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While I agree a lot of websites are needlessly bloated, its just the way the modern web works. If you try to make a website of significant complexity, you'll find yourself either using a framework, or slowly making one of your own unintentionally.
I think combating UI bloat on websites is more important than combating size bloat.
If you try to make a website of significant complexity, you’ll find yourself either using a framework, or slowly making one of your own unintentionally.
I know. However, this is not really talking about those complex webapps, but rather about informational or mostly text websites that are absurdly heavy and bloated nowadays. The usual example is cooking recipes websites - the content here is mostly just text and images, yet they pull all sort of extra elements, fancy scripts, not-so-fancy-but-actually-harmful scripts and so on. This is needless.^1^ Other great examples are news websites, which are infamous for being stupidly slow.
This isn't (just) about minimalism, not having many animations, etc. I think those are great in some contexts, but I'm mostly fine with them anywhere if they are used properly. I'd say the real issue here are illiteracy/incompetence when making a website (not compressing images, fonts, etc), the pointless scripts that are harmful to the users and the impact this has on people with worse connections than us.
Let's not forget that us, developers, tend to have better equipment than the average user, and thus are more prone to not noticing the effects that inefficient software has on the final users.
^1^ So much so, that you see initiatives such as based.cooking which, of course take extreme positions, but show perfectly well how bloated the usual places are.
Yeah I agree, text based websites, especially news sites, have no excuse being this bloated.
Let’s not forget that us, developers, tend to have better equipment than the average user, and thus are more prone to not noticing the effects that inefficient software has on the final users.
Great point that I didn't think about before.
Yeah it's very easy to forget. I have fallen to that "illusion" myself too.
Also surprisingly a lot of those flashy animation-type things are surprisingly small. Its mainly the tracking and analytics javascript bundles that you see sites like medium insert into every page that makes them hugely bloated.
Yeah true! It's honestly baffling sometimes how faster a page can load if you block stuff with uBlock or smth similar. Specially noticeable on mobile...
make a website of significant complexity
How many websites are of "significant complexity"? How many of those need to be so complex? And how many of those need to be a website?
What is UI bloat? Complex UI's?
Mainly pop-ups. Overly complicated "Consent cookies" windows, "subscribe to mail list", pressing "next page" multiple times, autoplayed videos, things like that.
Although it is true that for normal current PCs, the loading of the pages is not a problem, also if you use extensions that block all this crap of ads, pop-ups and trackers, some pages, due to a bad design or because they are hosted on a Paleolithic server, can slow the load down quite a lot, not because of their weight, but because of some connection shit, which can be also the own one.
To test the performance of the own PC, a good page is the Favorite Web Awards, who expose the best web designs, some quite heavy, but for good reasons. https://thefwa.com/awards/page/1/