It's what the developers say. Every developer has latest macbook, works on a shiny new office with AC with all the bandwidth and gadgets. And they think people all around the world also has the same thing.
Whereas lots of users don't care about the AJAX loading. Users want websites to be fast and less annoying. But, developers only care about latest hot frameworks even though that will make things slow for users.
Newest Youtube redesign is the same. It consumes more cpu and way much slower than the previous one. I know because I don't have a high end laptop and 100mbps internet. It does not matter because Google employees use all the latest gadgets.
Well, pulling some JSON via AJAX and updating a small part of the page is faster than reloading the entire thing.
And yet websites are slow. That's not just "get off my lawn" crankiness, either. We're now downloading multiple megabytes, and things are rendered via javascript late in the process, so we start seeing content later than we used to, and we get the final render later than we used to.
Modern websites are largely slow and annoying, a topic that has come up many, many times--with benchmarks--on HN.
I think the biggest culprit over the web, the thing that makes me hesitant as a mobile user to visit websites willy nilly, is media content, such as images, sound, and video. Many websites look empty without media, so people splatter at least a few things on there, as do advertisements, and I think that's easily a few MB.
I also think the biggest resource that people are consuming nowadays, including well-to-do people with iPhones, is not CPU, RAM, or even battery resource, but mobile data limits.
But HTML CSS JS cannot compete against rich media, and how badly it drains the user's most finite resource of all -- mobile data. That's what makes an information lookup even on native Yelp costly to the user.
1 request pulling down 1 Mb can be quicker than 4 requests for 10Kb each.
https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-sneak-peek-at-youtu...
fyi: It's generally considered bad practice to assume bad intentions when alternative explanations suffice.
With the framing of pushing browsers to implementing the Web Components standard it seems much less evil.
I think the true motivations are likely somewhere in the middle.
This has nothing to do with "back in the old days". The web in the 90s was very often horrible, and Flash made it worse (although it's a pity Google and Apple killed it - Adobe could well have opened it when they had a chance and we could all enjoy an independent open platform - but that's a topic for another discussion.)
I took a screenshot, cropped it, saved it as PNG, and embedded it with a plain old image tag. 3KB vs. 3000KB, and maybe I lost some fancy auto-scaling magic the culled JavaScript did. Big deal.
This is a company that positions itself as the new way for creative people to make a living in the 21st century, and they need multiple megabytes and several seconds to load the 175x36 road into that future. We're not quite in the future yet, and 3MB is still a lot to ask of limited data plans.
They're probably hooking into their analytics platform.
Yes, but the bad websites in the old days didn't lug in a bunch of unnecessary js to accomplish their aim. I do think things are improving as a whole, like you do, but we're currently on the latter half of a pendulum swing from barebones to over-engineered.
And "Flash sucked" is no excuse for the web being bloated and delivering text content in ridiculously stupid ways today.
There's always been poorly-written software, poorly-created websites, bad UIs, bad UX, etc. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Suggesting that the entire web is devolving into a vat of poor decisions is, I think, a bit alarmist. Technology changes, things progress, sometimes things get slightly worse before they get better. But I think, on the whole, things are moving in a good direction. And we'll always be able to pick out a few bad examples to justify why the sky is falling. But in the end, I much prefer the current state of affairs to the way things were a decade ago.