Overall, this was a good article and it had me eyerolling at some of the dumb...dumb things people do. Like the internet.org background logo continually downloading a movie. Whoever did that should not be making websites.
Likewise, I took a look at my project and was able to chop the JS size in half by yanking out some libraries I no longer use, so now the JS and CSS are each under 500K each. Still a 1.2MB load overall; but it's also cached and an app people will visit more than once.
I hate that my CSS is close to 500K though. The design itself isn't that complicated; but I'm basing it off of a bootstrap theme and until I know what I'm using I can't prune much.
And I think that's a source of some bloat: frameworks and libraries. But, It's a tradeoff; it's code I don't have to write, which lets me get a better product to market faster. Sure, I could really spend the time to prune all my assets; and i think one day that will be a good move to make. But for me, and for many other projects, it's a tradeoff.
Usually media is the big one to blame, and things like streaming a background movie and eating up hundreds of megabytes in bandwidth to display it is simply irresponsible.
In Apple's case, they probably want their images to be high resolution, which is understandable. But even then they could (may even already) run it through some compression filters to reduce the size without hurting the quality.
It's something we should all be mindful of. You can, but don't have to go to extreme lengths to reduce the size of the site. There are often some low hanging fruit you can reach for that get you 80% of the way there. And obviously if its site that people a lot versus a site that people will visit once, your priorities for optimization are going to be different.
Oh that's awesome. Would be even better if you could "start a session" navigate through your website and then see amalgamated results at the end, rather than just a single page.
Likewise, I took a look at my project and was able to chop the JS size in half by yanking out some libraries I no longer use, so now the JS and CSS are each under 500K each. Still a 1.2MB load overall; but it's also cached and an app people will visit more than once.
I hate that my CSS is close to 500K though. The design itself isn't that complicated; but I'm basing it off of a bootstrap theme and until I know what I'm using I can't prune much.
And I think that's a source of some bloat: frameworks and libraries. But, It's a tradeoff; it's code I don't have to write, which lets me get a better product to market faster. Sure, I could really spend the time to prune all my assets; and i think one day that will be a good move to make. But for me, and for many other projects, it's a tradeoff.
Usually media is the big one to blame, and things like streaming a background movie and eating up hundreds of megabytes in bandwidth to display it is simply irresponsible.
In Apple's case, they probably want their images to be high resolution, which is understandable. But even then they could (may even already) run it through some compression filters to reduce the size without hurting the quality.
It's something we should all be mindful of. You can, but don't have to go to extreme lengths to reduce the size of the site. There are often some low hanging fruit you can reach for that get you 80% of the way there. And obviously if its site that people a lot versus a site that people will visit once, your priorities for optimization are going to be different.