Hacker News Reader

When was the last browser change that broke things like simple news websites????

The phrases "simple" and "news websites" don't combine well these days. Even the NPR website downloads 13.2 MB of content over 91 individual requests, and takes just over 3.6 seconds to load (6.5 to finish).

- CSS Stylesheets: 3

- Animated gifs: 1

- Individual JS files: 11 (around 2MB of JS decompressed (but not un-minimized))

- Asynchronous Requests: 14 (and counting)

And that's with uBlock Origin blocking 12 different ad requests.

That's not simple in any form. So, the possibility of something on this page breaking? High. There's a lot of surface area for things to break over time. And that's not counting what happens when the NPR's internal APIs change for those asynchronous requests.

I know NPR was just an example, but they do actually have a text-only version that I've found really useful: https://text.npr.org

If the site is being served over HTTP/2 then the 11 separate JS files is a good thing compared to a single 2MB JS file.

-

In my case it also has the added benefit of being able to cache JS for a long(er) period of time, with users only having to download maybe 0-30kb of JS when only 1 component is updated instead of invalidating the entire JS served (Way under 1MB however)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com