<story><title>Is the web getting slower?</title><url>https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dijit</author><text>I didn’t touch “web dev” since php&amp;#x2F;dream-weaver&amp;#x2F;myspace era.&lt;p&gt;I started working with some web developers for a simple project recently, my mock product was built with vue.js using the standard way of “including” it: But what really threw me for a loop was that the web developers told me that that’s wrong, they are now _compiling_ (Or, semantically “packing”) JavaScript blobs to make even very simple websites.&lt;p&gt;I don’t know why we as a community have started doing that, but it feels like an anti-pattern, it makes adding new dependencies opaque and we can very quickly end up including dozens and dozens of lines of code which must all be rendered by every device that comes into contact with my site.&lt;p&gt;Often this happens because we want only a small bit of the functionality too.</text></item><item><author>rhizome</author><text>Yes, demonstrably and provably. Count the number of pageload indicators (spinners, throbbers...whatever you like to call them) in your daily browsing. They are everywhere...&lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;AJAX (and, I suspect, the shadown DOM model) have proliferated in recent years, and there is no site design simple enough that someone hasn&amp;#x27;t thought to put every page element behind a JS call. Don&amp;#x27;t forget to put CSS in there, too!&lt;p&gt;Frontend developers are at fault for all this. There, I said it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sanitycheck</author><text>So.. There are benefits to this for complex apps - but 90% (charitably) of this kind of code is not in a complex app.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s for two main reasons:&lt;p&gt;1. If you don&amp;#x27;t use complicated new technology you won&amp;#x27;t get a job doing web dev.&lt;p&gt;2. Many new JS devs don&amp;#x27;t understand JS&amp;#x2F;HTML&amp;#x2F;CSS well, they only understand a particular framework - and even then not in a sufficiently deep way.&lt;p&gt;When you come across a seemingly normal site that requires JS in order to display anything, it&amp;#x27;s pretty unlikely that anyone involved ever considered &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; doing it that way.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is the web getting slower?</title><url>https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dijit</author><text>I didn’t touch “web dev” since php&amp;#x2F;dream-weaver&amp;#x2F;myspace era.&lt;p&gt;I started working with some web developers for a simple project recently, my mock product was built with vue.js using the standard way of “including” it: But what really threw me for a loop was that the web developers told me that that’s wrong, they are now _compiling_ (Or, semantically “packing”) JavaScript blobs to make even very simple websites.&lt;p&gt;I don’t know why we as a community have started doing that, but it feels like an anti-pattern, it makes adding new dependencies opaque and we can very quickly end up including dozens and dozens of lines of code which must all be rendered by every device that comes into contact with my site.&lt;p&gt;Often this happens because we want only a small bit of the functionality too.</text></item><item><author>rhizome</author><text>Yes, demonstrably and provably. Count the number of pageload indicators (spinners, throbbers...whatever you like to call them) in your daily browsing. They are everywhere...&lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;AJAX (and, I suspect, the shadown DOM model) have proliferated in recent years, and there is no site design simple enough that someone hasn&amp;#x27;t thought to put every page element behind a JS call. Don&amp;#x27;t forget to put CSS in there, too!&lt;p&gt;Frontend developers are at fault for all this. There, I said it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lukeramsden</author><text>&amp;gt; Often this happens because we want only a small bit of the functionality too.&lt;p&gt;To be fair, this &amp;#x27;compiling&amp;#x27; also allows for tree shaking, which if you use a well-structured library like lodash&amp;#x2F;date-fns etc, allows you to get that small bit of functionality without paying for the whole library.</text></comment>