The website is a bit of a parody, but the numbers are real: http://vanilla-js.com/
For similar functionality, modern, native JS is orders of magnitude faster than almost all JS libraries. The libraries obviously do more, but they also account for older browsers and just by their nature have a lot more overhead.
The point about edge case devices also should not be missed – the assumption that "we have 5G" should be a target is really quite surprising. There are always cases for a more optimum website. When traveling and there is low signal, or people on pay-per-MB plans, and more – there are all kinds of people that can benefit from a slimmer and lighter (compute-wise) website. The stupid fast chips are not used by everyone, in fact, not even the majority.
I'm not. Rural areas often have unbelievably bad internet connections. In my home town we have around 2 MBit/s for broadband connections and 5G is not there either.
You lose nothing by optimizing your sites for the worst possible case and not for what you'd like everybody to have.
That's not true. The overwhelming majority of user-perceived latency for mobile devices accessing typical websites occurs after the initial HTML response has been received. See eg https://wpostats.com or https://httparchive.org for data.
> But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.
It's much less common in the UK than the US to buy a smartphone on credit - cheap phones with cheap pre-paid plans are normal - so low-end models with very slow chips are more common. The sort of thing where even scrolling through your contact menu will induce lag.
The people who need government services the most won't have this
Just want to make sure we aren’t just making assumptions.
I would think most folks of any income would replace their phones even every 5 years, simply because the batteries would’ve died. And I’d think any phone in the past 5 years would be reasonably decent. Even the ultra cheap ones.
Plus with networks, cell carriers are at least incentivized in general to get folks off 3g into lte since it’s cheaper for them to not have to maintain N systems.
For data maybe Android share in Europe could be a start, or people with prepaid plans. In my experience both are much more prevalent in Europe than in the US.
Device memory is a good proxy for how powerful the phone is
Effective connection type will give some data on network performance