Hacker News Reader

Comment by billpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

Seems nothing is good enough anymore! I give up. But seriously, all this does is serve to make you feel better when looking at metrics and barely puts a dent in real user experience. You're still blocking, you've still got the same load times. The only only difference is that you're delaying the inevitable and doing so doesn't always help user experience a bit. Waiting is waiting whether you wait now or later.

View on HN

The difference is that earlier, if there is a load spike in monitoring, we dont know if it was cause of 3rd party scripts or some problems with out server/CDN. the former we can live with, but the latter is very bad.

Now after deferring the 3rd party scripts, we know for sure what the user experience is with regards to the main content of the site.

Ok. Fair enough. I never thought of it that way. I stand corrected. I'm tempted to argue that some third party scripts may be necessary for presenting content and delaying them can mess up a user experience. But we all know not to do that so that point is moot however there are excepts, however few, to every rule.

All that aside, though I'd say I just changed my mind to agree with you.

Definitely. Though with small modifications, you should be able to have your cake and eat it too:

http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a...

...this technique begins downloads immediately, but still avoids blocking window.onload (just ran a brief test myself to verify this behavior). Unfortunately, it requires the third-party provider to adopt LightningJS. Here's to hoping that more providers take notice :)

> "The only only difference is that you're delaying the inevitable and doing so doesn't always help user experience a bit."

"Always" seems like an unnecessarily high bar. If any meaningful fraction of your users would be better served by getting readable content in 2 seconds and having to wait 10-90 seconds for third-party features, I would absolutely say this is definitely a worthwhile optimization. Even if it leaves some speed-reading twitterer waiting the same 10-90 additional seconds for those features to load and render.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com