Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

We're so far past the days when competitions were held for the best website under 5 kilobytes... which was then increased to 10kB to allow for JS [1]. Last time it was run was 2002.

Just goes to show that the software devs always squander more resources faster than hardware developers can create it. It is kind of like when you increase the radius of a ball by 2X it's volume grows by 8X.

Except this shouldn't be a law of physics. Most of it seems to be for developer convenience and faddishness. Perhaps if they noticed just how much everyone rushing off to the latest framework resembled ever teenager rushing off to buy the latest fast-fashion trends, it wouldn't happen so much.

It is just incredibly disappointing to see performance of even major websites visibly degrading every month to the point of unusability (yes, even on a CAD-/gaming-level rig), while obscure sites are still snappy. These are the very well-funded sites that should be able to optimize and streamline everything.

[1] https://www.the5k.org/

"Most of it seems to be for developer convenience and faddishness."

Something like that.

The devs want to use the latest frameworks and libraries, because it makes their CV look good. Or the bosses want them to use a CMS like Drupal (it's possible to build a slim Drupal site, but in practice everything is conspiring against you).

Brochure websites are typically written once, thrown over the wall to the client, and never edited again for 5 years. The client knows no better, the web-shop has been paid, and any techie reporting problems with bugs or performance is ignored.

I particularly deplore the custom of loading Javascript libraries from some CDN. If you do that, you're jamming code into my browser that you didn't write. It can change from one day to the next, without the website operator knowing that's happened, let alone reviewing the changes (I've never known such a review to happen).

There's a handful of sites I care about enough to make a NoScript exception (banking, government). Apart from those, if a site demands that I run arbitrary code on MY computer, and fails to load if I refuse, then there's always other sites. Byeee!

> The devs want to use the latest frameworks and libraries, because it makes their CV look good

could be this, could also be due to bootcamps that teach the latest and greatest to keep up with the latest tech fads, also maybe because of the mirage that "if I become a react wiz, then I have better chances at landing a job at Facebook! $$$"

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