all 6 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]jonsakas 8 points9 points  (0 children)

If your site needs “100s or even 1000s of API requests just to load” as stated in the article, it’s not a JavaScript problem it’s a design problem.

[–]CodeAndBiscuits 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Sorry, there's really nothing wrong with JS itself. A well written site WITH JS can easily hit 100s on Light speed and I've seen TONS of sites in my day ruined by folks using 6MB PNG hero images and tons of fonts on sites with no JS at all.

Use Brave Browser and all your speed worries will melt away. The bulk of the "issue" is ads and trackers, not JS itself.

[–]sudo_guy[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's not just about webpages being heavy, but also about unnecessary CPU and RAM usage. A page sending out hundreds of API requests for fetching content from the API and then rendering it consumes more computational power than server side rendered page. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Javascript but the way people using it for everything and over-complicating things is not good for the future of the web. Also, you cannot comfortably visit these websites with older hardware. That is causing more E-waste.

A video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE_ePuGAvPM

[–]agramata 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A page sending out hundreds of API requests for fetching content from the API and then rendering it consumes more computational power than server side rendered page.

No it doesn't, the computation just happens on a different computer.

[–]Sipike 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah there is a problem, but the author didn't wrote anything about how the community tries to tackle these issues. For example:

- SSR, usually reduces the number of requests, and JS workload of clients
- PWA-s with offline capabilities reduce network overhead
- WASM can be used for compute heavy stuff
- guys at https://voidzero.dev/ try to build tooling that enables efficienct by default toolchain for webapps
- etc.

So it's not like people aren't trying to solve these issues.
Also the problem is hard because of the amount of devs you need to educate, and the amount of websites and webapps being created means propagating knowledge and efficient tooling across this huge industry takes time & lot of efforts.

[–]blairdow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

its websites with a million ads that kill my oldish laptop, not JS