8 ms·

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy n

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. New UI doesn’t have as many page loads it seems but wherever you navigate to takes far longer to load because of api calls or just baaad JS. Slow for the user, slow for the server. It's almost like the people who push website technology are the same one selling you servers. Hate it and want to go back.

culi 5y ago
You're not alone in feeling this way https://handmade.network/manifesto https://handmade.network/manifesto
Beached 5y ago
it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.
- mro_name 5y ago
  Website Obesity crisis going on and on: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Was here on HN several times, sadly still the case.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible. Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome. "
- jmondi 5y ago
  What a false equivalence. You are comparing static sites of the past to dynamic sites of today. Apples to oranges.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.
    - RussianCow 5y ago
      [citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        I don't want my browser to be loading entire JS frameworks and trackers and whatever other crap just to read a bunch of text. That's absolutely nonsensical
        damir 5y ago
        I'm using two browsers, one with disabled JS (primary) and vanilla one. When and only WHEN page doesn't load on non-js browser (and if I really, really, reaaaally want that piece of content) then maybe I will use vanilla browser... Browsing with js disabled is fast, pages load quickly, almost no trackers and there are "old" or "text" versions of sites still available... old.reddit, old.twitter or nitter instances... Heck, even google has one... To be honest, I just use dillo browser most of the time. Small, speedy and safer then most... Edit: typo.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        For the user's benefit, or for the dev's?
        Nextgrid 5y ago
        Or the advertises/whatever assholes profit of “engagement”?
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Let’s look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core concept of it hasn’t changed, it still just has to display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML and a simple form POST. I don’t have the numbers for the page back then but I’d estimate it at 100KB - nowadays it’s a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails at its primary purpose of displaying a block of text with a stupid “something went wrong” message or endless spinner. The “new” Reddit is also a good example. Even ignoring all the user-hostile functionality changes, the actual experience is still slower and less reliable.
- kgeist 5y ago
  I don't know, we're currently rewriting our UI from the classic "PHP renders everything with almost zero JS" to the more modern "single page application with a crap ton of JS" and the new UI feels much faster to me. The old way was to resend and rerender everything on each click, which is problematic for complex UIs with a lot of data.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    On a modest 3 year old phone running Firefox, such websites are excruciating.
simion314 5y ago
>and bloated with JS crap? CSS animations too , especially the ones that use infinite.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Nothing to do with site hosting. css animations don't eat the server's CPU; nor does JS bloat (other than bandwidth).
  - Retric 5y ago
    JS bloat can have significant server overhead when data is loaded dynamically. It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately. That may flip around when someone spends a long time interacting with a SPA, but there is plenty of truly terrible code in the wild.
    - RussianCow 5y ago
      > It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately. Without context, this statement is misleading at best and downright false at worst. You’re right that splitting up a single request into multiple would incur a small performance penalty, but you also generally gain other advantages like more localized caching and the ability to conditionally skip requests. In the long run, those advantages may actually make your app significantly more efficient. But without discussing details like this, it’s pointless to make wild assumptions about performance.
      - Retric 5y ago
        The context was JS bloat, so we are specifically talking about the subset of poorly written sites. When it’s possible to shoot yourself in the foot many people will do so. That said, if you ever actually profile things you will find the overhead per request is actually quite high. There is a clear tendency to request far to little data at a time.
flatiron 5y ago
The new lightning makes it such a pain to do my time cards. Try to open my sub projects to see how many hours are left and have a tab open with my time card and constantly errors out. I can’t be the only person who checks hours left on sub projects when entering my time.
onion2k 5y ago
aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server. There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  And, heck, there's a solid argument that server-side rendering is more environmentally efficient, since the work is done in a data-center, which can (1) utilize caching to avoid re-doing work and (2) be built in an optimal location for electricity generation.
  - nathanfig 5y ago
    Conversely, you are losing the distributed computing gained by rendering on the client, and therefore need a bigger server to scale when needed. And HTTP caching can and should be used for API responses as well.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      If we're measuring by total resource consumption regardless of location, is distributed computing beneficial? Your server can be less powerful, but the client needs to be more powerful. I'd think the primary difference is who's paying for it. Sure, most clients may already be adequately provisioned, but only because so many websites with bloated Javascript have forced their hand...
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  I think he is talking about badly written JS code serving the APIs and the overhead of it. Of course it's hard to debate whether JS, Java or PHP is most inefficient in that regard.
  - onion2k 5y ago
hattmall 5y ago
I agree with this so so much. The problem is too much reliances on frameworks and add on libraries. Developers will import an entire framework that for the benefit of a single feature. It's mind blowing to look at the amount of js includes for seemingly simple sites. Stackoverflow answers that direct you to import a library or framework should be banned in most cases. I will often have to scroll past several answers that say to import a library before finding a simple and functional answer that uses only a few lines of code down near the bottom. Which in my eyes is the real answer. I often wonder if there's a behind the scenes effort on SO to promote certain includes. The entire ecosystem of some languages / implementations relies on this far too heavily. We are seeing some of the consequences other than just bloated systems from this style of coding with malicious node packages.
- throwaway11602 5y ago
  I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full blown framework like Vuetify. So far, I haven't found anything in between. I would love to find a CSS library that I can just import and be able to create simple, nicely styled pages, e.g. that look Material-esque, without jQuery, node, npm, gulp, grunt, sass, and all that jazz.
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?
    - avrgamp 5y ago
      How about Tailwind?
    - mattl 5y ago
      Bootstrap is unfashionable?
BostonEnginerd 5y ago
We’ve recently transitioned to Salesforce for a project. It’s remarkable how laggy the interface is. Removing a line from a quote takes three clicks and four seconds. The UI also doesn’t always refresh the items in a reasonable period of time, requiring a page reload. Reloading the page is like 20MB as well. Great when you’re tethered to your phone.
robbedpeter 5y ago
I agree. There needs to be a substantial effort in web development to shed the bloat. Clean and small reduces issues with resources, security, and maintainability. The status quo is gross.
calebwinston 5y ago
Genuine question from a not-a-web-developer: Is this not mitigated by minimization tools like webpack?
- toastal 5y ago
  Webpack is a front-end build toolchain, not a minifier. Usually Terser is used inside of Webpage to minify.

