's a good framework for building lightweight websites? Or am I better off just writing HTML?

Depends what sort of website really. If it’s best described as an app, Svelte seems good. Rather than having a big feature-filled runtime it does most of its work at compile time, so your bundle is almost always much smaller than something like React or Vue.

If it’s just a static or almost static content I’d lean more towards just plain HTML, maybe with a little server templating.

Re: 1MB Club

#205

Post by ezluckyfree » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #178

Thanks, especially for: https://john-doe.neocities.org/ I'm just looking at modern front end web again (we're using react, ant - and I've stockholmed myself into considering react with tailwind as a "lightweight" alternative... Nice to be reminded about truly simple html+css).

ah I like this one, thanks!

Re: 1MB Club

#206

Post by yellowapple » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

wcerfgba wrote: post #79

bnchrch wrote: post #45

Ahh let the bikeshedding continue. In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares". Optimization matters when it actually solves a problem, before that it's just wasted effort. I don't hear the general public yelling from the rooftops "The web is too slow! Developers are building too fast! I wish we could go backwards!"

What about the problem of CO2 / MB ?

I feel like it'd be more productive to reduce the CO2 per MB (e.g. using a 100% renewable-energy-powered hosting provider, pressuring ISPs to use renewables, pressuring power companies to use renewables, etc.) than to reduce the MB in this case.

Re: 1MB Club

#207

Post by globular-toast » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

Instead of being an absolute number it should be a ratio of useful information/size, or a signal to noise ratio. It's quite hard to calculate in general, but it could probably be done by rendering the page something like Firefox's reader mode and taking that as the signal and the rest as the noise.

Re: 1MB Club

#208

Post by mnsolo » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

Using the phrase "cancerous growth" is really poor form. Do you really think a 300ms page load resembles someone fighting for their life?

Re: 1MB Club

#209

Post by pippy » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

The culture change around the importance of performance is frustrating, new developers all seem to love their massive JavaScript libraries. Giving a trivial function such as search box on a webpage or some animation results in a convoluted 10MB JavaScript monster from hell. If they run into anything remotely challenging they'll simply add a library to do it for them creating more bloat. It used to be the opposite. When asked 'why not just some jQuery and DOM'? they'll reply it's too hard. React, webpack, node etc are great tools but they need to used carefully.

Re: 1MB Club

#210

Post by yellowapple » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

pketh wrote: post #170

mintone wrote: post #164

I believe this is placing emphasis on entirely the wrong thing. Page size does not matter. Render time/time 'til functional does. Stripe.com is 1.2MB fully loaded but is pretty much all non blocking so it feels as fast as a very small site. By the time you've scrolled to the bottom of the homepage it's loaded >2MB. The convert pretty well, and my experience is that Stripe knows what they are doing better than most. S…

yar, maybe it should've been about js size, ideally closer to the 200kb-of-js club

I'd be down for that, but without the "k" :)