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Speaking from building both react and Preact sites serving millions of customers - the difference is noticeable when you add everything up. Minification or not

Speaking from building both react and Preact sites serving millions of customers - the difference is noticeable when you add everything up. Minification or not, starting with a 6x bundle size puts you in a precarious position to have to care more about how it grows over time adding other assets. Downloading, parsing and then executing a larger bundle size will impact performance and we've been able to see time to interactive impact conversion on e-commerce sites. However you are right that there are many other factors at play here that will make the site better and I think the post misses the point about "bundle size". The important differentiation for us with Preact is two things: native support for web components, and a significantly faster library when it comes to transformations and dealing with vdom - see here https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark/master/webdriver-ts-results/table.html https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark/master/we... On your comment about browser cache, also true but it really depends - if you haven't appropriately split out your bundle then returning users will probably be redownloading react again and again with app updates. Also new users are super important because if you are trying to get new traffic you care about their experience not just returning users.

KronisLV 5y ago
> Minification or not, starting with a 6x bundle size puts you in a precarious position to have to care more about how it grows over time adding other assets. If this were true, wouldn't it apply in equal measure to other resources? And if that's true, then why do we still see multiple MB large pages that are full of images or even videos? Personally, the arguments expressed in "The Website Obesity Crisis" back in 2015 still hold up today in my eyes: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm In short, for me to agree with your argument, i'd have to see websites in general take the path of using less images when not necessary, or optimize them better and use slightly lower resolutions etc. Opening the first random news site that came to mind, BBC, yields over 5 MB of data and almost 100 network requests: https://www.bbc.com/ https://www.bbc.com/ Opening Reddit means almost 15 MB of data and has around 235 network requests: https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/ Opening YouTube means almost 12 MB of data and has around 90 network requests: https://www.youtube.com/ https://www.youtube.com/ Sure, there are techniques to minimize this impact and compression that everyone should be using for their content, but if the big companies are doing something like this, then clearly the majority of people don't really care. To me, it feels like the thing that we should be doing is just putting less content in pages, less functionality, less widgets etc. Case in point: https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ It needs less than 3 MB of data to load and while around 90 network requests is still bad, as a consequence of the smaller size, it loads more quickly! (note: the imporance of compression cannot be overstated, but at the end of the day even if your 15 MB compresses down to 5 MB, your browser still needs to handle all of that stuff locally, process the JS, CSS and HTML and display all of your media anyways, as well as keep it in memory, so i'd say that both the full size and the compressed size matters, decreasing the former obviously being good for the latter as well) On a similar note, there is a really interesting site called "What Does My Site Cost", which allows to further illustrate the bloat, for example: https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/index.php?testID=220205_BiDc8S_589#gniCost https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/index.php?testID=220205_BiDc8... Back on topic, i think that Preact, Svelte and even Vue are all pretty cool lightweight options for front end development!
- kilburn 5y ago
  > If this were true, wouldn't it apply in equal measure to other resources? No. On sites that buy in to react/preact, there are parts of the site that won't work until react/preact has loaded. In contrast, the site will work perfectly fine without having loaded those large beautiful images. If done correctly, images won't even affect the layout of the page. Likewise, it doesn't matter if google analytics and the 10 thousand myriad tracking pixels take a minute to load: users shouldn't notice any difference here. > but if the big companies are doing something like this, then clearly the majority of people don't really care. Companies are complicated beasts. Using react or preact is entirely a predicament of the technical team. Nobody from marketing, sales, business could care less about it. However, marketing _needs_ (that's how they put it) those myriad tracking pixels because otherwise they can't track the effectiveness of their campaigns. Corporate wants those custom fonts and beautiful, large images because real people have said the site looks much better with them in usability tests (done using enterprise-level network connectivity of course). Sales people will go to war over having analytics, as otherwise they don't know how effective their campaigns are, and business loves the nice dashboards there so they back them up. The tech team decides that given the pace at which complicated interactive features are coming in going the plain html + sprinkle of vanilla javascript is untenable (partly due to whats-cool-today syndrome). In the end you get these big, "bloated" sites as a result. What users actually want is just a small factor in all this.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    > Likewise, it doesn't matter if google analytics and the 10 thousand myriad tracking pixels take a minute to load: users shouldn't notice any difference here. So much for me being able to open 100-200 tabs across all windows on my browser without needing more RAM. Or even using a browser on my older phone without it feeling slow/sluggish or the browser killing the battery life of the device. To clarify for the downvoters: my point is that it might not matter for the average user for whom the site is optimized, they might be able to tolerate ads, autoplaying videos, popups, incredible waste of resources just to get visually attractive UI etc. and be none the wiser about any of it (possibly not even knowing that things could be different), but it definitely matters for people who want more out of web in regards to usability. In my eyes, there's little difference between the current state of web and using Electron for desktop applications instead of native solutions, both seem to be driven by financial initiatives and result in a degraded experience, playing directly into Wirth's law and thus making interfacing with computers worse as a whole (though admittedly the state of the web feels more malicious than a team wanting one Electron codebase for multiple platforms).

