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Comment by anhner | Hacker News Reader

You know what gimmicks web developers use? They use babel and other transpilers that add code bloat in the final asset since they can't use standard JavaScript because a browser doesn't implement certain apis. Or having to use third party shitty libraries as workarounds because again a browser decided they are not going to include functionality that has existed in all other browsers since 5 years.

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While that may be necessary for complicated webapps, most sites display text, images and a some video. The tools to display images and text have been available since the 90s. The tools for video (without flash) have been available since HTML5, so a decade.

New recently introduced gimmicks only solve problems that were already solved. There is no reason that a site such as reddit should have to run scripts for 11s on page load, when a pretty much feature-identical site such as HN manages the same with 100ms of scripts running.

Modern webdev is, for the most part, creating new problems that didn't need to be solved. It's a job placement program, nothing more.

> There is no reason that a site such as reddit should have to run scripts for 11s on page load, when a pretty much feature-identical site such as HN manages the same with 100ms of scripts running.

The really disheartening thing about this dichotomy is realizing that all of this extra effort, code, and time are in service of the banality of tracking and ads.

If it was just tracking and ads it would be a lot more performant honestly.

The transpilers aren't really the problem. The real problem is developers adding in all sorts of libraries for every little problem, and each library added is adding tens or hundreds of kilobytes to the final assets size.

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