4 ms·

9KB vs 83KB - people are really concerned about 74 kilobyte when sites like Medium send megabytes of unnecessary and invisible data to the client, https://binar

9KB vs 83KB - people are really concerned about 74 kilobyte when sites like Medium send megabytes of unnecessary and invisible data to the client, https://binarypassion.net/digital-decadence-6ea59251d64d https://binarypassion.net/digital-decadence-6ea59251d64d

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
If everyone bases their own standards on existing bad practices, we won't be around much longer.
- datalist 11y ago
  If these bad practices are very common though, one should rather try to tackle them before going after 3% of the average size of websites these days. 74 kilobytes might have been a lot a few years ago, these days it is (unfortunately) mostly "noise". Particularly if it is not a real alternative but only a subset of the original functionality.
mbrock 11y ago
Medium is a disaster from a website performance engineering perspective. Why would I make my website slower and heavier just because Medium is slow and heavy?
- datalist 11y ago
  Medium's approach is unfortunately pretty standard these days. I didnt say you should add an invisible 1MB image to your site but that a few kilobytes do not make such a difference anymore (particularly when you lose functionality at the same time).
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Well, it depends on use cases. If you're optimizing your site for fast initial loads on poor mobile connections, for example, then kilobytes matter. If you find smaller replacements for more than one library, you could end up saving a megabyte. So it's good to have small libraries.
    - datalist 11y ago
      Of course it depends on use cases, but overall there is not much of a point to break up one library into "dozens" of smaller ones, if their eventual total then, in the best case, saves only <10kb or maybe even exceeds the size of the initial one library. All these jQuery alternatives are nice and such but are not actually bringing much to the table. Yes with each of them you save a few kilobytes but also lose a lot of features. In that case you can go native straight away (querySelectorAll) and save any download in the first place. And, mobile connections are not that poor anymore as well. Certainly also depends on the region in the world but overall they are getting closer to fixed one every year. But yes, eventually it depends on the use case and I am sure there are cases where a trimmed down library might be useful. They wont be the common ones though
      - mbrock 11y ago
        They're getting better in the normal cases, but they're still relatively unreliable. Plus with roaming charges, code bloat incurs costs for users. Just a random example: my band's rehearsal space is under ground and has very poor connectivity. Sometimes I still want to look something up down there. In that situation, I really appreciate websites that download minimal amounts of code. And I think lots of people have equivalent situations, whether it's their country house, their month in rural Thailand, their sailboat, prison, the wifi on the night bus between Cluj-Napoca and Budapest, etc etc etc. Since I've been annoyed by heavy websites so many times, often in precious or precarious situations, I have a principle of caring about every kilobyte (and caring about offline functionality, too). As for whether using this library just means you need to import more libraries to cover for jQuery's other features, that's an empirical question that also depends on use case.
dexterdog 11y ago
But how much do they send when you are using something like ghostery or ublock. Those tools are an absolute necessity today.
- datalist 11y ago
  These issues of bloat do not even yet include ads.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago

If everyone bases their own standards on existing bad practices, we won't be around much longer.

datalist 11y ago
If these bad practices are very common though, one should rather try to tackle them before going after 3% of the average size of websites these days. 74 kilobytes might have been a lot a few years ago, these days it is (unfortunately) mostly "noise". Particularly if it is not a real alternative but only a subset of the original functionality.

mbrock 11y ago

Medium is a disaster from a website performance engineering perspective. Why would I make my website slower and heavier just because Medium is slow and heavy?

datalist 11y ago
Medium's approach is unfortunately pretty standard these days. I didnt say you should add an invisible 1MB image to your site but that a few kilobytes do not make such a difference anymore (particularly when you lose functionality at the same time).
- mbrock 11y ago
  Well, it depends on use cases. If you're optimizing your site for fast initial loads on poor mobile connections, for example, then kilobytes matter. If you find smaller replacements for more than one library, you could end up saving a megabyte. So it's good to have small libraries.
  - datalist 11y ago
    Of course it depends on use cases, but overall there is not much of a point to break up one library into "dozens" of smaller ones, if their eventual total then, in the best case, saves only <10kb or maybe even exceeds the size of the initial one library. All these jQuery alternatives are nice and such but are not actually bringing much to the table. Yes with each of them you save a few kilobytes but also lose a lot of features. In that case you can go native straight away (querySelectorAll) and save any download in the first place. And, mobile connections are not that poor anymore as well. Certainly also depends on the region in the world but overall they are getting closer to fixed one every year. But yes, eventually it depends on the use case and I am sure there are cases where a trimmed down library might be useful. They wont be the common ones though
    - mbrock 11y ago
      They're getting better in the normal cases, but they're still relatively unreliable. Plus with roaming charges, code bloat incurs costs for users. Just a random example: my band's rehearsal space is under ground and has very poor connectivity. Sometimes I still want to look something up down there. In that situation, I really appreciate websites that download minimal amounts of code. And I think lots of people have equivalent situations, whether it's their country house, their month in rural Thailand, their sailboat, prison, the wifi on the night bus between Cluj-Napoca and Budapest, etc etc etc. Since I've been annoyed by heavy websites so many times, often in precious or precarious situations, I have a principle of caring about every kilobyte (and caring about offline functionality, too). As for whether using this library just means you need to import more libraries to cover for jQuery's other features, that's an empirical question that also depends on use case.

dexterdog 11y ago

But how much do they send when you are using something like ghostery or ublock. Those tools are an absolute necessity today.

datalist 11y ago
These issues of bloat do not even yet include ads.