https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9599905
It's an animated company logo in HTML5. The standout "feature" is that the page pegs a CPU core at 100%. Turns out that this is because the developer wanted to update the page favicon at 60fps.
In the post, the developer explained this decision:
"I got this idea in my head that it'd be really slick to animate the FavIcon to stay in sync with the logo. I love little moments like that. Others might feel that's frivolous or unneccessary but I disagree - details like that are the little moments that make the difference."
Nothing (short of taking away APIs) will stop developers from coming up with these "little moments" that will burn CPU time and battery to oblivion.
That's one reason. The other reason is that all Flash runtimes other than the heavily-optimizied primary implementation for Windows universally suck. That ends up being a rather large pain point when developers are more likely than average users to be running Mac or Linux.
Also NPAPI sucks compared with ActiveX.
Flash in its original popularity was its vector animation streaming capability, think SVG withe a timeline with streaming. Plus a decent ECMA scripting environment, and later hardware accelerated 3D apis and C++ compilation support. It's a good platform past its prime time and caught in a marketing controversy in an unfortunate mobile age.
It also had (and still has) an enormous set of language features, a billion codecs, a handful of protocols and several different scripting languages, a vanishingly small subset of which was still maintained. The result was probably the most insecure software ever to grace the face of the Earth. Running by default. Taking input on every web page you ever visited.
So it was never just a "marketing controversy". Sure, Apple and Adobe could never agree on the terms for flash on non-Mac devices. But that alone would never have been enough for the demise of Flash. Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, did large parts of the work. They were rightfully concerned not just with Flash as a vector for malware, but also the power it brought to Adobe who could single handedly decide what Flash would run and on which platforms.
I understand this argument, but I don't believe that this was primarily a marketing war. Browser plugins are dirty, they always have been. It is not surprising that the latest web standards are attempting to plug this gaping security hole.
Furthermore, all of the features you have listed were only implemented because Adobe had a huge financial monopoly on the technology.
Quicktime is a plugin, do you feel its presence? Yet WWDC video pages were not HTML5 compatible and using Quicktime plugin.
The same applies to Canvas or SVG, yes they are standards, but their performance will suck worse than Flash if advertisers start abuse animations with canvas. Best part, you can not disable canvas like you can with Flash.
Maybe if they didn't look at server response time, and only counted things like JS execution time, it would be a fairer ranking to those looking for substantive content. I'm quite willing to wait a lot longer, if it means I will spend more time reading a lengthy page once it loads, than to find a fast-loading page with little content.
That article was written 5 years ago, and while speed might not have been a huge factor back then, they could've changed it since --- certainly there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, and my experience with how Google's results have changed over time agree.
I'd hedge that 95-99% of alexa top 1000 sites could be delivered under 30kb -- just content+ css. (assuming ajax/video/fonts are asyncronous in google's algo and not counted towards load time).
In which case it's easy even for the cheapest AWS server to host and server instantaneously. I think the bigger sites have a distinct disadvantage -- they have so many tracking and ad resources, that it kills their load time.
Software architecture has a lot more to do with app speed these days than expensive infrastructure does.
Cost is only part of the equation. What about those who don't want to use a CDN for, among other things, privacy reasons?
"Do as I say, not as I do".
There are a couple of sites I visit that do this. If I leave a few tabs of imgur open in Chrome they'll consume a pile of CPU time (this doesn't always happen, so perhaps it depends which ads are on the page?). IFLS pages eat CPU and memory too (again, almost certainly due to the ad content). In both cases it can be noticeable on a powerful desktop machine, so it must be a significant drain on low powered laptops and such.
In the Flash vs HTML5 iPhone wars, people argued that if Flash was hated because of the developers who abused it, what's going to stop the same thing happening to HTML5/JS/canvas?
It's happening. Usually not on some interactive visualization game but on simple articles. And the response are things like Facebook Instant that introduce a babysitter against ambitious developers and dysfunctional organizations.
But it's really something that should be built into the web. Sites that eat up a lot of bandwidth and CPU can be marked. Sites that legitimately require more resources, are experimental in some way, can be marked by the developer as such, warning users. An article would rarely be one of those.
If no centralized measures are taken against poor UX, only relying on culture to maintain UX across the board, the web stack will meet the same fate as Flash. Competitors like Facebook Instant will route around it.