[mwcampbell]

To quote Joel Spolsky [1]:

> For review: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. No matter how much it bothers you neat freaks, the market always votes for bloatware.

See also [2].

Basically, one peron's bloat is another person's necessary features.

Hell, I should have posted this on the Electron rant thread the other day.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/07/20020407/

[2]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

[matwood]

This is the old argument about replacing Excel. No one uses all the features offered by Excel, but every feature offered is used by someone.

[jakewins]

And a nice illustration for why startups often do well focusing on very specific use cases first.

Replacing Excel for the general population is a moon-shot project; replacing it for a well selected set of use cases hard but, as history showed, possible.

[bobbytherobot]

Not only that, often the when Excel users are asked what features they desire, the desired feature is already in Excel.

[curun1r]

Counterpoint...For years, Google's search page was famously minimal/unbloated. That lack of bloat and overall search speed was a big part of them winning.

[onion2k]

Basically, one person's bloat is another person's necessary features.

And that is why I like modules.

[mwcampbell]

> And that is why I like modules.

Just be careful that you don't remove too many of them in your efforts to eliminate bloat. For example, last time I checked, the Qt toolkit implements accessibility (e.g. for blind users) in a plugin. How many Qt-based applications are completely, utterly inaccessible to some users just because they didn't ship that plugin? Again, one person's bloat is another persons' necessary feature. Yes, I made a typo the first time; I noticed it too late.

[xs]

I think if there are two sites with the same content and functionality, people would hands down prefer the faster page.

[always_good]

The thing is that, there aren't.

Only in our wet dreams exists a competitive edge where you copy a website 1:1 but use vanilla JS over their jQuery so things load a tiny bit faster and their users flock over to your website, chanting your name.

[candiodari]

Really ?

https://blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-late...

http://glinden.blogspot.com.au/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-...

I'm sure I read essentially the same from ebay as well at some point. It's worse than being a competitive advantage : extra milliseconds seem to matter a lot for the size of the market in the first place.

[always_good]

Nowhere upstream did someone say "smaller isn't better".

[paulcole]

If Amazon loads .1 second slower, are users not buying from Amazon or not buying at all? Until you know the answer to that you're not really making a convincing point.

[xs]

Whoa whoa whoa. Amazon has focused on page speed load and user experience for over a decade. Their core business is their website. They have refined and improved thousands of times. You should ask "What would happen to Amazon's sales if they suddenly stopped caring about page speed?" The answer is over time they will add additional bloaty libraries and it will eventually slow down to a horrible crawl. This will likely start turning customers away who want a better user experience.

On a daily basis I have to interact with HPE's website. Now THAT's a company that could care less about their user's experience on their website. Pages take on average 20 seconds to load and sometimes up to 3 minutes! They are lucky that it's not their website that is their business but it's their products or else they'd lose business so fast. I absolutely HATE interacting with their site because of how slow it is. I can deal with bad UX if the site is quick to load, but I can't deal with bad UX if the site is extremely slow.

Another thing to think about is simple single content pages, like ones that just tell you the time, or tell you what your IP address is. The ones at the top of Google searches pay extremely close attention to page speed load times. There is so much competition in their space that they know they need to be the best and that is just another way to do that.

[yellowbeard]

From Amazon's perspective it's the same and worth optimizing

[huac]

No, it's not. If a user chooses a 'no purchase' option then it means that the product assortment offered was not worth it for the price. That means Amazon needs to change the assortments of products it offers users. If a user chooses to purchase elsewhere, it means Amazon needs to improve the website.

[benologist]

https://lite.twitter.com just launched, eventually that may show a preference either way.

[Radle]

Twitter is a page with only one feature. Lite.Twitter is a version of that feature for a very specific subset of mobile users.

In 99,9% of cases it's not worth it to go ultra lightweight.

[jonahx]

The market votes for bloatware because people are lazy.

If you are someone who cares about speed and simplicity and generally doing things right, I don't see how this fact relevant to the current discussion. Sure, frameworks like mini won't be as popular as bootstrap. But there are plenty of people, myself included, who'd rather use them.

[Radle]

Mini is 7kb; Bootstrap 20kb

Your users simply won't notice the difference. If you for whatever reason need to include a picture on your page it's going to be bigger than the ultra lightweight bootstrap page.