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With internet speeds only getting faster as time moves forward, does size REALLY matter? Is there an honest tangible difference between a 7kb and 30kb download?
by moondev 10y ago
With internet speeds only getting faster as time moves forward, does size REALLY matter? Is there an honest tangible difference between a 7kb and 30kb download? Also what about obsessing over a 10ms difference in render performance? Is that even noticeable? I can't help but think it may be wasted effort.
- LoSboccacc 10y agoRight now I'm on a train, browsing with the train wifi along with thousand other users in the middle of the Italian campaigns. Hn is one of the few sites that loads and works. There's plenty person that for a reason or another are temporarily or long term broadbandless.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoYes. Especially for resource constrained IoT devices serving up their own web pages. Smaller is always better. My current mission is to rebuild an embedded site into a sub 100k single file SPA. I can't afford bloated CSS and Javascript libs and I can't shove everything off to a CDN that may not exist ten years from now.
- franciscop 10y agoIf you do so please send me a link, I'm compiling a list of all sub-100kb sites I can find (so far I got 100kb.org and probably will make a display as a side-project to showcase https://serverjs.io/ https://serverjs.io/ functionality).
- SparkyMcUnicorn 10y agoSomeone is doing IoT development correctly!?
- erickhill 10y agoIt matters if you are a large website pushing content to hundreds of thousands of users (or millions). Those KB do add up over time in cost. For the vast majority of sites out there, though - no, not really.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoFaster for whom?
- thinbeige 10y agoYes, size does matter. AMP limits injected CSS size and AMP sites heavily outrank non-AMP sites on Google's SERP.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago>... and AMP sites heavily outrank non-AMP sites on Google's SERP. That's like saying Ford thinks Ford makes the best cars.
- smt88 10y agoNo, it's like saying Ford owns the roads, created a standard car size limit, and penalizes people driving cars that are any bigger. Either accurate or inaccurate, it's not a relevant point.
- nebabyte 10y agoOutranks because google has a vested interest in promoting it
- z3t4 10y agoits not size that matters. its how you use it. a superb user experience might be worth it. some times web devs go to great length to minify the css yet serve a 10mb video background.
- inopinatus 10y agoMaybe that's the perspective from your bubble, but I still have users on dialup and satellite links and ten-year-old notebooks, and I expect this situation to persist for years. Perhaps even more so if we launch in developing locales. "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." - Gibson, W.
- onion2k 10y ago...ten-year-old notebooks... Presumably that requirement rules out using any of these frameworks because they're all optimized for download size rather than browser support or rendering speed.
- inopinatus 10y agoThat sounds like a self-referencing definition of "these frameworks", so I can only respond with Mu.
- tyingq 10y agoI agree that alone, agonizing over 7kb vs 30kb is probably silly. It's more the overall effort of doing that sort of thing across the site for more than one library, image, etc. There are still many people that will access your site via mobile in spotty coverage areas with low speed. Or after they've exhausted their included high speed monthly allotment, and are now throttled. Also, egress bandwidth at popular clouds is ridiculously expensive. Enough so that the effort of trimming down pays for itself pretty quickly.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> With internet speeds only getting faster They're not getting faster uniformly. Even on my phone, one minute I have high-speed LTE, the next minute I'm on EDGE. Happens a lot during inter-city travel. Not many things piss me off like "simple" sites that fail to load on weak connections, because they're too bloated. > I can't help but think it may be wasted effort. Multiplied times the number of users, efficiency improvements in popular software translates to saving quite a lot of electricity. Something worth consideration, IMO.
- sergiotapia 10y agoYes it matters. It's easy to see for yourself though, you don't have to believe any of us. :) Just open dev tools and throttle your connection to 3G, that's what most of your users are seeing. Enjoy!
- camus2 10y ago> With internet speeds only getting faster as time moves forward, does size REALLY matter? My mobile data plan isn't unlimited, and that's the case for a lot of people who use mobile to browse the web. Yes the size does matter.