Inautilo

The performance inequality gap, 2023 · When digital is society's default, slow is exclusionary https://ilo.im/zuyec

“Websites sites continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world’s users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is an ethical crisis for the frontend.” — Alex Russell

#development #trends
#society #ethics #accessibility #website #webdevelopment #webdev #webperformance #bandwidth #frontend #framework #library #JavaScript #JS #CSS #HTML

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2023

To serve users at the global P75 of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight upgrade on last year's budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. Meanwhile, web developers continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world's users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is an ethical crisis for frontend. Meanwhile, the most popular tools and frameworks remain in stubborn denial, but reality is not moved by ignoring it: when digital is the default, slow is exclusionary.

Alex Russell
Dec 21, 2022 at 5:30amWeb
Show threadrenicDec 21, 2022

@inautilo This is thought povoking - thanks... and... You don't even need a moral crusade. There is a ton of fairly obvious ways to recognize a higher value for light and fast web based software:

A faster experience is better UX = happier customers

Less egress = less bandwidth costs

Less output = less compute to produce it = less infrastructure cost

The list can go on and on.

Show threadInautiloDec 21, 2022
@renic indeed, well said: “you don't even need a moral crusade.”