Hacker News Reader

Comment by cantbecool | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else notice how ridiculously bloated theguardian.com is? It seriously takes 5 seconds to completely load on my modern machine.

View on HN

There is a new responsive site which is going to be phased in soonish (no definite time frame though). It's much better performance-wise.

The beta site is a very bad desktop experience compared to the current site. It's a bit like when gmail was redesigned - needs an ultracompact view with way more information density.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk?view=mobile

beautiful, they must send down at least 75% less data down the pipe compared to their desktop version.

I thought it was interesting how they appear to have inlined the CSS and JS into the HTML for their new responsive site. Is this becoming a common practice?

I guess they must have worked out that their CSS and JS was lean and minified enough that despite the extra overhead of it being in the HTML (which is even less when gzipped, I guess) and not being served from cache, it was faster than making another 2 requests. I guess there is some small overhead to fetching a file from the browser cache but surely it is tiny?

Would be interested to get more insight into this aspect of the site if anyone knows anything!

Inline styles have always been common practice for some people...

My offshore teammates littered our repo with inline styles for no reason. It completely changed the UI I built for the projects. I spent serval days this week trying to fix it and I am still not done.

One of their senior engineers gave a good talk on this recently: https://speakerdeck.com/patrickhamann/css-and-the-critical-p...

There's a new trend to try and put the really important CSS rules inline so your content can render quickly then fill in the rest later without making the initial render look like it was designed by design blind programmers, i.e. the unmodified Times New Roman HTML page.

The Gruand is also trying progressive image loading.

Unfortunately it actually just looks shit, it's like peeking behind the curtains in Oz as your content kinda half renders then renders again properly, twitching into life like some sort of half botched Frankenstein experiment.

Notice the `loadFontsAsynchronously` and the `loadCssFromStorage` in the js.

In some ways I like that the Gruand's team is experimenting, in others it's frustrating to see how the creaky and leaky HTML/web browser combo is still justifying people doing all sorts of crazy things to try and get a simple page to render quickly 25 years after the web was born. And "responsive" designs that are really just mobile designs stretched to a one-size-fits-all simply because browsers are too fucking stupid to tell you what they actually need.

My Grump is in full swing today.

*Grauniad

The irony.

It's almost instant on my 3 years old machine (Win7 + Chrome)

You probably visited the site before, and had some information cached. Clear your cache and get back to me on the results. I'm curious.

Actually, I from some reason get automatically new (mobile) version. Same as linked by OliverJAsh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com