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"640k ought to be enough for everyone." Setting some arbitrary hard-limit is counter-productive and shortsighted. That quote is infamous for exactly the same r

"640k ought to be enough for everyone." Setting some arbitrary hard-limit is counter-productive and shortsighted. That quote is infamous for exactly the same reasons that this claim is flawed. Lots of unanswered questions here, e.g. what happens if a 500byte javascript file then does a load of XHR requests that download more JS: what happens then? does the connection just get closed as soon as you pass 5mb? That will break the internet for lots of users. Plus what happens if I down load a couple of kilobytes of javascript that ends up allocating many gigabytes of memory? Is that ok because it was under 5mb of over-the-wire-bytes? I can easily imagine a 5mb+ web application. Sure you might not like that, but it does not make that a bad situation. If you don't like javascript, then the answer is simple: disable it. If you want to use javascript but feel like a particular website is using too much resources, then the answer is simple: dont visit it. You have choice.

mcphage 8y ago
> If you want to use javascript but feel like a particular website is using too much resources, then the answer is simple: dont visit it. You have choice. You don't know how many resources it's going to use until you've already visited it.
tenebrisalietum 8y ago
I can imagine a 5mb+ web application too, but there should be some way of communicating something needs a lot of resources before it is casually downloaded. It's impolite for an installer to not tell you it's copying 50GB of data to your hard drive before it starts. "640K ought to be enough for everyone" is shortsighted, but "Web applications should not assume the user wants to dedicate all system resources to them without knowledge/permission" is not. It won't matter much longer. Websites are giving way to phone apps. Where no visibility into behavior or resource consumption is normal, standard, and expected.

mcphage 8y ago

> If you want to use javascript but feel like a particular website is using too much resources, then the answer is simple: dont visit it. You have choice. You don't know how many resources it's going to use until you've already visited it.

tenebrisalietum 8y ago

I can imagine a 5mb+ web application too, but there should be some way of communicating something needs a lot of resources before it is casually downloaded. It's impolite for an installer to not tell you it's copying 50GB of data to your hard drive before it starts. "640K ought to be enough for everyone" is shortsighted, but "Web applications should not assume the user wants to dedicate all system resources to them without knowledge/permission" is not. It won't matter much longer. Websites are giving way to phone apps. Where no visibility into behavior or resource consumption is normal, standard, and expected.