Relevant: http://suckless.org/philosophy/
One of my first jobs was maintaining and extending an ASP.NET Web Forms application.
A dashboard style application has to do way more than open a dropdown. People keep the page loaded all day long - the fact that it takes 2 seconds to load the first time is irrelevant.
No - users actually do want more features. They want more features than you can ever hope to deliver. Figuring out which features they will actually appreciate is the tough part. Your competitors are working very hard to build those features before you can. Your competitor's sales team is already cold calling your users.
Lightweight software is easy. As an engineer, I appreciate it, but it's not what the average user wants.
And for the vast majority of websites, the users don't actually want (let alone need) that degree of interactivity. A blog shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. A storefront shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. A restaurant page (even one with a reservation system!) shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. Even something like Twitter shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. Unless you're building something like Trello that's heavily dependent on drag-and-drop as a basic workflow, there is no good reason to make JavaScript a hard dependency on using your site.
If users are forced to allow arbitrary Turing-complete code to run on their machines because your site is inexplicably incapable of running without it, then you have utterly failed. That's harsh, but that's reality. Your users want oodles of JavaScript only in the sense that a penguin wants to swim through an oil slick.
I'll believe it when I see it. With notable exception of collaborative editing, most software on the web is essentially a subpar reimplementation of desktop software from 10 years ago, missing half of the features, but consuming 10x the resources.
It's almost like for some the argument is more about some abstract concept of artisanal purity than true care for user experience. HN basically has a front page post decrying the state of the modern web every day...
Before anyone jumps down my throat about this I should add that browsing the web with JS disabled is a truly wonderful experience on sites that support it. It would be great if everything did. I don't see that happening though.
As opposed to what, some abstract concept of ordinary users? What the sales department wants? The idea of craftsmanship isn't that abstract to me. Performance and cacheability aren't abstract at all, that a website can get reloaded many times even for just one reader, and usually shares memory and CPU and HD cache with many other tabs, is also a really obvious observation. Stuff that makes a noticeable difference even in isolation makes a giant difference multiplied with a triple trillion, I've done the math.
> HN basically has a front page post decrying the state of the modern web every day...
That doesn't mean there isn't a problem. There's also articles decrying environmental destruction every day, not on HN but in general - should that make one care less? Would you say that biologists and climatologists are more concerned than the "ordinary person" means the ordinary should be heeded? I'd be surprised to see scientists in a science forum talk like that.
Web development is an "art", maybe like architecture is art, and we are the artisans. If having any sort of ideals to strive towards is "abstract" to us, that says more about the people involved in web development and how much genuine excitement and care for detail was destroyed by money and marketing, but not much about web development as an art form as such.
Does a flood of crappy action movies say anything about the state of the art in movie making, at all? And yes, the "average audience" maybe likes them, but who cares? If they got something else instead, there's nothing they could do about it, and it would be better for them. I don't care if that's arrogant, but don't call it abstract :P
> I don't see that happening though.
That is like talking about sports or the weather, even if its true, it's pointless. The question is rather, what do we think should happen, and how can we make it happen.
That's because developers are the only people who know what the fuck is going on, and who to blame. Regular users don't have a mental model to correctly identify the source of their annoyance. So they end up blaming "the computer". It often manifests in requests like "could you come over one day and clean my computer? I think it's full of viruses." No, it's not really full of viruses, just the websites you're using the most went through another redesign, and now consume 10x resources for zero added utility. But what can you do. I install adblock and sometimes buy them another RAM stick, so they can throw their laptop in a garbage bin a year later than they would without my help.
No, users do complain, you just have to know where to look (and actually talk to them).
True, but turnaround time is something that is primarily beneficial to developers, as it's all about reducing development costs.