41–50 of 324 posts
Damn... I'm at 17.2KB for my home page! (not including dependencies) FWIW I optimised the heck out of my personal homepage and got 100/100 for all Lighthouse scores. Which I had not previously thought possible LOL Built in Rails too! It's absolutely worth optimising your site though. It just is such a pleasing experience when a page loads without any perceptible lag!
I’d care about this if I was selling in India or Africa. If I’m selling to cash cows in America or Europe it’s not an issue at all. As long as you have >10mbps download across 90% of users I think it’s better to think about making money. Besides if you don’t know that lazy loading exists in 2025 fire yourself lol.
Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…
The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
I’d care about this if I was selling in India or Africa. If I’m selling to cash cows in America or Europe it’s not an issue at all. As long as you have >10mbps download across 90% of users I think it’s better to think about making money. Besides if you don’t know that lazy loading exists in 2025 fire yourself lol.
- rural location
- roommate or sibling torrent-ing the shared connection into the ground
- driving around on a road with spotty coverage
- places with poor cellular coverage (some building styles are absolutely hell on cellular as well)
I’d care about this if I was selling in India or Africa. If I’m selling to cash cows in America or Europe it’s not an issue at all. As long as you have >10mbps download across 90% of users I think it’s better to think about making money. Besides if you don’t know that lazy loading exists in 2025 fire yourself lol.
I wouldn't be surprised if many '3rd world' countries have better average internet speeds than some developed countries by leapfrogging older 'good enough' tech that's still dominating in the developed countries, e.g. I've been on a 16 MBit connection in Germany for a long time simply because it was mostly good enough for my internet consumption. One day my internet provider 'forcefully' upgraded me to 50 MBit becaus…
Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…
The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
Is it? My front end engineer spending 90 minutes cutting dependencies out of the site isn’t going to deny YouTube the opportunity to improve their streaming algorithms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.
Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give…
I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas).
This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally, but making your website smaller and "being vocal about it" (whatever you mean by that) doesn't make an iota of difference. It also only works if your site is basically just text. If your website uses other resources (images, videos, 3D models, audio, etc.), the impact of first load is just noise anyway.
You can have a bigger impact by telling 100,000 people to drive an hour less each month and if just 1% of your hypothetical audience actually does that, you'd achieve orders of magnitude more in terms of environmental and societal impact.
Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…
The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
It's a small thing, but as you say internet video is relatively heavy.
To reduce my AI footprint I use the udm=14 trick[1] to kill AI in Google search. It generally gives better results too.
For general web browsing the best single tip is running uBlock Origin. If you can master medium[2] or hard mode (which will require un-breaking/whitelisting sites) it saves more bandwidth and has better privacy.[3]
To go all-out on bandwidth conservation, LocalCDN[4] and CleanURLs[5] are good. "Set it and forget it," improves privacy and load times, and saves a bit of energy.
Sorry this got long. Cheers
[0] https://greasyfork.org/whichen/scripts/23661-youtube-hd
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1j5tktg/ubloc...
Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…
It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.
Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…