Why are websites now less and less optimized? Because people use apps and APIs. Ergo, they're just fetching the data set.
CloudFlare Pages and GitHub Pages are bringing in a new era of fast, static websites. It isn't all doom and gloom. Furthermore, plenty of people are now using static site generator plugins with CMS like WordPress so that there's no database access required for each page load, which is really what slows things down.
Oh FWIW my personal site is static files built with Hugo SSG, and a minimum of JS. I don't think I will ever use a server-side technology for my personal site again. I do think a growing number of users are "seeing the light" in this regard.
Static site hosting with a brand name smashed onto it is a new era? GitHub itself btw is broken on palemoon for one thing. Not here to defend palemoon but it does show one thing: GitHub's frontend is over-engineered.
Not a GitHub Pages user, also not a Palemoon user, so couldn't say, but Palemoon is niche. There's not even an official macOS version.
All owned by the same company. I'd agree about it being revolutionary if it was on some distributed p2p network like freenet, torrent, ipfs etc. But to call some company doing things in a slightly different manner a new era? Come on
And if western web-devs cared so much about the experience of the users in poor countries, why haven't they optimized it already to run better on older devices?
When most people go online they go to consume content on the websites of the biggest corporations like Google, YouTube, Netflix, Reddit, Facebook, TicTok and so on.
That's what most of the internet is for most average consumers.
The fact that indie devs exist who care about well optimized websites doesn't change this.
I have nothing against the individuals doing web-development, it's just a job to eat and pay rent.
Don't know who you're referring to but I wasn't arguing against making usable products. I'm not even a web developer. I merely stated the facts grounded in the real world. Most of the web is dogshit slow. What is more likely to happen from the two: 1) Web-devs starting to optimize their code to run well on old hardware or 2) People upgrade to HW that can run the current web a little bit better.
> used in africa, india, china and most of the non developed world. Do you think these devices are in any means powerful?
I find it funny the moments the HN users try to shoe-horn the poverty of the third world into various arguments, as if that's somehow a consideration for most people in rich countries on how they conduct their lives. Spoiler alert, most people only care about what happens in their surrounding, and in their personal bubble, and that's it, and most app-devs and web-devs care about the userbase they can monetize the most, which is why some app devs, especially in the US, never port their apps to Android as well and are fine with only with the more affluent iOS majority userbase. So bringing up the third world poverty and inclusiveness in such contexts feels deeply ironic to me.
Yeah, I'd like that too, that web-devs and app devs would not discriminate between iOS and Android and all websites would run great on older machines, but that's not the truth. The truth is that most websites developed in the west are not optimized property therefore heavily favor those with modern machines and some apps are even Apple exclusive to the detriment of those left out.
I've seen Facebook offer Lite version of their mobile client and messaging apps but that's only due to their huge userbase in the developing world, which like ou said, owns mostly low-end devices.