7 ms·

Ahh let the bikeshedding continue. In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares". Optimization matters when it actually solves a problem, before that i

Ahh let the bikeshedding continue. In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares". Optimization matters when it actually solves a problem, before that it's just wasted effort. I don't hear the general public yelling from the rooftops "The web is too slow! Developers are building too fast! I wish we could go backwards!"

baxtr 6y ago
Well I agree and disagree :) as always it depends. I think it’s clear that especially on slow mobile connections people will close a site quickly if they don’t see results and this in turn yields lower sales for example. Also, Google will factor Speed into its algorithm. So you will lose traffic if you don’t optimize. At the same time, people at home with broadband wouldn’t care less. That’s actually a core reason for slow pages. People in offices with large monitors and huge bandwidth develop those sites
stickfigure 6y ago
I hear my users constantly yelling for more features. Not one has complained about the page load (5mb uncompressed, plus a delay for auth to initialize). I'll keep listening to my users.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  Because anyone who complains is given this treatment. We don't complain to everybody we just bounce.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > We don't complain to everybody Except on forum's. We complain there :P
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    If you're offering a service that is so uncompelling or so undifferentiated that the page load speed is a driving factor, than you should certainly focus on page load speed. On the other hand, Gmail regularly takes 10s+ to load and yet most users are glued to it. If you're a SaaS business, your marketing page is probably not your app. The people using your app care about usability, and page load speed is rarely the driving factor. Especially with SPAs.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      I hear you saying that if my service is compelling enough, people will tolerate the horrendous page loads.
      - stickfigure 6y ago
        That is absolutely correct. Ask yourself: Will my customers be happier with additional features X, Y, and Z, or a faster page load? Better yet, ask your actual customers.
      - somurzakov 6y ago
        hahaha, brilliant
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      Maybe the initial load is 10+s, but clicking into and out of emails is fast, and that is what matters. If that took 10s it would be unusable.
- maxk42 6y ago
  Interesting. What I've found is that the users I have that complain are by far the minority of my users. They ask for every little whim, many of them conflicting. If I'd been listening to them my website would be a mess right now. Alexa top 5k. 7 million uniques / day. 550kb. Less than 2 years old. Every time I implement a new feature, there is no significant change in my site's trajectory. Improving latency by adding an auto-scaler, however, has lead to a massive uptick in usage in the past 90 days.
Shared404 6y ago
> In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares". This list has a second hidden benefit: Typically, I find that those who have very lightweight pages have more interesting things to say. That being said, that's not a hard and fast rule, as I both have a lightweight page, and not much that's interesting to say.
- ffpip 6y ago
  This is also true for how the site 'looks'. The less flashier, the more interesting the content might be to read. They don't bother about SEO/clicks
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    The best content is always on some boomers custom made forum software from 2009 that they use to post in depth articles about obscure topics.
- geodel 6y ago
  Agreed. Not a general rule but as a rule of thumb it works very well.
- bnchrch 6y ago
  This feels like both an anecdote and a straw man. I can point to two blogs on either side that have a lot to offer. Large bundle: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ Small Bundle: https://www.eugenewei.com/ https://www.eugenewei.com/
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > This feels like both an anecdote Definitely. This is just something I've noticed. > and a straw man. Wait what? I was just bringing up something I've noticed. How is this a straw man? As I said before, this is by no means a firm rule, just something that I noticed is frequently the case. PS. Thanks for linking those blog's, I've added both to my reading list.
geodel 6y ago
If general public even knew who to complain they would have surely yelled loudly. For now I hear non-tech people say 'Oh, our internet is slow even though we pay lot of money' Meanwhile valley bros keep helpfully reminding me to upgrade my computer to a reasonable 2020sh.
- krapp 6y ago
  The general public likes to do things on the web other than reading minimalist hypertext. They like real-time chat and video and images and playing games in the browser. They would rather be able to do the things they like faster and more efficiently than abandon the last 20 years of technological progress.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    I had real-time video chat and played browser games 15 years ago, on hardware a fraction of the power of that today. It seems a lot of the newer generation just doesn't realise what was already possible before, and is only infatuated with inefficient reinventions.
  - donbrae 6y ago
    Those things are all great and probably far better optimised than your average should-be-static site serving bloat.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    The overwhelmingly vast majority of things on the World Wide Web are things that are perfectly feasible - and indeed pretty darn trivial - with minimalist hypertext.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    The general public likes to do things other than reading minimal hypertext. They don't demand that we shoehorn everything into the web.
- bnchrch 6y ago
  I simply disagree that this relates to bundle size. When people (I know) complain about slow internet it's typically in relation to high bandwidth streaming (Netflix, Youtube, etc...) This is said by someone who is not a "valley bro" and often lives in rural Canada.
aresant 6y ago
"Optimization matters when it actually solves a problem" - agree. With the major disclaimer that if your website serves ANY commercial utility for you personally or your business website speed is hugely important a clear cause / effect impact on engagement, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.
