Half the people in the world probably struggle to have access to a 10 Mb/s connection. Even I go to places with connections that are tenuous at best.

Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.

Size matters a lot.

There are also other factors to consider. I'm not huge in premature optimization, but damn.

Our current plan is to support the complete feature set while still supporting places with connectivity around 5Mbit/s. We are still in very early stages (we only just put out the tech preview today!) but we have some confidence that this is possible. Personally I'm more worried about the performance of layout animations (e.g. resizing paragraphs) than about download size, but again, it's early days still.

What Moore's Law giveth, React/Flutter taketh away...

Abstraction for the engineer should not come at the expense of the person on the other end of the wire.

And now that developers make the visitors pay for the load (through their electricity bill, and also through their mental state), they don't give a shit about how much the users will have to pay - and thus how much electricity will be unnecessarily wasted on a global scale.

Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.

Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster.

I for one hate pages that take minutes to load... and it happens a lot more than you’d hope.

I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections. If I do 4G speed tests up north, it's always way faster but there's also way fewer people trying to use it concurrently...

Which makes it indistinguishable from terrible infrastructure :)

More people sharing the infrastructure also means more people paying for it. So in terms of value for money London's internet infrastructure is terrible even by your very lenient definition.

(New place has 1Gbps fibre - average is about 300-350Mbps during peak times, 800Mbps+ in quiet times.)