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!"
Meanwhile valley bros keep helpfully reminding me to upgrade my computer to a reasonable 2020sh.
It seems a lot of the newer generation just doesn't realise what was already possible before, and is only infatuated with inefficient reinventions.
This is said by someone who is not a "valley bro" and often lives in rural Canada.
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 ignorant developers with attitudes like yours.
To any twitter "engineers" on HN, sort it or abort it.
It's deeply disturbing that if they go full-SPA like YouTube did, it seems not a single person working there realises the insanity of somehow needing so much software (and hardware) just to read 140-character long microblogposts, something that would've been possible with hardware and software from 30 years ago. If you look at their minimum browser requirements, then look at the minimum OS requirements from the browser, and go back to hardware requirements from that, you'll probably end up with something that seems ridiculously overpowered for the task, yet with that "minimum supported" system the site will still be slow as molasses and worse than the static page. Seriously, what the fuck!?
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.
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.
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/
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.
And just as someone who grew up horrified if individual pages got over 100kb (or whatever the company rule was), the idea of not caring at all about "page" weight is how my old company wound up passing 20+ megs of JSON around just because it was a little easier.
The same thing is not true for the general public.
Except they usually yell "My phone is too slow" when the problem is actually the web that got 3X bloated since they bought their phone.
With the major disclaimer that if your website serves ANY commercial utility for you personally or your business website speed is hugely important a clear cause / effect impact on engagement, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.
Makes them feel like the site actually does some calculations, even if everything is cached in the background.
See travel agencies, airline comparators, train booking services, insurance benchmarks or credit simulations.
I mean never mind that my internal page links load in <50ms thanks to prefetching and all the other smart stuff that Gatsby does.
I'll keep listening to my users.
Except on forum's. We complain there :P
On the other hand, Gmail regularly takes 10s+ to load and yet most users are glued to it.
If you're a SaaS business, your marketing page is probably not your app. The people using your app care about usability, and page load speed is rarely the driving factor. Especially with SPAs.
Better yet, ask your actual customers.
What I've found is that the users I have that complain are by far the minority of my users. They ask for every little whim, many of them conflicting. If I'd been listening to them my website would be a mess right now. Alexa top 5k. 7 million uniques / day. 550kb. Less than 2 years old.
Every time I implement a new feature, there is no significant change in my site's trajectory. Improving latency by adding an auto-scaler, however, has lead to a massive uptick in usage in the past 90 days.
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.
That’s actually a core reason for slow pages. People in offices with large monitors and huge bandwidth develop those sites
I think it might be like bicycle parts. It is ridiculous that parts are sold with a pricetag PLUS a weight in grams.
I mean, you could save the equivalent of $100 by wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
But those obsessive people end up making most bicycles lighter weight, and thus bike rides for normal people are more enjoyable.
Flippant but I doubt there's any clear correlation between reducing the size of a web page and reducing overall CO2 emissions.