noobermin 6y ago
I don't know about you but I see a lot of complaints on twitter about the new stories feature. That isn't a complaint about things being slow but it does seem to suggest users want to go backwards wrt new features that are unneeded.
wcerfgba 6y ago
What about the problem of CO2 / MB ?
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I feel like it'd be more productive to reduce the CO2 per MB (e.g. using a 100% renewable-energy-powered hosting provider, pressuring ISPs to use renewables, pressuring power companies to use renewables, etc.) than to reduce the MB in this case.
  - zer0tonin 6y ago
    Why not both?
- abraae 6y ago
  I dunno. That time the user spends waiting for the sluggish website downloading gigabytes of html is time they maybe don't spend reaching for that apple that was air freighted across the world to reach their fridge. Flippant but I doubt there's any clear correlation between reducing the size of a web page and reducing overall CO2 emissions.
dheera 6y ago
The public does yell "The web is too slow!" Except they usually yell "My phone is too slow" when the problem is actually the web that got 3X bloated since they bought their phone.
jen729w 6y ago
Well also, my site is built with Gatsby and comes in at <1MB (just) but I bet if you told people it was Gatsby you’d get the stink-eye. “Ugh, dirty framework, what’s wrong with no-JS?” I mean never mind that my internal page links load in <50ms thanks to prefetching and all the other smart stuff that Gatsby does.
- account42 6y ago
  Prefetching (or not) should be left up to the browser.
tclancy 6y ago
Not everyone within earshot of your roof is "the general public". It matters to people on lower-bandwidth connections. It matters in terms of carbon footprints. And just as someone who grew up horrified if individual pages got over 100kb (or whatever the company rule was), the idea of not caring at all about "page" weight is how my old company wound up passing 20+ megs of JSON around just because it was a little easier.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  In my company I don’t care so much about load time since everyone will only load the app once per day, we know and control the network speeds, and anyway, they’re paid to sit there waiting for it to load. The same thing is not true for the general public.
jamil7 6y ago
Thats because you're not listening to them.
userbinator 6y ago
To be frank, that's probably because you're not listening. YouTube redesign, Twitter redesign, and one other huge site I can't remember at the moment all had plenty of complaints about how much slower --- and less featured --- they were. The average user doesn't know a static page has been replaced with a bloated SPA, but can sure feel the difference. The web has declined for sure, and it's precisely because of ignorant developers with attitudes like yours.
- Khaine 6y ago
  Twitter's web version is an abomination. Every time you click on a link to read a tweet, you get an error. Every time. You need to force a refresh to get the content. Its an absolute joke. To any twitter "engineers" on HN, sort it or abort it.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    What's even worse is that the much better static-page "mobile" version which I've been using (mobile.twitter.com), and you can only get to it if you set your UA to an older browser, now has this ominous "warning": "This is the legacy version of twitter.com. We will be shutting it down on 15 December 2020." It's deeply disturbing that if they go full-SPA like YouTube did, it seems not a single person working there realises the insanity of somehow needing so much software (and hardware) just to read 140-character long microblogposts, something that would've been possible with hardware and software from 30 years ago. If you look at their minimum browser requirements, then look at the minimum OS requirements from the browser, and go back to hardware requirements from that, you'll probably end up with something that seems ridiculously overpowered for the task, yet with that "minimum supported" system the site will still be slow as molasses and worse than the static page. Seriously, what the fuck!?
  - account42 6y ago
    Go to about:serviceworkers (for Firefox, other browsers might have it elsewhere) and remove anything related to twitter - or better yet disable service workers entirely. Not saying that this is acceptable, just providing a workaround.
mokkol 6y ago
I always think, the one feature everybody wants is speed. The same page but faster is always better.
- vntok 6y ago
  No, not always. Users typically prefer waiting a few secs after entering their criteria rather than getting instant filtered and sorted search results, especially on price-sensitive services like price comparators, but basically everywhere the website is supposed to have the user's financial interest at heart. Makes them feel like the site actually does some calculations, even if everything is cached in the background. See travel agencies, airline comparators, train booking services, insurance benchmarks or credit simulations.
keb_ 6y ago
Perhaps Bradley Taunt is bikeshedding, but it doesn't mean he's not pulling in the right direction. People obviously care because people obviously want their browsers to load content quickly. No one likes waiting for webpages to load. How do you decide when a website/webapp is fast enough and you've "solved the problem"? On what range of devices and internet speeds do you test on? As my family's personal IT assistant, I can't tell you how often I get the complaint that "my phone is too slow" or "my laptop is slow and heats up" when all they are doing is browsing popular websites. An we live in a developed nation with decent internet -- I can't imagine how awful it must be when you don't have those luxuries. I think your comment is lacking severely in perspective, and the mindset you've demonstrated to be particularly bad for the web. Not to mention snide and dismissive.
m463 6y ago
I believe in this case it illustrates that lightweight is possible. I think it might be like bicycle parts. It is ridiculous that parts are sold with a pricetag PLUS a weight in grams. I mean, you could save the equivalent of $100 by wearing a short-sleeved shirt. But those obsessive people end up making most bicycles lighter weight, and thus bike rides for normal people are more enjoyable.
jevgeni 6y ago
The public continues to smoke 40-50 years since it’s been shown that it causes cancer. The public isn’t a good indicator.

