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> A simple dialog would put the user in control of the situation: > "The site example.com uses 5 MB of scripting. Allow it?" Oh God, no. Please don't do this.

> A simple dialog would put the user in control of the situation: > "The site example.com uses 5 MB of scripting. Allow it?" Oh God, no. Please don't do this. 1) We know that users presented with these kinds of dialogs don't read them. They just blindly click "OK" to get the dialog to go away. So now you're just annoying people to no good purpose. 2) Even if the user does read this dialog, how is she supposed to know how much JavaScript is too much? There's no context to tell her whether 5MB is a lot, or how it compares to payloads delivered by similar sites. ("The site example.com wants to load more code than 99.99% of other sites you visit" would be slightly more helpful, but only slightly.) It just expects her to have a strong opinion on a subject that nobody who isn't a coder[1] themselves would have an opinion about. 3) If the problem we're trying to solve here is that code makes sites load slowly, making people click through a dialog isn't going to make the site load any faster. In fact it will almost certainly take the user more time to find and click the "OK" button than it would to just load the code. 4) It's measuring the wrong thing. 1 kilobyte of badly written code can do as much or more harm to the user experience than 1 megabyte of well written code will. [1] With the possible exception of people on strictly capped data plans, but now we're solving a different problem.

kbenson 8y ago
> We know that users presented with these kinds of dialogs don't read them. They just blindly click "OK" to get the dialog to go away. So now you're just annoying people to no good purpose. I would say you're annoying some people so others have the ability to make that choice, and the site developers will definitely see the friction of that dialog as something to be avoided. It incentivizes good behavior. > It's measuring the wrong thing. 1 kilobyte of badly written code can do as much or more harm to the user experience than 1 megabyte of well written code will. That depends entirely on your connection, keeping in mind your connection might be from your phone, when you have very poor reception. The fact that people are immediately assuming it only matters for execution time after loading illustrates part of the problem, which is that developers often forget about entire classes of access and thus don't consider the problems they create for them.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > I would say you're annoying some people so others have the ability to make that choice That is justification for opt-in instead of opt-out for this feature. But you lose that incentive you want. Want to make your users happy and have on-by-default protection to incentivize better resource management? Gotta get out of the users' way.
- antris 8y ago
  > That depends entirely on your connection, keeping in mind your connection might be from your phone, when you have very poor reception. Even large payloads on slow connections can be worked around if you know what you are doing. If your site is well engineered to progressively enhance without disruption, it does not matter if JavaScript is being loaded in the background.
  - FridgeSeal 8y ago
    > If your site is well engineered to progressively enhance without disruption, it does not matter if JavaScript is being loaded in the background. Yes but how many places actually make this effort? Seems to me that most places are very content to make some monstrous multi-MB React/Angular/etc app, ship it and wash their hands. The number of websites that have actually gone to the effort of optimising their sites is extremely small, so I'm doubtful when someone says "oh but web apps can do this too, if you only just progressively load/build it properly/etc" because that implies effort that so far, seemingly no one has gone to the trouble of actually doing.
    - antris 8y ago
