Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that we should get performance advice from the Airbnb team. It's a really slow website that has no business being slow.

View on HN

It’s true that AirBnB isn’t the fastest website in the world. However, I don’t believe it’s fair or fruitful to criticise an article where an engineer spent time writing a blog and sharing interesting findings based on the merit of AirBnB’s current performance. If the advice is good, it doesn't matter where it came from.

I just went to check how fast is airbnb: the base site loads fast, then they are showing popups of their ,,new features’’ and cookie popups.

They should get rid of the popups before starting other optimizations.

I still don’t think the cookie pop ups are mandatory, just put a toggle for them in the footer and you’ve complied in a perfectly reasonable way IMO.

No, the user must be aware of it and decide.

The real alternative is to not track at all. It's compliant, easy to implement, performant (the topic of the post) and does the right thing

or use progressive escalation, like I.e. Apples AppStore guidelines. Get the consent banner when the user performs an action that requires storing the data (i.e in a cookie)

That is your opinion, I think until login you should avoid setting cookies anyway and ask as part of that journey.

I believe the argument here by the GP is that tracking cookies shouldn't be used at all until the user logs in.

No idea what that would do to any business value Airbnb gets from tracking, but the idea is that the lost analytics data is outweighed by the benefit of removing new user friction.

It's probably only compliant if it's off by default, but I doubt anybody will ever toggle it on anyway.

Part of my job is web performance “optimization”[0]:

Cookie popups and third party JS are two of the biggest culprits for slow sites next to large images/videos and general bloat. Some of these tracking scripts and cookie popups require you to put them into the head. It’s terrible.

I always suggest my clients to simply remove them. Users are retained when the site loads and navigates fast. Spying on them doesn’t help…

Very large sites actually get leverage out of some analysis and tracking, however they should be doing that inhouse.

For everyone else it’s simply not worth it except that is your business model (not our clients).

[0] it’s called optimization, but it’s mostly just measuring, cleaning up, moving to standard practices and deleting alot of code. The times I get to optimize queries and algorithms are fun, impactful but rare. Most sites just suck because they are bloated and unpolished.

But then the marketing team is out of a job

Have you ever looked into Partytown? Nowadays you can have your cake and eat it too.

It's infuriatingly slow when looking for a place, and there are countless complaints about it.

Perhaps the advice is good, but it would be like taking budgeting advice from a guy who's always borrowing money from you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com