[Cthulhu_]

But for the slow sites highlighted, I don't understand why client-side performance and bandwidth usage apparently isn't a priority; I mean, their site, their front-end is their primary product, the thing they make money off of. A ten second load time is simply unacceptable; just look at the performance guys at Google, who have and are working hard to shave milliseconds off of page load time.

I'm probably going to offend a few people here, but creating a website without or with minimal performance optimization is just plain sloppy and uncraftmanshiplike work. Get your act together, or get a different job.

[lincolnbryant]

Right, and thanks for separating how to approach this issue in creation of an app vs maintenance. Real world issues like having a million images that are not compressed or sized correctly, or having part of an application out of your control that cannot be modernized or share assets with another part get in the way. There are companies that strive to outsource this work to a platform / appliance, like the recently acquired http://www.akamai.com/blaze instead of actually fixing/upgrading these issues (not to say that it works). After all, most companies don't have resources for their front-end devs to be profiling page loads by country and pushing HTTP performance under such dramatically different bandwidth/latency variations.

[dpcx]

You have to think about the target demographic. The guys at The Verge are probably targeting those with faster computers, faster internet connections. Google is targeting everyone.