culi 5y ago

You're not alone in feeling this way https://handmade.network/manifesto https://handmade.network/manifesto

Beached 5y ago

it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.

mro_name 5y ago
Website Obesity crisis going on and on: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Was here on HN several times, sadly still the case.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible. Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome. "
jmondi 5y ago
What a false equivalence. You are comparing static sites of the past to dynamic sites of today. Apples to oranges.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.
  - RussianCow 5y ago
    [citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      I don't want my browser to be loading entire JS frameworks and trackers and whatever other crap just to read a bunch of text. That's absolutely nonsensical
      - damir 5y ago
        I'm using two browsers, one with disabled JS (primary) and vanilla one. When and only WHEN page doesn't load on non-js browser (and if I really, really, reaaaally want that piece of content) then maybe I will use vanilla browser... Browsing with js disabled is fast, pages load quickly, almost no trackers and there are "old" or "text" versions of sites still available... old.reddit, old.twitter or nitter instances... Heck, even google has one... To be honest, I just use dillo browser most of the time. Small, speedy and safer then most... Edit: typo.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      For the user's benefit, or for the dev's?
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Or the advertises/whatever assholes profit of “engagement”?
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Let’s look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core concept of it hasn’t changed, it still just has to display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML and a simple form POST. I don’t have the numbers for the page back then but I’d estimate it at 100KB - nowadays it’s a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails at its primary purpose of displaying a block of text with a stupid “something went wrong” message or endless spinner. The “new” Reddit is also a good example. Even ignoring all the user-hostile functionality changes, the actual experience is still slower and less reliable.
kgeist 5y ago
I don't know, we're currently rewriting our UI from the classic "PHP renders everything with almost zero JS" to the more modern "single page application with a crap ton of JS" and the new UI feels much faster to me. The old way was to resend and rerender everything on each click, which is problematic for complex UIs with a lot of data.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  On a modest 3 year old phone running Firefox, such websites are excruciating.

