You're definitely using the wrong metric to assess how much JavaScript is used. Look at total weight, not total requests. Just because a site combines and minif

You're definitely using the wrong metric to assess how much JavaScript is used. Look at total weight, not total requests. Just because a site combines and minifies its libraries doesn't mean its not using them. As for why publishers use more JavaScript than tech companies, it comes down to the amount of technical talent. Maybe 10% of a digital publisher's employees work on the tech team, as opposed to ~50% for a tech company. Given these resource constraints, JavaScript requests proliferate due to two reasons: 1. With less time, engineers turn to external libraries more often to get things done even when they could address the problem with less code if they wrote it themselves. 2. We can't necessarily spend the time to tune everything and combine/minify libraries for peak performance. That being said, I'm sorry performance sucks. I'm working on it. Can anyone recommend good tools for analyzing performance bottlenecks on the web?