Post

Platforms are competitions, and the web is losing. We can do simple, straightforward things to combat that decline...but contemporary frontend isn't doing those things. Why not? A consolidated thread from last week: infrequently.org/2024/10/platform…

The fight against bloat isn't just with devs. I've seen sites where half he downloaded JS was due to ad and tracking scripts. I can block them but regular visitors don't.

Absolutely, but teams can't even begin to think about getting 3p in line until they have operational control of their first-party perf. Remediation is a serialized activity, and saying "Y is bad too" should dissuade us from fixing X.

Of course it shouldn't be an excuse. Sometimes it's just the lowest hanging fruit. I rarely see any good criticism of why big tech firms need to send me 100s of kB of js just to know someone clicked an ad or visited. Feels like big potential improvement for perfomance and privacy.