[kilburn]

> If this were true, wouldn't it apply in equal measure to other resources?

No. On sites that buy in to react/preact, there are parts of the site that won't work until react/preact has loaded.

In contrast, the site will work perfectly fine without having loaded those large beautiful images. If done correctly, images won't even affect the layout of the page.

Likewise, it doesn't matter if google analytics and the 10 thousand myriad tracking pixels take a minute to load: users shouldn't notice any difference here.

> but if the big companies are doing something like this, then clearly the majority of people don't really care.

Companies are complicated beasts. Using react or preact is entirely a predicament of the technical team. Nobody from marketing, sales, business could care less about it.

However, marketing _needs_ (that's how they put it) those myriad tracking pixels because otherwise they can't track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Corporate wants those custom fonts and beautiful, large images because real people have said the site looks much better with them in usability tests (done using enterprise-level network connectivity of course).

Sales people will go to war over having analytics, as otherwise they don't know how effective their campaigns are, and business loves the nice dashboards there so they back them up.

The tech team decides that given the pace at which complicated interactive features are coming in going the plain html + sprinkle of vanilla javascript is untenable (partly due to whats-cool-today syndrome).

In the end you get these big, "bloated" sites as a result. What users actually want is just a small factor in all this.

[KronisLV]

> Likewise, it doesn't matter if google analytics and the 10 thousand myriad tracking pixels take a minute to load: users shouldn't notice any difference here.

So much for me being able to open 100-200 tabs across all windows on my browser without needing more RAM.

Or even using a browser on my older phone without it feeling slow/sluggish or the browser killing the battery life of the device.

To clarify for the downvoters: my point is that it might not matter for the average user for whom the site is optimized, they might be able to tolerate ads, autoplaying videos, popups, incredible waste of resources just to get visually attractive UI etc. and be none the wiser about any of it (possibly not even knowing that things could be different), but it definitely matters for people who want more out of web in regards to usability.

In my eyes, there's little difference between the current state of web and using Electron for desktop applications instead of native solutions, both seem to be driven by financial initiatives and result in a degraded experience, playing directly into Wirth's law and thus making interfacing with computers worse as a whole (though admittedly the state of the web feels more malicious than a team wanting one Electron codebase for multiple platforms).

[kilburn]

Hey, I said "users", not "evil hackers doing weird things" ;)

The sad thing is that this isn't entirely a joke. I've brought up those kind of issues in executive meetings in the past (trying to exterminate battery-draining animations being a particular crusade of mine).

The response is a mix of blank stares, mild interest... and a quick dismissal from the top dog in the room, along the lines of: "That's certainly something to consider, but I think we have more pressing matters in our hands. Let's keep these on the back burner."

I don't even try anymore :(

[KronisLV]

I've definitely run into this in my own past as well. On one hand, you can understand the business incentives - ship something relatively quickly, have it look good enough to attract attention or at least not scare anyone away.

For example, compare the front pages of SourceHut (a lovely and lightweight project) https://sourcehut.org/ and GitLab (a really good self-hostable solution with plenty of features) https://about.gitlab.com/

One of those would capture the attention of most people better, so that's what the market will optimize for at large, unfortunately also sometimes pushing focusing on other things with less visibility (to the average user) to the back.

For the simpler things, not asking for permission can be a good idea (depending on the environment and circumstances) - a line that i heard in a software development conference once was: "You don't ask your manager for permission to write tests for your code, so why should you for making other similar decisions that are essentially just doing your job well?"

Of course, then you also become responsible for the potential impact of those changes and things going wrong, so it works better on simpler cases/optimizations and only as long as the things you're changing are simple enough to have almost no impactful bugs or you have enough tests in place to catch any.

Other times you can succeed by adopting a data driven approach and a healthy helping of taking initiative: "Hey, our automated performance tests indicate a regression in page load times of X% after version Y, which, according to these random but serious looking studies and posts might result in lost potential conversions and could cost us Z$ the following year. I've described these problems and what to do in Jira issue #W and have escalated the priority to 2, so that's what i plan on doing this week. Any questions?"

[zelphirkalt]

The "if done right" portions of the comment are huge ifs though and almost no one does it right.