baxtr 6y ago

Well I agree and disagree :) as always it depends. I think it’s clear that especially on slow mobile connections people will close a site quickly if they don’t see results and this in turn yields lower sales for example. Also, Google will factor Speed into its algorithm. So you will lose traffic if you don’t optimize. At the same time, people at home with broadband wouldn’t care less. That’s actually a core reason for slow pages. People in offices with large monitors and huge bandwidth develop those sites

stickfigure 6y ago

I hear my users constantly yelling for more features. Not one has complained about the page load (5mb uncompressed, plus a delay for auth to initialize). I'll keep listening to my users.

thesuitonym 6y ago
Because anyone who complains is given this treatment. We don't complain to everybody we just bounce.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > We don't complain to everybody Except on forum's. We complain there :P
- stickfigure 6y ago
  If you're offering a service that is so uncompelling or so undifferentiated that the page load speed is a driving factor, than you should certainly focus on page load speed. On the other hand, Gmail regularly takes 10s+ to load and yet most users are glued to it. If you're a SaaS business, your marketing page is probably not your app. The people using your app care about usability, and page load speed is rarely the driving factor. Especially with SPAs.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    I hear you saying that if my service is compelling enough, people will tolerate the horrendous page loads.
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      That is absolutely correct. Ask yourself: Will my customers be happier with additional features X, Y, and Z, or a faster page load? Better yet, ask your actual customers.
    - somurzakov 6y ago
      hahaha, brilliant
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    Maybe the initial load is 10+s, but clicking into and out of emails is fast, and that is what matters. If that took 10s it would be unusable.
maxk42 6y ago
Interesting. What I've found is that the users I have that complain are by far the minority of my users. They ask for every little whim, many of them conflicting. If I'd been listening to them my website would be a mess right now. Alexa top 5k. 7 million uniques / day. 550kb. Less than 2 years old. Every time I implement a new feature, there is no significant change in my site's trajectory. Improving latency by adding an auto-scaler, however, has lead to a massive uptick in usage in the past 90 days.

