Google Is Not God of the Web
The article is an unexpected take on what I would have assumed &quot;the basics of web development&quot; that would not be argued against. I would like to touch to some of the points here, as the arguments of the article were not very clear to me:<p>&gt; The simple assumption that it is always better to have the smallest page possible – that images should be resized and compressed to hell and typography&#x2F;other elements should be few in number.
I strongly agree with this statement overall, and the article doesn&#x27;t seem to provide any counter-arguments against it. We need to serve the smallest page possible because the larger the page, the more resources it consumes, it is that simple. Every _unnecessary_ byte added to a page literally translates to more storage for the page, more processing power to prepare the page, more data being sent on the wire, more data on the client-side to interpret the given data, and all these add up to more energy being used to consume that page and more resources being wasted. If I can remove one byte from a page, this is for sure a win for everyone, one byte is one byte, whether that saving is relevant considering the scale and the effort is a whole another discussion, and the claim was never &quot;send the smallest page at all costs&quot;. Considering the time and effort, if there is a way to send a smaller page, then do it, it is no different than turning the lamp off of an empty room, just on a different scale.<p>&gt; Instantaneous page loads should be priority over any other standards of measure for a web page – like interesting design, for instance.
I have never seen such a claim anywhere before, needs citation. As a developer, I think the look and the feel of the pages are as important as performance or efficiency, and web on its own can be used as an art platform, which would make this whole point irrelevant. Again, the overall point is this: if you can offer the same thing with smaller pages witha reasonable amount of effort, do it.<p>&gt; Minimalistic design is necessary.
I have never seen such a claim, needs citation. As a user, I prefer cleaner design over fancier things, but this is neither a &quot;rule&quot; nor the industry standard. There are various research being done on this topic and I am no expert on it, but a joint research [1] done by University of Basel and Google&#x2F;YouTube User Experience Research shows that the users perceive the cleaner designs as more beautiful, making the point that if the user perception is a goal for the given webpage, then keeping things simple might actually make a difference there. Again, depends on the use-case.<p>&gt; 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously
This is a pain I am living with every day. I have a 4 year old mobile phone with 6GB of RAM, and it takes at least 8-10 seconds for Medium to be usable over a ~100Mbps connection, combined with fetching the page and rendering &#x2F; interpreting it. This is exactly the point I was making above, if the page was smaller, it would have actually made a difference of seconds. The same device over the same connection at the same time opens the bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com in under a second, so, there is something to be seen there.<p>In addition to that, even if I had 1Ghz connection, a 1-byte waste is a waste, irrelevant of my connection speed. I am not talking of the effort of saving that byte, but it is important to acknowledge the waste.<p>&gt; Google has the right to dictate “Best Practices.”
This is a point that I agree with more than the other ones, but this seems to be a separate topic to me. The previous arguments were against the practices themselves, and this one is against the entity that is supplying those practices. Even though I agree with the majority of the points there, it would have been a more informative read if the claims and frustrations there were stated with better point-by-point explanations and data to back those claims up. Google having a huge power and monopoly to push people to certain standards is a big problem, but it is not clear in the article whether the author is arguing against the practices or Google itself.<p>Overall, I believe it would have been a more resourceful article if the points and claims against the given practices were backed by better alternatives and data. We all accept that more data is more processing power + more energy, therefore trying to minimize it is an important goal, if the author thinks it should not be, then would be more interested in the answer of &quot;why?&quot; rather than a rant against long-standing practices.