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1MB Club

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Re: 1MB Club

#351

Post by DJHenk »

userbinator wrote: post #152
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!"

To be frank, that's probably because you're not listening. YouTube redesign, Twitter redesign, and one other huge site I can't remember at the moment all had plenty of complaints about how much slower --- and less featured --- they were. The average user doesn't know a static page has been replaced with a bloated SPA, but can sure feel the difference. The web has declined for sure, and it's precisely because of ignor…

> The web has declined for sure, and it's precisely because of ignorant developers with attitudes like yours.

Not only due to developers. Designers have a hand in this too. Example: on many sites (Twitter, Imgur, etc.), it is not possible to simply zoom in an image without jumping to a lot of hoops. You hover the mouse over the image, the pointer becomes a magnifying glass, you click and...

The image blows up to fill to the screen until it his a overly large and useless border that some daft designer thought looked cute. There is no way to zoom in any further, that is blocked. So zooming to see a part if the image in full detail is out of the question. What's worse, if you have a small screen, likely to be the reason that you wanted to zoom in the first place, the zoomed image is actually smaller than the original. Great!

So, I've wasted my data plan to download a large high resolution image and a bunch of javascript libraries that make sure I don't get to enjoy that resolution. I can't remember for sure, but I bet that his already worked fine in Mosaic in 1994. Not anymore. And why? What benefit does this bring? Other than that it looked nice on the designers computer, I mean.

Re: 1MB Club

#352

Post by strken »

vagrantJin wrote: post #76
imheretolearn wrote: post #32

I was once asked to debug an extremely slowly loading page. In the first 5 minutes it was evident that the client was doing things it wasn't supposed to do. It was downloading 300MB worth of resources to show the webpage. Incorrect implementations and inefficient use of libraries is the reason why we're seeing a bloated websites all over the web

> It was downloading 300MB worth of resources to show the webpage. Incorrect implementations and inefficient use of libraries is the reason why we're seeing a bloated websites all over the web In situations like that, it's right and proper to ask who built the site. Then shake your head with absolute contempt.

I've had to fix web apps like that, and no, that's not always right and proper. One example I can give is a tool which loaded 50MB of deeply nested JSON, because when it was written 5 years ago, the payload per item was 80% smaller and the company had 0.1% the number of items.

The correct response is to work out who was responsible for maintaining the site for the past five years.

Re: 1MB Club

#353

Post by Paul_S »

marcan_42 wrote: post #322

Keep in mind that this might discriminate against CJK pages. While it is trivial to design a beautiful webpage in 1MB for a Western audience including CSS design and western fonts, a single CJK compatible webfont (one style/weight) is 500kB-1MB. My blog is pretty lightweight, but I use Japanese in the about page, and that font on that page blows everything else out on download size. I could subset it just for that li…

Why can't you use a system font?

Re: 1MB Club

#354

Post by ay »

I wonder if this is possible to write an extension that would allow to allocate a user-defined “data volume budget” to a site when the browser starts to load it, and hard-cut the process after this budget has been exhausted, and render the page using whatever it managed to download.

Re: 1MB Club

#355

Post by XCSme »

ay wrote: post #354

I wonder if this is possible to write an extension that would allow to allocate a user-defined “data volume budget” to a site when the browser starts to load it, and hard-cut the process after this budget has been exhausted, and render the page using whatever it managed to download.

This is interesting, but maybe instead of hard-cut maybe we could serve different website versions depending on the budget (eg. the same way we do with srcset for images).

Client requests page with 500kb budget? Send text-version with tiny images. Client requests page without any budget? Send full rich version, with full-res images.

Re: 1MB Club

#357

Post by phazy »

One truly useful service. I would love a Search Syntax feature for Google or DDG where one could specify the maximum size of the showed sites. This would definitely improve the results as in many the cases the most useful resources are text-only.

Re: 1MB Club

#358

Post by saagarjha »

boplicity wrote: post #185

Here's a common example, from a FAANG company: 72mb and 367 requests to display around 2,000 characters of text. Maybe double that if you count the "hyperlinks." Single page applications are horrible, and oh-so-common. https://imgur.com/a/v2rud7T

Apple marketing page?

Re: 1MB Club

#359

Post by chiefalchemist »

I agree. Too much bloat. Too much using a Technology X hammer when a screwdriver is what's need.

That said, the metric here is too blunt, too broad.

1) We need to call out avoidable bloat. A simple example: too often I'll visit a site where say the full-hero image is full width and full height. The problem is the same 300-500k+ image that's served to desktop is served to mobile. No media queries (if they're using background-image), no sizes and srcset if it's an image tag.

2) It's about expectations. Some site are naturally image heavy (e.g., photography). Within reason, that's acceptable. Some use of lazy load is better than paging, and such.

3) And do we throw the baby out with the bathwater? If a site is slightly bloated but accessible, I think there should be redeeming points for that. That is, you had X or Y amount of resources and you made #a11y a priority, at say the expense of trimming some bloat. I'm okay with that.

Re: 1MB Club

#360

Post by Shared404 »

bnchrch wrote: post #271
Shared404 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares". This list has a second hidden benefit: Typically, I find that those who have very lightweight pages have more interesting things to say. That being said, that's not a hard and fast rule, as I both have a lightweight page, and not much that's interesting to say.

This feels like both an anecdote and a straw man. I can point to two blogs on either side that have a lot to offer. Large bundle: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ Small Bundle: https://www.eugenewei.com/

> This feels like both an anecdote

Definitely. This is just something I've noticed.

> and a straw man.

Wait what? I was just bringing up something I've noticed. How is this a straw man? As I said before, this is by no means a firm rule, just something that I noticed is frequently the case.

PS. Thanks for linking those blog's, I've added both to my reading list.

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