Shared404 6y ago

> In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares". This list has a second hidden benefit: Typically, I find that those who have very lightweight pages have more interesting things to say. That being said, that's not a hard and fast rule, as I both have a lightweight page, and not much that's interesting to say.

ffpip 6y ago
This is also true for how the site 'looks'. The less flashier, the more interesting the content might be to read. They don't bother about SEO/clicks
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  The best content is always on some boomers custom made forum software from 2009 that they use to post in depth articles about obscure topics.
geodel 6y ago
Agreed. Not a general rule but as a rule of thumb it works very well.
bnchrch 6y ago
This feels like both an anecdote and a straw man. I can point to two blogs on either side that have a lot to offer. Large bundle: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ Small Bundle: https://www.eugenewei.com/ https://www.eugenewei.com/
- Shared404 6y ago
  > This feels like both an anecdote Definitely. This is just something I've noticed. > and a straw man. Wait what? I was just bringing up something I've noticed. How is this a straw man? As I said before, this is by no means a firm rule, just something that I noticed is frequently the case. PS. Thanks for linking those blog's, I've added both to my reading list.

geodel 6y ago

If general public even knew who to complain they would have surely yelled loudly. For now I hear non-tech people say 'Oh, our internet is slow even though we pay lot of money' Meanwhile valley bros keep helpfully reminding me to upgrade my computer to a reasonable 2020sh.

krapp 6y ago
The general public likes to do things on the web other than reading minimalist hypertext. They like real-time chat and video and images and playing games in the browser. They would rather be able to do the things they like faster and more efficiently than abandon the last 20 years of technological progress.
- userbinator 6y ago
  I had real-time video chat and played browser games 15 years ago, on hardware a fraction of the power of that today. It seems a lot of the newer generation just doesn't realise what was already possible before, and is only infatuated with inefficient reinventions.
- donbrae 6y ago
  Those things are all great and probably far better optimised than your average should-be-static site serving bloat.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  The overwhelmingly vast majority of things on the World Wide Web are things that are perfectly feasible - and indeed pretty darn trivial - with minimalist hypertext.
- anoncake 6y ago
  The general public likes to do things other than reading minimal hypertext. They don't demand that we shoehorn everything into the web.
bnchrch 6y ago
I simply disagree that this relates to bundle size. When people (I know) complain about slow internet it's typically in relation to high bandwidth streaming (Netflix, Youtube, etc...) This is said by someone who is not a "valley bro" and often lives in rural Canada.

aresant 6y ago

"Optimization matters when it actually solves a problem" - agree. With the major disclaimer that if your website serves ANY commercial utility for you personally or your business website speed is hugely important a clear cause / effect impact on engagement, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.

noobermin 6y ago

I don't know about you but I see a lot of complaints on twitter about the new stories feature. That isn't a complaint about things being slow but it does seem to suggest users want to go backwards wrt new features that are unneeded.

wcerfgba 6y ago

What about the problem of CO2 / MB ?

yellowapple 6y ago
I feel like it'd be more productive to reduce the CO2 per MB (e.g. using a 100% renewable-energy-powered hosting provider, pressuring ISPs to use renewables, pressuring power companies to use renewables, etc.) than to reduce the MB in this case.
- zer0tonin 6y ago
  Why not both?
abraae 6y ago
I dunno. That time the user spends waiting for the sluggish website downloading gigabytes of html is time they maybe don't spend reaching for that apple that was air freighted across the world to reach their fridge. Flippant but I doubt there's any clear correlation between reducing the size of a web page and reducing overall CO2 emissions.

dheera 6y ago

The public does yell "The web is too slow!" Except they usually yell "My phone is too slow" when the problem is actually the web that got 3X bloated since they bought their phone.

jen729w 6y ago

Well also, my site is built with Gatsby and comes in at <1MB (just) but I bet if you told people it was Gatsby you’d get the stink-eye. “Ugh, dirty framework, what’s wrong with no-JS?” I mean never mind that my internal page links load in <50ms thanks to prefetching and all the other smart stuff that Gatsby does.

account42 6y ago
Prefetching (or not) should be left up to the browser.

tclancy 6y ago

Not everyone within earshot of your roof is "the general public". It matters to people on lower-bandwidth connections. It matters in terms of carbon footprints. And just as someone who grew up horrified if individual pages got over 100kb (or whatever the company rule was), the idea of not caring at all about "page" weight is how my old company wound up passing 20+ megs of JSON around just because it was a little easier.

