4 ms·

For nowadays standards I consider anything below 500kB and with less than 6 server requests already pretty minimal, yet those are still numbers that can achieve

For nowadays standards I consider anything below 500kB and with less than 6 server requests already pretty minimal, yet those are still numbers that can achieve a lot of things and still look so "modern"/"normal" that you'd have to look into the dev console to really appreciate the effort that has been put into these. Whenever I see websites that use 5MB large PNGs for photos and have over 30 requests over a time span of multiple seconds I just question the general state of web-development these days. I just recently stumbled upon a site that had it all: webp/avif everywhere, minified CSS, even ditching unused classes from used frameworks, CSS data:-embedded and subsetted fonts (I think it even used a recent version of FontAwesome 6, but it still managed to make the WOFF2 be only 2kB in size because they just utilized like two dozen logos), only one request each for CSS and JavaScript (everything concatenated and with nice cache policies) and the site was still usable/viewable even without either one of these if you wanted to. Everything was automated in their deployment pipeline even. It only came to my notice because they wrote an article about it. I can't find it in my history but those things will stick to your head for a while.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
> For nowadays standards I consider anything below 500kB and with less than 6 server requests already pretty minimal, yet those are still numbers that can achieve a lot of things and still look so "modern"/"normal" that you'd have to look into the dev console to really appreciate the effort that has been put into these 500kB honestly doesn't require much effort at all. My WordPress blog with a popular theme and a few plugins has each almost every article below 500kB, despite looking like any modern blog and having at least 1 image per post. Actually, if I remove the Facebook share button, they drop to almost 250kB. Time to remove it I guess.
- nlitened 4y ago
  Honest question—do actual real people use Facebook share buttons? Have they ever? To me it looks like it has always been a fairytale made up by Facebook to spread their analytics scripts all over internet.
  - Wistar 4y ago
    Coincidentally, I used the fb share button this morning but it is a very rare occurrence.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    I don't know, my blog is small, but I don't think so. Especially since it's a blog about programming I'm sure it's not the kind of stuff you'll share on Facebook... I removed it today after seeing the impact on page size. I guess it works for some niches like news, online quizz, etc.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Sure they do, but do a meaningful number of people use it for niche geek blogs? No. Major news sites? Sure.
- sincarne 4y ago
  You could replace it with something more vanilla. I used to maintain a list of common share URLs, but this project is more more useful: https://github.com/bradvin/social-share-urls https://github.com/bradvin/social-share-urls
cosmodisk 4y ago
From time to time I visit websites that my i7 16gb dell xps struggles to process. Bloody hell, 20 years ago that kind of power would have powered a small super computer and now it can't run a news websites.
- jrockway 4y ago
  "i7" isn't a particularly useful measure of computer performance. It can refer to over 12 years worth of processors, including the ultra-low power version of the first model, a 1.07GHz processor. That thing probably has trouble loading Emacs.
  - b112 4y ago
    That thing probably has trouble loading Emacs. And with those historic words, the vi vs emacs debate was finally won.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    > That thing probably has trouble loading Emacs. I don't know about that, because my RISC-V SBC with a 1-core in-order 1GHz CPU and no GPU can load Emacs GUI just fine.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      As long as it has more than 8MB, Emacs will do just fine.
      - jrockway 4y ago
        I thought it was 80MB and even then you're constantly swapping. (I had 32MB of RAM on the computer I learned Emacs on and it was totally fine.)
        pjmlp 4y ago
        When Emacs came to be, you'd be lucky to have a 80MB hard disk, let alone main memory. :)
zero_shift 4y ago
For small websites I wrote an observables microlibrary, one afternoon. It's called Trkl and minified & gzipped the code is about 400 bytes: https://github.com/jbreckmckye/trkl https://github.com/jbreckmckye/trkl

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> For nowadays standards I consider anything below 500kB and with less than 6 server requests already pretty minimal, yet those are still numbers that can achieve a lot of things and still look so "modern"/"normal" that you'd have to look into the dev console to really appreciate the effort that has been put into these 500kB honestly doesn't require much effort at all. My WordPress blog with a popular theme and a few plugins has each almost every article below 500kB, despite looking like any modern blog and having at least 1 image per post. Actually, if I remove the Facebook share button, they drop to almost 250kB. Time to remove it I guess.

nlitened 4y ago
Honest question—do actual real people use Facebook share buttons? Have they ever? To me it looks like it has always been a fairytale made up by Facebook to spread their analytics scripts all over internet.
- Wistar 4y ago
  Coincidentally, I used the fb share button this morning but it is a very rare occurrence.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  I don't know, my blog is small, but I don't think so. Especially since it's a blog about programming I'm sure it's not the kind of stuff you'll share on Facebook... I removed it today after seeing the impact on page size. I guess it works for some niches like news, online quizz, etc.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Sure they do, but do a meaningful number of people use it for niche geek blogs? No. Major news sites? Sure.
sincarne 4y ago
You could replace it with something more vanilla. I used to maintain a list of common share URLs, but this project is more more useful: https://github.com/bradvin/social-share-urls https://github.com/bradvin/social-share-urls

cosmodisk 4y ago

From time to time I visit websites that my i7 16gb dell xps struggles to process. Bloody hell, 20 years ago that kind of power would have powered a small super computer and now it can't run a news websites.

jrockway 4y ago
"i7" isn't a particularly useful measure of computer performance. It can refer to over 12 years worth of processors, including the ultra-low power version of the first model, a 1.07GHz processor. That thing probably has trouble loading Emacs.
- b112 4y ago
  That thing probably has trouble loading Emacs. And with those historic words, the vi vs emacs debate was finally won.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  > That thing probably has trouble loading Emacs. I don't know about that, because my RISC-V SBC with a 1-core in-order 1GHz CPU and no GPU can load Emacs GUI just fine.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    As long as it has more than 8MB, Emacs will do just fine.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      I thought it was 80MB and even then you're constantly swapping. (I had 32MB of RAM on the computer I learned Emacs on and it was totally fine.)
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        When Emacs came to be, you'd be lucky to have a 80MB hard disk, let alone main memory. :)

zero_shift 4y ago

For small websites I wrote an observables microlibrary, one afternoon. It's called Trkl and minified & gzipped the code is about 400 bytes: https://github.com/jbreckmckye/trkl https://github.com/jbreckmckye/trkl