Really impressed! Took a quick look at page source, a couple of observations on why it's fast:

1. Plain, small html - page size is 6.1 kb (request took 700ms for me, I guess the server side rendering is pretty fast too), css file 11kb; note html, css and js are all properly minified

2. Font-awesome and jquery at the bottom of page to not block page rendering, both loaded throught cdn (although a fallback jQuery exists)

3. Site's own js is only 5.6k

4. No large static assets, only image on page is an svg dlogo

5. Did not check with js off, but saw hints of decent fallbacks for no-script

Truly impressive is https://www.gov.uk/

A government site, lightning fast, try the search! No bullshit design.

Yes, I'm always impressed when I have to deal with it. Truly amazing to find such competence in a gov site.

A lot of that is done in the open, too.

https://alphagov.github.io/

The uk gov website is a blessing, now leaving in the UK I can compare with the french ones and those are not playing in the same league.

My hope is that a trend towards server side, text only sites becomes a thing. You can make things beautiful with typography, and layout, without superfluous pictures and designs.

Moreover they run a/b tests there! https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/ab-testing.htm...

Not just a site too. Almost every significant government service is being migrated to that domain, linked from that site and designed to the same standards.

Holy crap. The internet on a phone can feel like this?!

I designed an API first forum written in Go, front-end in Python, that feels in the same ball park fast even for image heavy pages: https://www.lfgss.com/

Aside from making pages with few database queries, it's about removing all 3rd party dependencies and going same-origin to speed up the front-end too.

The 2 biggest things that slow me down are auth and analytics, but on the latter I trust you use an adblocker, and for auth I have a plan.

It didn't seem that fast to me compared to other sites, then I realized I'm running Firefox with uBlock while the rest of you are probably on Chrome.

This seems to rather be a case where it just happens to be crazy-fast on Chrome, whereas it does not happen to be on Firefox.

Might be Chrome pre-loading content that's behind links, which Firefox doesn't do for security, privacy, battery and not-eating-all-your-RAM-ery reasons.

I tried enabling preloading in about:config, which didn't seem to make a difference, but I'm not sure, if I did that right or if that feature is even functional at the moment. It's an experimental about:config flag after all, not a production feature.

Then again, this very much seems to be the exception on Chrome, too, so it's not exactly a reason to stop enjoying the internet without ads.

On a phone? Last time I tried adblocking on a phone I was super irritated by it. Some proxy setup that never quite worked and felt like it slowed everything down.

Android Firefox supports many of the desktop extensions and uBlock Origin works perfectly fine in it.

On iPhone you can use a safari content blocker like purify or 1blocker. On Android you can use Firefox and ublock.

Adblock on firefox on android just works.

Unless it's a Google Pixel device. Firefox on the Pixel infuriates my wife, it slow and crashes a lot. She's baffled because she watches me cruise happily with it on my Nextbit Robin.

Try Brave browser. It's a modified version of Chromium with seemless ad blocking by the co-founder of Mozilla.

Can't edit my post since it's been 3 hours, but I'm very curious why I was downvoted. Was there some negative news around Brave that I missed?

Not aware of any negative news.

I presume it was because prior to my comment, no one had yet explained to the guy that you don't need to deal with such a proxy setup to block ads in browsers.

So, your comment sort of made it sound like ad blocking not being too great for him, was because of Firefox and that Brave would be better at it, whereas it really just was because of a missunderstanding of the guy.

Besides that, Brave is also controversial. As much as some people have screamed bloody murder, because Eich's free speech was supposedly taken away by journalists/SJWs/Mozilla or whoever, a good other percentage of people do think that his donation was wrong and that he should have reflected on it and distanced himself from this (past) opinion.

Furthermore, many people think him basing it on Chromium was wrong. No matter how pissed off he might've been at Camp Mozilla, and no matter how much journalists would've slandered him again, if he started supposedly trying to work with Mozilla again by starting a fork of Firefox, there's just no way that you can work for 17 years on anything and then a few months later go "Actually, this competing product is better".

Chromium being Google software and him trying to sell his Chromium-based browser as privacy-friendly does not help it either. There's millions of lines of code in there with tens of thousands of design decisions, all made by the biggest data broker on the planet. You're not patching all of those out in any reasonable time frame.

I have uBlock.

Chrome is faster than FF with real world applications.

If you really think that's fast (and you're on the west coast...), try: https://www.changedetection.com/directory.html

Sadly it seems you can't register new accounts anymore because of their merger(?) with VisualPing, but their old site still functions for those with accounts and the speed is mindblowing as you can see there. I feel every website should strive to be like this.

And not NEARLY as fast as example.com!

Nice! The last time I had that fast feeling was with https://changelog.com/, written in Phoenix (Elixir).

lobste.rs is usually pretty fast but they have a silly and annoying April fools thing going on right now. I once did a dive into their CSS to see how they were doing collapsible tree style comments without any JS whatsoever.

https://lobste.rs

Wow, that site indeed feels fast! Is there a writeup about how it’s done?

And the software isn't just rendering the forums. It also simultaneously handles email, Usenet, and IRC relays.

Also, it runs on SQLite. I found that the most surprising of all.

Web development in D is incredibly fun. I love that I can compile HTML templates into machine code (which of courses catches template errors as compiler errors), I love how fast the result is, I love that there is a very lively collection of D packages around web development. In fact, the D package manager, dub, started as a package manager for Vibe.d, the main D web framework.

There's a bit of discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3592769

Source of the site is here: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

You can find the source on GitHub it not only runs a web server... It runs an IRC bot too and an NNTP server as well so you can download all threads and post with a newsreader / usenet client.