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If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disa
by clarry 12y ago
If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disabled by default (and only enabled when necessary) makes it very clear to me that using JS, at least on my system, is almost never a way to make any site more performant. On the contrary, it increases load times, cpu usage, and memory usage. It might also force me to use bloated crappy browsers like Firefox or Chrome where I could otherwise use something like w3m or links, which will display the page in a fraction of the RAM, much faster.
I wouldn't be disabling JS if it weren't such a pain in the ass. Or maybe I still would, just for security.
- timothya 12y agoPlenty of sites do use client-side instrumentation, and so they do indeed benchmark their site on your machine, and then make decisions based on the results of those benchmarks (likely aggregated with many other benchmarks from many other users). Yes, sometimes JavaScript is used poorly in ways that make sites bloated and slow, but plenty of sites use it properly in ways that only make their sites better (collecting the appropriate data to confirm that what they are doing is making their site better).
- clarry 12y agoPeople talk about these sites every once in a while. But my experience is that enabling JS makes things worse across the board. If there's some site that would perform better with it, these are very much in the minority. And in my experience, "old web" sites with out JS loaders and such are almost always much faster & easier on the resources. Even if some sites deploy instrumentation, it doesn't mean they're necessarily lifting a finger to make it faster for me.