simion314 5y ago

>and bloated with JS crap? CSS animations too , especially the ones that use infinite.

scrollaway 5y ago
Nothing to do with site hosting. css animations don't eat the server's CPU; nor does JS bloat (other than bandwidth).
- Retric 5y ago
  JS bloat can have significant server overhead when data is loaded dynamically. It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately. That may flip around when someone spends a long time interacting with a SPA, but there is plenty of truly terrible code in the wild.
  - RussianCow 5y ago
    > It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately. Without context, this statement is misleading at best and downright false at worst. You’re right that splitting up a single request into multiple would incur a small performance penalty, but you also generally gain other advantages like more localized caching and the ability to conditionally skip requests. In the long run, those advantages may actually make your app significantly more efficient. But without discussing details like this, it’s pointless to make wild assumptions about performance.
    - Retric 5y ago
      The context was JS bloat, so we are specifically talking about the subset of poorly written sites. When it’s possible to shoot yourself in the foot many people will do so. That said, if you ever actually profile things you will find the overhead per request is actually quite high. There is a clear tendency to request far to little data at a time.

flatiron 5y ago

The new lightning makes it such a pain to do my time cards. Try to open my sub projects to see how many hours are left and have a tab open with my time card and constantly errors out. I can’t be the only person who checks hours left on sub projects when entering my time.

onion2k 5y ago

aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server. There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
And, heck, there's a solid argument that server-side rendering is more environmentally efficient, since the work is done in a data-center, which can (1) utilize caching to avoid re-doing work and (2) be built in an optimal location for electricity generation.
- nathanfig 5y ago
  Conversely, you are losing the distributed computing gained by rendering on the client, and therefore need a bigger server to scale when needed. And HTTP caching can and should be used for API responses as well.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    If we're measuring by total resource consumption regardless of location, is distributed computing beneficial? Your server can be less powerful, but the client needs to be more powerful. I'd think the primary difference is who's paying for it. Sure, most clients may already be adequately provisioned, but only because so many websites with bloated Javascript have forced their hand...
chakkepolja 5y ago
I think he is talking about badly written JS code serving the APIs and the overhead of it. Of course it's hard to debate whether JS, Java or PHP is most inefficient in that regard.
- onion2k 5y ago

hattmall 5y ago

I agree with this so so much. The problem is too much reliances on frameworks and add on libraries. Developers will import an entire framework that for the benefit of a single feature. It's mind blowing to look at the amount of js includes for seemingly simple sites. Stackoverflow answers that direct you to import a library or framework should be banned in most cases. I will often have to scroll past several answers that say to import a library before finding a simple and functional answer that uses only a few lines of code down near the bottom. Which in my eyes is the real answer. I often wonder if there's a behind the scenes effort on SO to promote certain includes. The entire ecosystem of some languages / implementations relies on this far too heavily. We are seeing some of the consequences other than just bloated systems from this style of coding with malicious node packages.

throwaway11602 5y ago
I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full blown framework like Vuetify. So far, I haven't found anything in between. I would love to find a CSS library that I can just import and be able to create simple, nicely styled pages, e.g. that look Material-esque, without jQuery, node, npm, gulp, grunt, sass, and all that jazz.
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?
  - avrgamp 5y ago
    How about Tailwind?
  - mattl 5y ago
    Bootstrap is unfashionable?

BostonEnginerd 5y ago

We’ve recently transitioned to Salesforce for a project. It’s remarkable how laggy the interface is. Removing a line from a quote takes three clicks and four seconds. The UI also doesn’t always refresh the items in a reasonable period of time, requiring a page reload. Reloading the page is like 20MB as well. Great when you’re tethered to your phone.

robbedpeter 5y ago

I agree. There needs to be a substantial effort in web development to shed the bloat. Clean and small reduces issues with resources, security, and maintainability. The status quo is gross.

calebwinston 5y ago

Genuine question from a not-a-web-developer: Is this not mitigated by minimization tools like webpack?

toastal 5y ago
Webpack is a front-end build toolchain, not a minifier. Usually Terser is used inside of Webpage to minify.