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by konjin
2106 days ago
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I have and the article starts off with the assumption that it hasn't and then ties itself in knots to reach that conclusion. The network speeds have increased, network latency has decreased, the hardware has gotten faster and we're at best stuck in the same place we were in 2010. >Page weight has increased over time, but so has bandwidth. Round-trip latency has also gone down. >Downloading a file the size of the median mobile website would have taken 1.7s in 2013. If your connection hasn't improved since then downloading this much data would now take 4.4s. But with an average connection today it would only take 0.9s. The problem today is that the average website sends a couple dozen to a couple of hundred requests to complete a load. The average website 10 years ago sent a couple to a couple of dozen requests for the same thing. So after 10 years of constantly improving technology and spending $5000 on phones to keep up with the latest CPUs the performance is pretty much the same. Imagine if you had to buy a new car every 5 years to drive at the speed limit. That is the situation we are in. |
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It's not about "the web" it's about various schools of web building.
This is most noticable when a property fundamentally changes their approach (reddit) or when twitter did it a while back and then (sensibly) retreated.
A better, more sensible approach then say, graphing CPU clockspeeds, would be to fragment web development into these various schools, give them names and then characterize them accordingly.
There's really only two ways to talk about this problem: one is hopelessly divisive and factional and the other is irrelevant and useless.
That sounds unpleasant? Correct! That's why it's still a problem and getting worse.
When the "make things better" axe falls on the fingers of the "mostly harmless" it's the passions of the axe wielder that get the focus and the blame. So instead we all slide into mediocrity together. It's the path of human institutions and the web isn't immune from the pattern.