      It's not common enough, but I think the situation is getting a bit better. Node and React made it greatly easier to render your pages on the server side, and I've seen a lot more sites do it.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  "Your connection is using RSA signatures instead of ECSDA. Do you want to continue?" "The bits for this website traveled through a router in Europe. Do you want to continue?" "This website uses some special behavior that isn't part of the w3c spec and works slightly differently in your browser than in other browsers. Do you want to continue?" "This website was developed by a company that offers its employees below market rate health insurance. Do you want to continue?" There exist people who'd like to know about each of these things. It would be insane to make them dialog boxes.
lmkg 8y ago
You're thinking about it wrong. The overall effect is not that users will take control over their data, or whatever. The effect is that users will complain that the site is broken. And then the pointy-haired boss will demand that the pop-up is fixed. Now instead of "page weight" being "blah blah nerd bullshit," it is something the pointy-haired boss will demand from ad network partners, and the effects will spread across the web ecosystem.
- porphyrogene 8y ago
  Given the choice between a person with a particular hairstyle and a person who minimizes the value of others by mocking their appearance, I would choose to work with the former.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
    "Pointy-hair" is not a hairstyle that even exists in reality. It's a Dilbert reference.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - krapp 8y ago
      https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article7110907.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/Keith-Flint.jpg https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article7110907.ece/ALT...
      - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
mc32 8y ago
You’re right that saying 5MB lacks context. Instead they could use BW and latency to offer a “congestion” index the user could gauge and load js or not load js.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Just load the site. If it's too slow for your connection that's a subjective call. Close the window if you're unhappy. Deal with it. Having to support people who refuse to load more than arbitrary amount X of JavaScript would be ridiculous.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    It's not so ridiculous to expect progressive enhancement to work. It takes designers willing to use <a> and <img> tags for that to happen.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It is ridiculous when there's so many gradients and things to accommodate.
jhasse 8y ago
Perfect is the enemy of good.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Stupid is the enemy of progress.
mattlondon 8y ago
Instead of using "she" and "her", may I recommend you use "they" and "them". This is more inclusive and does not ignore approx 50% of the world's population one way or another. (that said, ...ignoring your sexism I agree with your sentiment)
- toomim 8y ago
  Unfortunately, using they/them excludes people who identify as a singular person, rather than as multiple people.
  - switch007 8y ago
    Does it? My understanding is that using "they"/"them" for purposes of gender equality/neutrality is well understood by many people. EDIT: if sarcasm, we can't have perfection, but not excluding ~50% seems like better...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mattlondon 8y ago
    I disagree. "They" and "them" are - as far as I am aware (and I work in a highly-charged (some out say overly-so) diversity-aware company) - the currently preferred terms. The sand may well have moved under my feet (this happens every month or so) but as far as I understand this is the politically-correct term for referring to generic "people" without referencing gender one way or another. For better or worse, I think we can all agree that only ever saying "him"/"he" or "she"/"her" is currently considered unacceptable (for better or worse) in English-speaking companies. I do wonder though how this plays out in companies where gender is a major part of the the dominating-language. How can you eliminate her/him in a language where such simple concepts even a table has a gender stereotype (der tish, la mesa, la table etc)
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      >where such simple concepts even a table has a gender stereotype (der tish, la mesa, la table etc) // Linguistic gender and whatever "gender" is supposed to mean for people are entirely orthogonal. It's not "la table" because it has traits related to the female sex.

