[taneq]

I'm long out of web dev, but... is this really how (well designed) web apps work? It seems lazy, you should be able to statically generate a list of most, if not all, assets and queue them all up simultaneously.

With only a tiny bit more effort you could improve things even further by generating 'resource packs' (just zip files really) like games do, that you can load and then unpack locally.

[oefrha]

Which is why I get a heart attack whenever I hear people talk about forgoing bundlers and using esm imports for dependencies directly in production. Some will tell you that dozens/hundreds of small requests aren’t a problem since h2 can load them simultaneously in the same connection. What they don’t mention is the cascade of roundtrips as imported deps are parsed from scripts. Apparently they don’t care because they assume all users live 20ms from their data canters.

[taneq]

Sadly this seems to be industry-wide these days, so many things don't work well (or at all!) without a fast internet connection. Most recent example that's been bugging me is Explorer in Windows still connects synchronously to network shares as far as I can tell.

[oefrha]

As things get faster developers have to introduce lazier practices to maintain the same level of shittiness. Eliminate parallel request limit and they spam you with hundreds of scripts. Eliminate head of the line blocking and they come right back at you with cascade of dependencies blocking. Of course “things get faster” isn’t universal when it comes to network latency and throughput, so the experience strictly worsens for a subset of users.