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Comment by oarsinsync | Hacker News Reader

> Also since when exactly did websites have a mandate to economise to the scale of mobile data? It's always been edge case unless you are specifically targeting that.

Trends towards mobile-first have been a thing for a while. Especially in developing countries where mobile users outweigh desktop users.

Targeting desktop is slowly becoming the edge case for anything targeting a mass audience. Look at a lot of the recent high-value tech companies. Do Uber/Snapchat/Whatsapp/Instagram target desktop or mobile first?

Where are users in general spending the majority of their time? On a desktop/laptop, or on a phone/tablet?

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Mobile-first is designing for a mobile interface. I quiet clearly stated "economise to the scale of mobile data". That is, supporting users on heavy mobile data restrictions.

Users, regardless of device used, are primarily on wifi and that is what is designed for. In modern countries most users don't really have data restrictions low enough to come into effect through websites so going into the future this will not be a problem.

Which countries would that be? As far as I know there are strict data restrictions basically everywhere (apart from legacy plans). You get about 10 of those "modern" websites a day with 1 GB which is for example what US's Sprint "Unlimited" plan offers you.

Most of Asia and Europe. The American plans are so expensive and restrictive they don't reflect the current state of the technology at all. That's what's causing all this 'crisis' scaremongering. 1GB is a fairly basic plan over here and for that you can expect to have to watch your usage.

I was in Hong Kong last year and I was looking at limited data plans then.

I'm in the UK and the only network offering unlimited data is so slow you'll struggle to use more than 3GB in a month.

I've since given in and just paying through the nose for 16GB/month, so that I can not have to watch my data usage. (Un?)fortunately, the network is so fast I've found my data usage is already around 9-10GB/month, so I'm going to have to start watching that again soon.

Then please tell that my German and French mobile providers. While cheaper than their US counterparts I still have to watch my usage. China also has basically the same prices (not adjusted for income parity!). I know that especially north and east of Germany the plans are significantly less restrictive but that's far from universal.

Apart from laziness there is no reason for those websites to be so large.

Apart from greediness there is no reason for data to be so expensive...

Sure there's always room for an amount of optimization and good practice but it's insane to rely on that instead of fixing the problem. The growth in page size has been fairly linear and predictable.

The real headline here should be "German and US carriers cannot keep up with natural growth in technology"

So tell me: Out of a 2 MB website with 300 HTTP requests, what do you usually get as a visitor?

You make it sound as if the natural growth in technology is what makes these websites huge. I run a web app, which is uptodate technology-wise. It has a responsive design with @2x images and @3x. It uses JS in a sensible manner. It's fast and easy to use. Top notch technology. Yet, the average request sums up to 200KB. And 60KB of that is a custom font.

This is not about the natural growth in technology, it is about 50-70% of the 2MB are entirely worthless to the user, because they are usually Ads, trackers, wrongly compressed images (ImageOptim does wonders here) and using 10 JS frameworks in parallel.

It's almost as if you're saying: See, img tags now support the width attribute, so let's upload a 10MB photo and just tell the browser to resize it to 100px, because technology.

I'm not picking through all that hyperbole and condemnation of every dev that isn't you to try a maintain a reasonable argument.

So I go with a "those in glass houses" approach:

The only reason I can't see the terrible quality of your website's photos on my phone is that all the content is so damn small and zoomed out I can barely make out the text never-mind the picture pixels. I don't really want to zoom in because the shade of lime green you've chosen is so jarring it'll likely give me a migraine if it fills the screen.

If you're referring to the domain of my email in my profile: This isn't my website. It's just an email provider.

Well what's your website then and I'll judge it. Either that or refine your argument.

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