[giantrobot]

Measuring the speed of a page rendered on an iPhone 14 on an mmWave 5G connection a foot from an antenna is not a worthwhile test. If it takes 5 seconds for Twitter to load a tweet (which it does on my iPhone 12 Pro on WiFi) is that somehow better? A tweet, famously limited to 140 characters takes 5 seconds to load?

A news article or tweet takes way too long to load on my phone, it's just ludicrous that on a mid-range phone and connection it would take 45 seconds! A copy of Frankenstein[0] (~78k words) weighs in at 463KB. A random CNN article or tweet is not a damn copy of Frankenstein. There's no reason either should take more than a second to load and render.

An HTML document with a bare minimum CSS to not be ugly has enough information to render and be useful to a user. It can do that with a single request to a server. At minimum the same page rendered with JavaScript needs two connections to a server. It's also got a higher minimum threshold for displaying something to the user because the JavaScript needs to be downloaded, parsed, interpreted/JIT, then requests for useful resources made. All to do things a browser will already do for free.

There's full JavaScript applications that can't be built with just HTML and CSS. Of course they need to load and run the JavaScript. A tweet or news article are not applications. They do not need to load the equivalent of copies of Doom to display a dozen paragraphs of text or just 140 characters of text. The modern web's obsession with JavaScript everywhere is asinine.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84