Why are web sites becoming so unwieldy? Several sites have become almost unusable: fandango, expedia, salon, and several generic news sites come to mind. I wait endlessly for the page to load, clicking in vain on the article I want to read. But alas, the page will not become responsive until that last little advertisement is loaded.
I get that the web devs out there all want to use the latest JavaScript frameworks without really understanding why. It’s called “resume driven development” and it’s all the rage.
But the poor end user is a left with a site that takes ages to load on a phone, and even is cumbersome to unusable on a powerful desktop machine.
What happened to perf measurements? Back when there were modems we tried to make pages light and load quick. But now, heck, who cares? Networks are fast. Computers are fast. And the devs and testers have already pulled all the components down from the CDNs. Here’s the recent article explaining how the average web page is now almost the size of the original Doom distribution.
Oh well, there is still that matter of advertising. I quit using one site because their ads were so intrusive. It’s not like we don’t have a choice these days.
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