KronisLV 5y ago

> Minification or not, starting with a 6x bundle size puts you in a precarious position to have to care more about how it grows over time adding other assets. If this were true, wouldn't it apply in equal measure to other resources? And if that's true, then why do we still see multiple MB large pages that are full of images or even videos? Personally, the arguments expressed in "The Website Obesity Crisis" back in 2015 still hold up today in my eyes: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm In short, for me to agree with your argument, i'd have to see websites in general take the path of using less images when not necessary, or optimize them better and use slightly lower resolutions etc. Opening the first random news site that came to mind, BBC, yields over 5 MB of data and almost 100 network requests: https://www.bbc.com/ https://www.bbc.com/ Opening Reddit means almost 15 MB of data and has around 235 network requests: https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/ Opening YouTube means almost 12 MB of data and has around 90 network requests: https://www.youtube.com/ https://www.youtube.com/ Sure, there are techniques to minimize this impact and compression that everyone should be using for their content, but if the big companies are doing something like this, then clearly the majority of people don't really care. To me, it feels like the thing that we should be doing is just putting less content in pages, less functionality, less widgets etc. Case in point: https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ It needs less than 3 MB of data to load and while around 90 network requests is still bad, as a consequence of the smaller size, it loads more quickly! (note: the imporance of compression cannot be overstated, but at the end of the day even if your 15 MB compresses down to 5 MB, your browser still needs to handle all of that stuff locally, process the JS, CSS and HTML and display all of your media anyways, as well as keep it in memory, so i'd say that both the full size and the compressed size matters, decreasing the former obviously being good for the latter as well) On a similar note, there is a really interesting site called "What Does My Site Cost", which allows to further illustrate the bloat, for example: https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/index.php?testID=220205_BiDc8S_589#gniCost https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/index.php?testID=220205_BiDc8... Back on topic, i think that Preact, Svelte and even Vue are all pretty cool lightweight options for front end development!

kilburn 5y ago
> If this were true, wouldn't it apply in equal measure to other resources? No. On sites that buy in to react/preact, there are parts of the site that won't work until react/preact has loaded. In contrast, the site will work perfectly fine without having loaded those large beautiful images. If done correctly, images won't even affect the layout of the page. Likewise, it doesn't matter if google analytics and the 10 thousand myriad tracking pixels take a minute to load: users shouldn't notice any difference here. > but if the big companies are doing something like this, then clearly the majority of people don't really care. Companies are complicated beasts. Using react or preact is entirely a predicament of the technical team. Nobody from marketing, sales, business could care less about it. However, marketing _needs_ (that's how they put it) those myriad tracking pixels because otherwise they can't track the effectiveness of their campaigns. Corporate wants those custom fonts and beautiful, large images because real people have said the site looks much better with them in usability tests (done using enterprise-level network connectivity of course). Sales people will go to war over having analytics, as otherwise they don't know how effective their campaigns are, and business loves the nice dashboards there so they back them up. The tech team decides that given the pace at which complicated interactive features are coming in going the plain html + sprinkle of vanilla javascript is untenable (partly due to whats-cool-today syndrome). In the end you get these big, "bloated" sites as a result. What users actually want is just a small factor in all this.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Likewise, it doesn't matter if google analytics and the 10 thousand myriad tracking pixels take a minute to load: users shouldn't notice any difference here. So much for me being able to open 100-200 tabs across all windows on my browser without needing more RAM. Or even using a browser on my older phone without it feeling slow/sluggish or the browser killing the battery life of the device. To clarify for the downvoters: my point is that it might not matter for the average user for whom the site is optimized, they might be able to tolerate ads, autoplaying videos, popups, incredible waste of resources just to get visually attractive UI etc. and be none the wiser about any of it (possibly not even knowing that things could be different), but it definitely matters for people who want more out of web in regards to usability. In my eyes, there's little difference between the current state of web and using Electron for desktop applications instead of native solutions, both seem to be driven by financial initiatives and result in a degraded experience, playing directly into Wirth's law and thus making interfacing with computers worse as a whole (though admittedly the state of the web feels more malicious than a team wanting one Electron codebase for multiple platforms).