Browsers are ridiculously fast! (Without JavaScript.)

http://ift.tt/eA8V8J

I'm sure this isn't really news, but I had no idea how bad it had gotten. This page, without adblock, takes some 30 seconds of video playback, janky scrolling, interstitials, and just loading garbage before you can actually read the content.

One weird trick: Turn off JavaScript. Just on that site. (In Chrome: Click the "Not Secure" (or "Secure" on better sites) next to the URL, change JavaScript to "always block on this page", then reload.) Flash should already be blocked by default. The page now loads in under a second. Completely -- I mean, the comments don't work, but that might even be a plus here.

Is that site a fluke? Well, that one is especially bad, but this one took 10-15 seconds to become useful, and it's actually pretty light on ads. Disabled JS, it loads in about exactly one second. Washington Post goes from 5 seconds to load their paywall to half a second to load the whole article, skipping the paywall, breaking the image, comments, and navigation, but leaving the article.

I mean, holy shit, when did it get this bad? JS is still important and useful, and no way I'm turning it off on Reddit, but has the entire Web gone crazy? An extra second or two would've been fine, but 10-15 seconds... Is it time for a news startup to try the radical idea of actually loading fast enough to not drive away a third of your users, or is that article hopelessly outdated, being from 2011?

I knew about noscript, but last I heard of it was years ago, when 2 seconds was considered slow, even with all the JS. Maybe it needs to make a comeback, especially with the basic functionality built into browsers like this!



Submitted November 28, 2017 at 08:14AM by SanityInAnarchy http://ift.tt/2AGsGJ2

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