exerceo
14h

I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.

I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.

I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.

I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.

I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.

JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.

Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.

The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.

And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.

Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.

"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...

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