Interesting quantitative look at web performance and how designs made for people with high-end devices can be practically unusable for people on low-end devices, which disproportionately affects poorer people and people in developing countries. Also discusses how sites game Google’s performance metrics—maybe not news to the web devs among ye, but it was new to me. The arrogance of the Discourse founder was astounding.
RETVRN to static web pages.[1]
Also, from one of the appendices:
In principle, HN should be the slowest social media site or link aggregator because it’s written in a custom Lisp that isn’t highly optimized and the code was originally written with brevity and cleverness in mind, which generally gives you fairly poor performance. However, that’s only poor relative to what you’d get if you were writing high-performance code, which is not a relevant point of comparison here.
Although even static web pages can be fraught—see his other post on speeding up his site 50x by tearing out a bunch of unnecessary crap. ↩︎
I’m on an old laptop and every browser I’ve used outside of chrome just chugs, which sucks because it’s google, but for some reason chrome is snappier on older hardware from what I’ve seen.
Likely due to the chromium stranglehold on modern web dev. Not sure which browsers you’ve tried but it might be worth trying something like edge, brave, or ungoogled chromium all are chromium-based but not a google product technically.
I’ll have to try out chromium.
Literally this site right here is a bloated pile of crap.
None of you need active updates for all the elements on screen! Just compile a static page on the server side and send it over!
Happily, we do have a nice (read-only) static version of Hexbear coded up by our very own @kota@hexbear.net: diethex.net! Here’s the announcement post with more details; it’s also linked in the sidebar on the home page. Funnily enough, in said announcement post someone links to an article which discusses the very blog post I posted here, so we’ve come full circle!
(also yes, kota is aware that spoilers don’t currently work)
Thank you for the wonderful and informative reply!
I wish there was a native Linux app for Lemmy. It would be a lot of work to make though. There are Android and iOS apps though.
Cool article and website!
Wish they’d test out some non-Western websites. And more stuff that doesn’t also have native apps that you’re supposed to use instead (and what they optimize for. Why bother optimizing a website people aren’t even supposed to use?).
They quote a Discourse developer who has a lot of elitism about what kinds of devices people use. And I googled Discourse (I’ve used it before actually) and the tagline that shows up in Google is “Discourse is the place to build civilized communities”. Hmmm… “civilized”…
The article mentions good reasons to optimize websites, such as to get more users. I guess a lot of companies basically just think paying more developers to optimize their sites costs them more money than they want to spend, even though they could get more users. Companies already adopt “web technologies” partially because there is such a large pool of developers they can hire from.
I’ve found that a lot of the larger companies, big international corporations with layers and layers of people between any one decision, no one really cares as long as everyone plays along and says the right things. The line goes up or they do layoffs and then the line goes up. That’s all it ever seems to be. They would rather people say nothing negative and do terrible work slowly than try to improve anything about the working environment.
Even productivity can’t be analysed critically without everyone thinking you’re trying to topple the entire company or something.
