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Comment by oldmanjay | Hacker News Reader

I know it's a common complaint amongst a certain set to remember some bizarre version of the good old days when software was lean and mean and usable and did all the work our modern software does, but that time literally never existed. What you call bloat, most people either call "usability and features" or simply don't notice at all. The fact that you (apparently) don't like usability and features and prefer to call them bloat doesn't actually give any veracity to your opinions - certainly not enough to make such assertive unsupported statements.

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That's not true. There are many websites today that have identical or less functionality than in the past, and they're just SLOW. So many sites I visit do an inane amount of work to load up a static site. And they scroll poorly, they feel laggy. There's no new functionality, except as far as the developer goes - they're now doing databinding on the client, loading content at runtime (vs sending back rendered HTML), etc.

Edit: I'd also add "on the web" continues to be an excuse for slow, unresponsive software. Even in ~96 or so, I remember folks getting excited. "Look at this online frog dissection thing!" ... It was crappier than what you could do with even a small download. But it was on the web so it was hot. Same thing now.

It could still be a case of one person's bloat being another's feature. Though for a website website, the other people could be advertisers, people who develop the site and people who publish content to it. There was a Mozilla report not too long ago that found that just disabling tracking (not ads) reduced page load times by almost half.

In many cases it's not. In fact I've recently worked on several projects where the frontend is stupidly heavy for zero reason. Just sloppy or over engineered code.

I know the full extent of the capabilities - one is just a corporate website with no interactivity. It's just dumb. The previous version was just simple static HTML; but as part of the "responsive design overhaul" it turned into this behemoth that makes several dozen requests to open the homepage. Nuts.

Websites are a great example since the bloat is clearly visible on the developer's end. I decided to try using Foundation last week. The last time I worked on a website I just generated some static HTML markup and filled it in with my own hand-built CSS. Nobody would give an award for that design, but it was functional enough.

The Foundation install instructions first ask for three dependencies: Ruby, node.js, and git. Subsequently, through gem and npm, dozens of other dependencies were installed. The framework pushes multiple .js dependencies onto the served pages, and heavily encourages using either Compass or libsass to generate the final CSS, making it weigh considerably more. It even had tooling to automatically rebuild as a background process.

All of this, and I basically just modified the example templates slightly to help me build a layout. In theory all sorts of other things could be done with that framework, but the nature of the software stack we have, at least in this domain, favors including the kitchen sink when you need a cup of water.

Don't start on node. A dozen thousand files of dependencies because every function needs its own module containing at least 6 files. And using RequireJS, well it takes 30s+ to build this site even though it's not doing anything earth shattering. And that's before running uglify or any such minimizer. I don't get it.

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