There are a good number of sites now which have entirely given up on progressive enhancement and simply don't show you anything without JS... but I generally find I just don't care, and just close the tab and look at the next thing instead.
Still using them for the side effects. Its nice to be able to start reading an article immediately without waiting for the jumping around of content to stop. And actually read until the end without having modal dialogs shoven down my the throat.
And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy.
I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'
[Edit] "blogs and news sites should be static" -> this should read "blogs and news sites don't need JavaScript"
It takes more work to have a bloated JS mess of a site, than it is to have a small, simple, clean site. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot in the first place.
The lazy approach WILL lead to bloat.
No news agency is running a plain jane HTML website.
There is definitely a trade-off between ease-of-use and cost-of-use and I feel this gap is bridged by the content created by those who could not publish bare bones.
I don't understand what you mean by that. Content creators don't need to be developers for us to use simple, reliable systems.
> There is definitely a trade-off between ease-of-use and cost-of-use and I feel this gap is bridged by the content created by those who could not publish bare bones.
Yes, but I personally find the "ease of use" to be worse on heavy, slow, bulky sites. If content is "easier to use", then why are people constantly angry at slow, non-responsive interfaces? I see and feel this all the time, yet it's somehow "easier to use"? I don't see people complain when sites are fast, responsive and simple. Everyone's top complaint is that their computer/phone is "soooo slooow". Why is this, when we have extremely fast computers?
That's the problem. If you do legitimately need it, then yeah, it might be, but my experience says you probably don't need that.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I guess we're almost all on evergreen browsers now anyway...
OTOH, in Chrome the website actually works fine and feels more snappy with JS disabled. So, thanks for the tip!
This will make a few segments of people cringe because much like the topic of racism, there's a school of thought that it only counts when things are exhibited in severe forms like water cannons, attack dogs or restrictive housing covenants or otherwise people being directly being told 'no' because of superficial topics like race, gender or sexual orientation.
But as a tech guy who's slowly pivoting towards law, I've long held the belief that technology will become the next battle ground for civil rights-and has the potential to even change (in the sense of expanding the definition of) how we talk about civil rights. Think along the lines of people being left behind when it comes to accessing information they need to request public resources as more and more cities move towards online only forms, or even utilization of "entitlement programs" to pay for internet access (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-o...).
Now it may not be active discrimination in the sense that one will be outright told 'no', but disparate impact deserves to be at the table of discussing this sort of thing.
The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds
Kind of makes me miss the old plain HTML days - much less CPU intensive too.
At work we did something similar a few years ago with our Android app. We dropped support for Android 2.3 users because we only had a couple hundred of them and it didn't justify the developer cost to maintain it. WhatsApp only dropped support a month ago. I don't think that was because they were somehow less privileged than us.
The casual ageism in your comment is unbecoming. You could reconsider it.
Your making it usable for that 1%, but you're making it better for the other 99%.
[0] The ones I've worked with
Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.
source? the entire goal of AMP is to load pages quickly
Here's the current top story when I hit news.google.com in a mobile browser:
https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.was...
Loading that in a simulated 2G connection takes about 80 seconds and at least 30 seconds of that is waiting to display anything you care about. Looking at the content breakdown shows why: ~200KB of webfonts, 1.2MB of JavaScript, 275KB of HTML, etc.
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/...
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details
Loading the same page without JavaScript pulls the content render time down into a couple seconds, still over 2G:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/...
Sounds like either a configuration issue on your end or maybe your wireless carrier.
The problem is simply a brittle design which depends on a ton of render-blocking resources. The assumption is that those will be cached but my experience is simply that fairly regularly I'll click on a link, see the page title load (indicating the HTML response has started), and then have to wait a long time for the content to display. Many news sites also load a ton of stuff but since fewer of them block content display waiting for JavaScript, the experience under real-world wireless conditions is better in the worst case and no worse in average conditions.
Hacker News was pretty much the only site I visit that could reliably load quickly. m.facebook.com had a slight wait but was still bearable. I had to leave my phone for 10 or 15 minutes to get Google News.
WeChat and email worked well.
Everything else was horrible, especially ad networks that would ping pong several requests or load large images.
Opera has a compression proxy mode that helped a bit when it worked but it was still painful.
For search results, Stack Overflow, and YouTube, it was easier to easier to ssh into an AWS node and use elinks/youtube-dl.
Using SSH as a socks proxy/compression was insanely slow due to something with with the great firewall.
I don't think this has changed, at least not in general. The included roaming package is still free international 2G roaming everywhere except Mexico and Canada (which get free 4G), with "high-speed data pass" upgrades available for a daily or weekly fee if you want faster. They did have a promotion for the 2nd half of 2016 (initially for the summer, then extended through the end of the year), where international 3G, and in a few areas 4G/LTE, was free without buying the upgrade passes for most of Europe and South America [1]. But that's now over, and I believe it's back to free 2G internationally now.
[1] https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/t-mobiles-endle...
I live in California -- this is not just something people internationally are dealing with.
Annoyingly, T-Mobile's own website doesn't work properly when you're throttled to 2G speed. Found that out the hard way when I ran out of minutes on Thanksgiving and couldn't talk to my family, and couldn't load their website to add more minutes.
With iOS9+ content blockers and things like Google AMP, I think the web is a lot more usable.
Apps tend to be less bloated in terms of bandwidth as well, since they usually don't load as many assets on request.
I hate the all-or-nothing approach to shaping. At least give me 5Mbit or something!
Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better solutions and thereby make your services better. The west and the tech centers in particular is really rather blinded by the glutinous bandwidth that keeps eating up greater and greater amounts of data with only marginal improvements in outcome or user experience.
I used to work at a place that had a <1mbps modem, and a ~7 year old destkop. If their software didn't work on that, it needed to be optimized. I wish more places would test this way. Your sight may work fine in downtown SF, but that doesn't mean it's going to work well anywhere else.
I've gotten a lot of blank stares.
That's why more designers don't bother: decision makers usually respond only to look/flashiness/branding.
T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem.
While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exceed a few megabytes. I even had a few website block me because of my "ad blocker" because the adverts didn't load timely enough.
Makes me feel for people in like rural India or other places still only at 2G or similar speeds. It is great for some things, not really useable for general purpose web browsing any longer.
PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.