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1MB Club

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Re: 1MB Club

#251

Post by _cairn »

Aeolun wrote: post #190
crazygringo wrote: post #163

I don't mind highlighting and curating small sites for fun, that's neat. But calling larger sites a "cancerous growth on the web" just feels immature to me. Everything is just cost/benefit. There's no need to bring a black-and-white fanatical exaggerated mindset to it. You can celebrate something you like without having to make the alternative a disease , sheesh.

With all due respect. Modern news websites are a disease, and I find it pretty hard to disagree with the nomer cancerous growth since the behavior is spreading, and normalized by these websites. There is zero benefit to me in loading 20mb of garbage just so I can read 10kb of text.

I think the reason why blog posts are written in this hyperbolic format is because it catches people’s attention, or “click bait”, if you will. If it were toned down in the way you suggested (which I agree with in principle), it might lose more readers before they get to the substance. Just hypothesizing here btw.

Re: 1MB Club

#252

Post by curben »

e12e wrote: post #171
KMnO4 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a quick Google search and discovered that SVG favicons are valid in most browsers, so for fun I reduced it by 95% down to 886 bytes: https://output.jsbin.com/yudonidujo

Nicely done. Manual or automatic conversion?

[1] generates ico, png and svg. you may want to remove some favicons from the generated HTML snippet; in my brief testing, Firefox loads both png and svg, while Chrome loads ico.

[1]: https://realfavicongenerator.net/

Re: 1MB Club

#253

Post by toastercat »

crazygringo wrote: post #163

I don't mind highlighting and curating small sites for fun, that's neat. But calling larger sites a "cancerous growth on the web" just feels immature to me. Everything is just cost/benefit. There's no need to bring a black-and-white fanatical exaggerated mindset to it. You can celebrate something you like without having to make the alternative a disease , sheesh.

As much as it "feels" immature, it is still an understandable analogy, regardless if you're a fanatic. As other users pointed out, it has become a norm for software/webdev houses to convert what is mostly static content into weird, flashy, bloated SPAs that load a ridiculous about of resources for little content. I see it in my peers too, and I saw it even when I was attending college. Frankly, I think it's immature to pretend this is not a problem as some seem to suggest.

Re: 1MB Club

#254

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #141
chrisin2d wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for a major e-commerce company and will back this up. The importance of performance, of course, depends on the use case. In e-commerce, the biggest factors (that come to mind) to compete on are—SEO and brand aside—price, offerings, and convenience. Convenience has two dimensions: UX and performance. If a user has a very clear idea of what they want from your site, they'll probably be patient. If a user…

I totally believe that the vast majority of page views are from channel surfing (or bots), but have a hard time believing that has any correlation to actual purchases. If I'm spending an hour's pay on something I really want, of course I'll wait 10 seconds for the page to load, or if I can't get it to load at all, I'll make a note to try again later from different browser or internet connection. I'll manually enter m…

> Are there whales who buy everything you can put in front of their face, or a different demographic who searches for something to buy and then changes their mind in precisely 850 milliseconds?

Maybe, maybe not, but site load time has a very well documented correlation with bounce rate. And if a user bounces, they're obviously not going to end up spending money.

I believe it's more about keeping the user in a sort of sales/marketing 'funnel'. If I'm just browsing and come across a service I might be vaguely interested in, perhaps I'll click the link to view their page. Now I'm at the top of the funnel. With each link I have to click to follow, there is an opportunity for me to get bored, get distracted by something else, or so on. Maybe I'm not buying anything then, but maybe somewhere along the funnel is a free trial of the service, and if I'm in a pleasant mood, maybe I'll do the trial. But if I bounced because of a 5 sec load time, chances are good the mildly impulsive mood I was in is not going to persist enough to encourage a subsequent visit.

So it might not be an immediate thing, but better engagement does lead to more sales. I like to consider myself a mindful shopper, but there are definitely a handful of $5/month services I am subbed to because I was in a vaguely impulsive mood and stumbled into something I thought might be useful -- and their signup process was silky smooth.

And if you are instead shopping for an item and browsing several different sites, if one of them sticks out because of its slow load times, that's a tab you are going to close.

Re: 1MB Club

#255

Post by meshaneian »

yellowapple wrote: post #92

I love it! I feel like the 1MB limit is excessively generous, especially for text-only pages. But maybe that's what makes it so damning when pages fail to adhere to it. I know at least one website I maintain fails it spectacularly (though in my defense it's entirely because of that website being chock-full of photos, and full-res ones at that; pages without those are well under that 1MB mark), while other sites I've…

Next level: The 1MB Quine Club.

Re: 1MB Club

#256

Post by Aeolun »

notJim wrote: post #242
Aeolun wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect. Modern news websites are a disease, and I find it pretty hard to disagree with the nomer cancerous growth since the behavior is spreading, and normalized by these websites. There is zero benefit to me in loading 20mb of garbage just so I can read 10kb of text.

1) Many websites are not news sites. In fact, I'd guess the vast majority. So this point doesn't feel relevant. 2) Sometimes things might be useful to people other than you. The world doesn't exist to cater to your needs, and referring to things that aren't exactly what you want as cancerous is childish.

In response to your second point, please tell me who benefits from the 20mb of cruft loaded when accessing the page?

Aside from the marketing monkeys that put it all there in the first place?

Re: 1MB Club

#257

Post by sneak »

crazygringo wrote: post #163

I don't mind highlighting and curating small sites for fun, that's neat. But calling larger sites a "cancerous growth on the web" just feels immature to me. Everything is just cost/benefit. There's no need to bring a black-and-white fanatical exaggerated mindset to it. You can celebrate something you like without having to make the alternative a disease , sheesh.

Most webpages that load megabytes of bullshit today would be much better for everyone, developers, operators, hosting, and end users, if they just didn’t do that.

Re: 1MB Club

#258

Post by Aeolun »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #212
Aeolun wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect. Modern news websites are a disease, and I find it pretty hard to disagree with the nomer cancerous growth since the behavior is spreading, and normalized by these websites. There is zero benefit to me in loading 20mb of garbage just so I can read 10kb of text.

Yes news sites are the worst of the bunch but then we get people complaining about full web apps using JS when there is no real alternative.

I mean, I agree full web apps are annoying to some extend, but if you’re loading a whole application in a few MB that actually seems kind of reasonable.

Re: 1MB Club

#259

Post by toastercat »

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!"

Perhaps Bradley Taunt is bikeshedding, but it doesn't mean he's not pulling in the right direction.

People obviously care because people obviously want their browsers to load content quickly. No one likes waiting for webpages to load.

How do you decide when a website/webapp is fast enough and you've "solved the problem"? On what range of devices and internet speeds do you test on?

As my family's personal IT assistant, I can't tell you how often I get the complaint that "my phone is too slow" or "my laptop is slow and heats up" when all they are doing is browsing popular websites. An we live in a developed nation with decent internet -- I can't imagine how awful it must be when you don't have those luxuries.

I think your comment is lacking severely in perspective, and the mindset you've demonstrated to be particularly bad for the web. Not to mention snide and dismissive.

Re: 1MB Club

#260

Post by corobo »

SilasX wrote: post #160
charlesdaniels wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of over-complicating things, perhaps there could be limits per resource type. 10Mb of images might be reasonable (e.g. for a photojournal), but only 128KB of JS, and 128KB for everything else. Something along those lines.

Yeah I was surprised they included pictures in the limit at all -- I mean, sometimes, you need those pictures, and for them to load slower is less important so long as you don't need them to navigate the page.

Well if you need them you can't be a part of this 1MB club.

It's not a bad thing, it's just a thing.

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