4 ms·

To play devils advocate, we are in 2017 and JS adverts on normal websites can slow the latest phones down to a crawling stuttering mess. These are probability

by robmcm 9y ago

To play devils advocate, we are in 2017 and JS adverts on normal websites can slow the latest phones down to a crawling stuttering mess. These are probability the same developers that were writing sloppy Flash banners a decade earlier.

tambourine_man 9y ago
Sure, but JavaScript is an open standard and you can tune your implementation at will. Compare that to being at the mercy of a company like Adobe that bundles at least 3 different JavaScript interpreters, a full blown WebKit and who knows what else to Photoshop. All while having a custom made cross platform UI layer across all of their apps.
- bartread 9y ago
  True, although sadly you can't also tune JavaScript developers at will.
kreetx 9y ago
That's simply bad app or library code. Any website can take up 100% of a cpu thread. If all threads are used then even the greatest workstation will slow down.
bartread 9y ago
This is quite true. I had nothing but disdain for Flash back in the early noughties because, almost universally, everything I encountered that was built with it was terrible, especially those CPU core swallowing ads. Nowadays of course we have CPU core swallowing and battery draining JavaScript ads, along with massive JavaScript bloat in general. For the heck of it I just went and had a look at one of my own pages, which runs an HTML5/JS/CSS game, and includes Adsense. It downloaded 633KB of JavaScript. By today's woeful standards that's not even particularly bad. To break it down a bit though, 52KB of it is scripts I use directly, of which 47KB is required for the game. The other ~5KB is FontAwesome, which I use for icons on the menu buttons. The other 581K? Well, Adsense itself is also fairly small (about 35K for two scripts), which leaves the rest - the vast majority - which is loaded by the ads themselves. Like you, I've come to realise that it wasn't the tool/platform, but the people building for it. Clearly the best developers are not building ads. It feels like there should be some scope for disruption here.
- robmcm 9y ago
  I think browsers could throttle scripts loaded from cross origins. That may allow the main website to load faster, but then I guess from the content owners point of view the most important thing is getting the ad code loaded and registering hits :(

by robmcm 9y ago

tambourine_man 9y ago

Sure, but JavaScript is an open standard and you can tune your implementation at will. Compare that to being at the mercy of a company like Adobe that bundles at least 3 different JavaScript interpreters, a full blown WebKit and who knows what else to Photoshop. All while having a custom made cross platform UI layer across all of their apps.

bartread 9y ago
True, although sadly you can't also tune JavaScript developers at will.

kreetx 9y ago

That's simply bad app or library code. Any website can take up 100% of a cpu thread. If all threads are used then even the greatest workstation will slow down.

bartread 9y ago

This is quite true. I had nothing but disdain for Flash back in the early noughties because, almost universally, everything I encountered that was built with it was terrible, especially those CPU core swallowing ads. Nowadays of course we have CPU core swallowing and battery draining JavaScript ads, along with massive JavaScript bloat in general. For the heck of it I just went and had a look at one of my own pages, which runs an HTML5/JS/CSS game, and includes Adsense. It downloaded 633KB of JavaScript. By today's woeful standards that's not even particularly bad. To break it down a bit though, 52KB of it is scripts I use directly, of which 47KB is required for the game. The other ~5KB is FontAwesome, which I use for icons on the menu buttons. The other 581K? Well, Adsense itself is also fairly small (about 35K for two scripts), which leaves the rest - the vast majority - which is loaded by the ads themselves. Like you, I've come to realise that it wasn't the tool/platform, but the people building for it. Clearly the best developers are not building ads. It feels like there should be some scope for disruption here.

robmcm 9y ago
I think browsers could throttle scripts loaded from cross origins. That may allow the main website to load faster, but then I guess from the content owners point of view the most important thing is getting the ad code loaded and registering hits :(