Found this article on HN comment thread. Really nice read!
It clearly shows problems in 2015 and made accurate predictions that in 2020 things would be even worseâŚ
Had to fetch an archived cus the images werenât loading on the live website.
Subscribe to see more stories about technology on your homepage
While I agree a lot of websites are needlessly bloated, its just the way the modern web works. If you try to make a website of significant complexity, youâll find yourself either using a framework, or slowly making one of your own unintentionally.
I think combating UI bloat on websites is more important than combating size bloat.
How many websites are of âsignificant complexityâ? How many of those need to be so complex? And how many of those need to be a website?
I know. However, this is not really talking about those complex webapps, but rather about informational or mostly text websites that are absurdly heavy and bloated nowadays. The usual example is cooking recipes websites - the content here is mostly just text and images, yet they pull all sort of extra elements, fancy scripts, not-so-fancy-but-actually-harmful scripts and so on. This is needless.1 Other great examples are news websites, which are infamous for being stupidly slow.
This isnât (just) about minimalism, not having many animations, etc. I think those are great in some contexts, but Iâm mostly fine with them anywhere if they are used properly. Iâd say the real issue here are illiteracy/incompetence when making a website (not compressing images, fonts, etc), the pointless scripts that are harmful to the users and the impact this has on people with worse connections than us.
Letâs not forget that us, developers, tend to have better equipment than the average user, and thus are more prone to not noticing the effects that inefficient software has on the final users.
1 So much so, that you see initiatives such as based.cooking which, of course take extreme positions, but show perfectly well how bloated the usual places are.
Yeah I agree, text based websites, especially news sites, have no excuse being this bloated.
Great point that I didnât think about before.
Also surprisingly a lot of those flashy animation-type things are surprisingly small. Its mainly the tracking and analytics javascript bundles that you see sites like medium insert into every page that makes them hugely bloated.
What is UI bloat? Complex UIâs?
Mainly pop-ups. Overly complicated âConsent cookiesâ windows, âsubscribe to mail listâ, pressing ânext pageâ multiple times.
Although it is true that for normal current PCs, the loading of the pages is not a problem, also if you use extensions that block all this crap of ads, pop-ups and trackers, some pages, due to a bad design or because they are hosted on a Paleolithic server, can slow the load down quite a lot, not because of their weight, but because of some connection shit, which can be also the own one.
To test the performance of the own PC, a good page is the Favorite Web Awards, who expose the best web designs, some quite heavy, but for good reasons. https://thefwa.com/awards/page/1/
there đ is đ no đ obesity đ crisis
I think that you just react on the word obesity and didnât even read the article which is about page bloat on the web.
Please donât feed him
I knew people that literally died because cardiovascular problems due to obesity and sedentarysm. Is an enormous problem the amount of obese children because trash food and that. Ik itâs not related but we need to drastically improve our diet. (I include myself)
Do you ever opened the web?