4 ms·

I had this argument about 4 years ago with a young colleague who said I was out of date, and I am not a developer. Brett Tabke of Webmasterworld.com has been ar

I had this argument about 4 years ago with a young colleague who said I was out of date, and I am not a developer. Brett Tabke of Webmasterworld.com has been arguing for years that lightweight matters. It used to matter for dialup in the USA, now with widespread broadband it is less important to those people. Now it is important for mobile users and global users on dialup or slow connections. In a few years it will matter to the people that got their first android phone in some country with poor infrastructure. Even personally it matters to me :) since I live in a 50 year old house that has slow DSL (YouTube buffers constantly) and I live in the center of Tucson, AZ. I recall Google doing a study that increasing the speed of browsing increases the use of the internet. Page weight will always matter to someone.

neumann_alfred 14y ago
Page weight will always matter to someone. I'd even go further and claim it matters to everyone in some situations. Open youtube in one tab to listen to a long lecture, open more tabs.. slim webpages still load fast, but "regular" (derpy!) ones take ages. And then it's also a resource. I turn water off when I don't need it, because wasting water sucks, not because I cannot afford wasting some. Why should bandwidth be much different? I'm all for using what you need, or for making experiments, but the quest for shinyness over content, putting all sidebars on all pages, including jquery plugins and whatnot at the drop of a hat etc.. all that leads to crappy sites and a crappy infrastructure. That is, the same infrastructure could allow people to achieve much more, if more sites were spartanic like, say, HN ^^ Because at the end of the day, I don't even care if I notice it. That argumentation is lazy and shortsighted. See, if the site loads in 200 ms instead of 250 ms, and I load the site a thousand times per year, that's 50 seconds per year -- over 10 years that's over 8 minutes. That may not sound like much, but consider that this is not the only site, and that I am not the only human (and that load time reductions of much more than 50 ms would be possible on a lot of big sites). In total, the amount of time wasted by petty BS is probably quite staggering.

neumann_alfred 14y ago

Page weight will always matter to someone. I'd even go further and claim it matters to everyone in some situations. Open youtube in one tab to listen to a long lecture, open more tabs.. slim webpages still load fast, but "regular" (derpy!) ones take ages. And then it's also a resource. I turn water off when I don't need it, because wasting water sucks, not because I cannot afford wasting some. Why should bandwidth be much different? I'm all for using what you need, or for making experiments, but the quest for shinyness over content, putting all sidebars on all pages, including jquery plugins and whatnot at the drop of a hat etc.. all that leads to crappy sites and a crappy infrastructure. That is, the same infrastructure could allow people to achieve much more, if more sites were spartanic like, say, HN ^^ Because at the end of the day, I don't even care if I notice it. That argumentation is lazy and shortsighted. See, if the site loads in 200 ms instead of 250 ms, and I load the site a thousand times per year, that's 50 seconds per year -- over 10 years that's over 8 minutes. That may not sound like much, but consider that this is not the only site, and that I am not the only human (and that load time reductions of much more than 50 ms would be possible on a lot of big sites). In total, the amount of time wasted by petty BS is probably quite staggering.