kbenson 8y ago

> We know that users presented with these kinds of dialogs don't read them. They just blindly click "OK" to get the dialog to go away. So now you're just annoying people to no good purpose. I would say you're annoying some people so others have the ability to make that choice, and the site developers will definitely see the friction of that dialog as something to be avoided. It incentivizes good behavior. > It's measuring the wrong thing. 1 kilobyte of badly written code can do as much or more harm to the user experience than 1 megabyte of well written code will. That depends entirely on your connection, keeping in mind your connection might be from your phone, when you have very poor reception. The fact that people are immediately assuming it only matters for execution time after loading illustrates part of the problem, which is that developers often forget about entire classes of access and thus don't consider the problems they create for them.

kodablah 8y ago
> I would say you're annoying some people so others have the ability to make that choice That is justification for opt-in instead of opt-out for this feature. But you lose that incentive you want. Want to make your users happy and have on-by-default protection to incentivize better resource management? Gotta get out of the users' way.
antris 8y ago
> That depends entirely on your connection, keeping in mind your connection might be from your phone, when you have very poor reception. Even large payloads on slow connections can be worked around if you know what you are doing. If your site is well engineered to progressively enhance without disruption, it does not matter if JavaScript is being loaded in the background.
- FridgeSeal 8y ago
  > If your site is well engineered to progressively enhance without disruption, it does not matter if JavaScript is being loaded in the background. Yes but how many places actually make this effort? Seems to me that most places are very content to make some monstrous multi-MB React/Angular/etc app, ship it and wash their hands. The number of websites that have actually gone to the effort of optimising their sites is extremely small, so I'm doubtful when someone says "oh but web apps can do this too, if you only just progressively load/build it properly/etc" because that implies effort that so far, seemingly no one has gone to the trouble of actually doing.
  - antris 8y ago
    It's not common enough, but I think the situation is getting a bit better. Node and React made it greatly easier to render your pages on the server side, and I've seen a lot more sites do it.
UncleMeat 8y ago
"Your connection is using RSA signatures instead of ECSDA. Do you want to continue?" "The bits for this website traveled through a router in Europe. Do you want to continue?" "This website uses some special behavior that isn't part of the w3c spec and works slightly differently in your browser than in other browsers. Do you want to continue?" "This website was developed by a company that offers its employees below market rate health insurance. Do you want to continue?" There exist people who'd like to know about each of these things. It would be insane to make them dialog boxes.

lmkg 8y ago

You're thinking about it wrong. The overall effect is not that users will take control over their data, or whatever. The effect is that users will complain that the site is broken. And then the pointy-haired boss will demand that the pop-up is fixed. Now instead of "page weight" being "blah blah nerd bullshit," it is something the pointy-haired boss will demand from ad network partners, and the effects will spread across the web ecosystem.

porphyrogene 8y ago
Given the choice between a person with a particular hairstyle and a person who minimizes the value of others by mocking their appearance, I would choose to work with the former.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- barbecue_sauce 8y ago
  "Pointy-hair" is not a hairstyle that even exists in reality. It's a Dilbert reference.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 8y ago
    https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article7110907.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/Keith-Flint.jpg https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article7110907.ece/ALT...
    - barbecue_sauce 8y ago

mc32 8y ago

You’re right that saying 5MB lacks context. Instead they could use BW and latency to offer a “congestion” index the user could gauge and load js or not load js.

astrodust 8y ago
Just load the site. If it's too slow for your connection that's a subjective call. Close the window if you're unhappy. Deal with it. Having to support people who refuse to load more than arbitrary amount X of JavaScript would be ridiculous.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  It's not so ridiculous to expect progressive enhancement to work. It takes designers willing to use <a> and <img> tags for that to happen.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    It is ridiculous when there's so many gradients and things to accommodate.

jhasse 8y ago

Perfect is the enemy of good.

astrodust 8y ago
Stupid is the enemy of progress.

mattlondon 8y ago

Instead of using "she" and "her", may I recommend you use "they" and "them". This is more inclusive and does not ignore approx 50% of the world's population one way or another. (that said, ...ignoring your sexism I agree with your sentiment)

toomim 8y ago
Unfortunately, using they/them excludes people who identify as a singular person, rather than as multiple people.
- switch007 8y ago
  Does it? My understanding is that using "they"/"them" for purposes of gender equality/neutrality is well understood by many people. EDIT: if sarcasm, we can't have perfection, but not excluding ~50% seems like better...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mattlondon 8y ago
  I disagree. "They" and "them" are - as far as I am aware (and I work in a highly-charged (some out say overly-so) diversity-aware company) - the currently preferred terms. The sand may well have moved under my feet (this happens every month or so) but as far as I understand this is the politically-correct term for referring to generic "people" without referencing gender one way or another. For better or worse, I think we can all agree that only ever saying "him"/"he" or "she"/"her" is currently considered unacceptable (for better or worse) in English-speaking companies. I do wonder though how this plays out in companies where gender is a major part of the the dominating-language. How can you eliminate her/him in a language where such simple concepts even a table has a gender stereotype (der tish, la mesa, la table etc)
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >where such simple concepts even a table has a gender stereotype (der tish, la mesa, la table etc) // Linguistic gender and whatever "gender" is supposed to mean for people are entirely orthogonal. It's not "la table" because it has traits related to the female sex.