Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
I have to disagree with this. Websites loaded slower because our connection was much slower. You’re comparing network speeds to page load times, which are different.
With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.
What you're describing is not a web site, but an application delivered through the web browser. Sites in the past were smaller and faster because they were just web sites. Today we have a whole host of applications delivered through the browser, with the Internet as the hard drive they're loaded from.
It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.
Gmail in 2018 feels like I'm downloading Thunderbird every time it opens. Ideally I'd only need to load it all once and then it'll be cached for faster load next time. But maybe that's too much to ask when changes must be deployed multiple times a day.
And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.
In what is most likely a parallel universe that I inhabit, websites have been getting consistently slower for a while. No amount of edge black magic can compensate for the growing bloat of fonts, frameworks, multiple-dozen-megabytes background videos, and half a thousand requests to ad networks.
> Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
I had a cable modem 15 years ago. Pages loaded faster, even though I had 1/10th the bandwidth that I do now.
Could be that web servers don't have much more bandwidth per client. Or that they're actually cold starting VMs or lambda functions instead of running constantly. Still, I agree the overall feel of the web had gotten shower and jankier over time.
With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.