They presume a "problem" is loading 32KB of data and the fix was spending a lot of tax dollars to replace it? Insane.
All in all, this sounds like fantastic work relative to what we normally expect from government end user software. We should encourage this kind of thing, not jump to the hand-wavy "my tax dollars!" complaint, which approaches meaninglessness in its commonality.
> We’ll provide more detail about exactly what that means in the next blog post.
The whole premise of the article is conjecture until we see the performance numbers presented. The claim is that removing a one-time load 32kB library is useful to page load times and user experience for low end users. It has ZERO specifications or performance numbers cited.
Besides which, the net effect of more data on a page is that it takes a little longer to load the page. For someone who has a slow phone, they are conditioned to this through use of other sites (or even clicking on the housing link at the top of the UK Gov site and waiting for a 360kB image to load). What is the advantage of speeding it up for them for a single site they may or may not use?
Will we also take it upon ourselves to justify anything that makes them click on the wrong link and have to wait to go back? Unlikely.
(Also, luckily the UK government spent zero dollars on fixing this.)
BTW, the UK doesn't use dollars.
I don't think you would generally expect people to say "tax euros" or "tax pounds" or "tax yen"
> the fix was spending a lot of tax dollars to replace it?
Reads fine as
> the fix was spending a lot of taxes to replace it?
Depends which country you're in. It would be very weird for UK politicians to start talking about tax dollars, for example.
gov.uk is an absolute delight to use exactly because of this kind of focus on the details and valuing of simplicity. I can’t think of another website that is more useable, and that is super important for a site that needs to work for a very diverse user base who have no choice but to use it.
I think you’d also be surprised how little this is likely to have cost compared to benefit to the tens of millions of users of these systems. GDS run a tight ship.