JavaScript Bloat in 2024
🔗 a linked post to
tonsky.me »
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originally shared here on
It’s not just about download sizes. I welcome high-speed internet as much as the next guy. But code — JavaScript — is something that your browser has to parse, keep in memory, execute. It’s not free. And these people talk about performance and battery life...
Call me old-fashioned, but I firmly believe content should outweigh code size. If you are writing a blog post for 10K characters, you don’t need 1000× more JavaScript to render it.
I’ll be honest: I’m a bad modern front end dev.
I only have a limited amount of experience with frameworks like Vue and React.
But this blog post gets to the reason why: massive JavaScript framework bloat is often not necessary.
As you can see in this post, many of these incredibly basic sites that display text (like Medium and Substack) still require 4mb of JS code! That’s insane!
It’s like the old axiom goes: use the right tool for the job.
And maybe think twice before slapping a thousand marketing pixels on your landing page. 😅