Aeolun 6y ago
In my company I don’t care so much about load time since everyone will only load the app once per day, we know and control the network speeds, and anyway, they’re paid to sit there waiting for it to load. The same thing is not true for the general public.

jamil7 6y ago

Thats because you're not listening to them.

userbinator 6y ago

To be frank, that's probably because you're not listening. YouTube redesign, Twitter redesign, and one other huge site I can't remember at the moment all had plenty of complaints about how much slower --- and less featured --- they were. The average user doesn't know a static page has been replaced with a bloated SPA, but can sure feel the difference. The web has declined for sure, and it's precisely because of ignorant developers with attitudes like yours.

Khaine 6y ago
Twitter's web version is an abomination. Every time you click on a link to read a tweet, you get an error. Every time. You need to force a refresh to get the content. Its an absolute joke. To any twitter "engineers" on HN, sort it or abort it.
- userbinator 6y ago
  What's even worse is that the much better static-page "mobile" version which I've been using (mobile.twitter.com), and you can only get to it if you set your UA to an older browser, now has this ominous "warning": "This is the legacy version of twitter.com. We will be shutting it down on 15 December 2020." It's deeply disturbing that if they go full-SPA like YouTube did, it seems not a single person working there realises the insanity of somehow needing so much software (and hardware) just to read 140-character long microblogposts, something that would've been possible with hardware and software from 30 years ago. If you look at their minimum browser requirements, then look at the minimum OS requirements from the browser, and go back to hardware requirements from that, you'll probably end up with something that seems ridiculously overpowered for the task, yet with that "minimum supported" system the site will still be slow as molasses and worse than the static page. Seriously, what the fuck!?
- account42 6y ago
  Go to about:serviceworkers (for Firefox, other browsers might have it elsewhere) and remove anything related to twitter - or better yet disable service workers entirely. Not saying that this is acceptable, just providing a workaround.

mokkol 6y ago

I always think, the one feature everybody wants is speed. The same page but faster is always better.

vntok 6y ago
No, not always. Users typically prefer waiting a few secs after entering their criteria rather than getting instant filtered and sorted search results, especially on price-sensitive services like price comparators, but basically everywhere the website is supposed to have the user's financial interest at heart. Makes them feel like the site actually does some calculations, even if everything is cached in the background. See travel agencies, airline comparators, train booking services, insurance benchmarks or credit simulations.

keb_ 6y ago

Perhaps Bradley Taunt is bikeshedding, but it doesn't mean he's not pulling in the right direction. People obviously care because people obviously want their browsers to load content quickly. No one likes waiting for webpages to load. How do you decide when a website/webapp is fast enough and you've "solved the problem"? On what range of devices and internet speeds do you test on? As my family's personal IT assistant, I can't tell you how often I get the complaint that "my phone is too slow" or "my laptop is slow and heats up" when all they are doing is browsing popular websites. An we live in a developed nation with decent internet -- I can't imagine how awful it must be when you don't have those luxuries. I think your comment is lacking severely in perspective, and the mindset you've demonstrated to be particularly bad for the web. Not to mention snide and dismissive.

m463 6y ago

I believe in this case it illustrates that lightweight is possible. I think it might be like bicycle parts. It is ridiculous that parts are sold with a pricetag PLUS a weight in grams. I mean, you could save the equivalent of $100 by wearing a short-sleeved shirt. But those obsessive people end up making most bicycles lighter weight, and thus bike rides for normal people are more enjoyable.

jevgeni 6y ago

The public continues to smoke 40-50 years since it’s been shown that it causes cancer. The public isn’t a good indicator.