Is JavaScript slowing the Internet down? | Hacker News Reader

Is JavaScript slowing the Internet down?

11 pointsi_ahmed9 comments

Do you mean literally or metaphorically? As in page load times are getting longer because browsers have to download a lot of js files? Or that Javascript is a deep seated technology and therefore prevents any other alternative from emerging?

In my opinion, irresponsible use of giant sweeping Images, HTML Video backgrounds, web-fonts, and other technologies (JavaScript included) are "slowing the internet down." Those and a heaping dose of people who only think about users with high speed connections (even when trying to target mobile devices.) In this case, I consider slowing to be constituted by long page load times and browser lockups.

That said, there are certainly sites with so much JavaScript, that even on my netbook or laptop, I find myself having to use a mobile version.

I agree with this interpretation. If client side technologies hadn't been invented, all websites would be giving us nice plain easy to read text layouts like HN.

I agree - it's still perfectly possible to design clear, attractive (and perfectly functional) websites with just HTML and CSS (and maybe a little bit of Javascript). The page weight of even simple-looking sites (like a blog post on medium.com) is surprising large (admittedly, probably not due to Javascript but due to web fonts).

I personally really like the use of web fonts. Using a service like Fontsquirrel, and limiting the number of font weights you use (regular, medium, italic etc), you can optimise the font file size to be smaller than what Google serves up through their font service.

I'd say to the original poster: if you really want to experience whether Javascript is slowing down the internet, try browsing popular sites with Javascript disabled (use an add-on like noscript on Firefox). You can judge for yourself how much faster browsing the web feels. See how many sites break, and then, when you enable Javascript, ask yourself if those same sites could work perfectly fine without Javascript or with minimal Javascript.

If you try running a browser session with Javascript disabled, not only do many sites break (as expected), but plenty of sites serving plain text articles simply won't display their content either[1]. HTML is designed for plain text content, why do we want to wrap it up in Javascript? The rise of Javascript frameworks like meteor is exacerbating this trend. Some developers are using these frameworks for outputting everything to the web whether it's a list of links or a plain text blog page. Do we really want to go down this path?

Some sites load fast whether Javascript is enabled or not, but for me, the question of whether Javascript is slowing down sites is closely bound up with the question of whether Javascript is needed for everything on the site in the first place.

[1] As an aside, try viewing the Official Android blog from Google with Javascript disabled and you get a blank page. When enabled you get a blog site that could easily be rendered in plain HTML and CSS. http://officialandroid.blogspot.co.uk/

What exactly do you mean? Because your question could be asking - 1) does using JS slow average page loading times? or 2) is JS actively slowing THE INTERNET down?

If 1 - it could be; it is hard to pinpoint the cause exactly. The average page loading time is increasing (http://marketingland.com/retail-website-load-times-continue-...).

If 2 - I don't think so; Bandwidth is increasing, and average internet speed is also increasing (http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/q2_2013_soti_infographic.pdf)

1) Though it's not fool proof (because there is no upper limit on file size), a large JavaScript application that consists of many scripts can be minified and concatenated, reducing download times. The situation can be made better with aggressive caching too, not to mention the client side cache, so I don't see how JavaScript can really be a culprit in "slowing down the internet". Seems a strange idea. If a client side application is written poorly, I can see how that might lead to the perception that JavaScript is to blame, but undeservedly so. I blame the mediocre developer for that :P

Considering that developers nowdays read tons of libraries just to show a alert('hello')... the answer would be yes.

Here I was hoping for an article detailing what this was really about. There are a LOT of angles to this.

no.

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