by joshstrange | 2025-04-29 19:57:27+00:00
I'm not a huge fan of the "let me tell you a story - ok, that was all made up"-hook. I was interested in finding out what the root problem was but instead this was all we got:

> I made that up. Not all of it, parts of it happened. And worse stuff happens, like when I needed to pay to get my visa and the website just wouldn't work if your phone was a few years old. It likely didn't have enough RAM for it to work. How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?

"Worse stuff" and a vague story (no link/source/reference) about not being able to get a visa due to an old phone. A claim I have no reason to doubt exactly, except now this is the second time the article has mentioned a problem that it hasn't explained (to be fair, the first example was made up /s).

I tire of all the "javascript sucks" people and I assume this is one of them, looking for any reason to try and shit on javascript. The last line:

> It'll mostly consist of refactoring Javascript codebases with no test coverage.

It makes absolutely no sense, it doesn't flow with the rest of the paragraph, and other than a swipe a JS devs for not writing tests (? I assume that's what it's saying?) it doesn't say anything or make sense in context.

Are some JS sites bloated? Yes. Do some people force JS or SPAs in where they don't belong? Yes. But everyone who points this out [0] normally just says "It's bad, and should stop" without any plan forward or alternative that actually makes sense. "Let's all go back to SSG-only web pages, you don't need any JS" is just silly and no one can agree on the right amount between "No JS" and the (often) strawman "huge JS page that doesn't need it".

> Benchmarks and guidelines you've read probably say "if you show any text under 5 seconds on newest iPhone on 5G connection you get 100% Performance Score, blue ribbon and your parents will be finally proud of you" because otherwise the biggest websites build by The Best Engineers in the Entire World will not get anywhere close to 100%.

What's even being said here? I'm not aware of any benchmark that says first paint <5s is good. Also, right after that they say:

> THE LIMIT IS BASICALLY THE SPEED OF LIGHT, A LITERAL SPEED OF LIGHT AND YOU SAY TAKING 10 SECONDS TO DISPLAY 1000 WORDS OF TEXT AND TWO IMAGES IS SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF?

Is it 5 seconds? Is it 10 seconds? Is it completely made up?

Lastly, back to the title:

> I can't pay rent because devs just don't care

No. Users don't care. They just don't. You are in the minority. Oh, I'm sure you might even get the majority of people to agree that they think "websites are too slow" or "bloated", you will not, however, get any of them to change their behaviors. People vote with their feet and wallets and they have near-unanimously declared they prefer bloated SPAs over alternatives. People say a lot of things, then turn around and do something different. Look no further than reddit. There is a non-SPA version of the site yet the majority of people on the web use new reddit over old reddit [1]. I'm sure if you showed some of those people old reddit they might consider switching but they aren't seeking it out.

[0] Which, this post does not even fully touch on. There are legitimate issues but this post just hand-waves its way to "JS bad mmk?".

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/zvbm6q/what...