alt Hacker NewsMost people have phones that can handle webpages with 1-5MB JS bundles. Why artificially limit what you can do on the web? Why limit ourselves to 1GB RAM when more resources means tech becomes more useful?
Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case for most people.
Most people want their cars to be safe and convenient, and their webpages useful and rich, more so than they want to return to some idealized simplicity.
A simple webpage or blog with minimal styling that runs as an ARM binary on a TV remote is cool and fun but it’s not economically useful. It’s the equivalent of a manual scooter. We can build better apps (in the same way that car manufacturers can build less crappy infotainment systems) but optimizing for scarcity isn’t the answer in a world where abundance tends to grow.
(Edit: your downvotes mean nothing to me, I’ve seen what gets upvoted!)
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Actually a plain car would be great
I crank the window up and down 3x faster than the little button
And I could adjust my damn seat before electricity is available... sigh
You can do a lot with little, it just requires investing more in development which understandably most companies are uninterested in. Besides, plenty of websites are bloated as all hell. Why does a newspaper website, for example, have to be very much more than plain html?
Your mistake is assuming there is some correlation with usefulness and size.
The JS Gmail UI from 15 years ago was just as functional as the one today.
Websites that are supposed to be simple lists end up bloated and laggy because of really poor JS that makes one request per item iteratively to populate a list.