i absolutely hate how the modern web just fails to load if one has javascript turned off. i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on. it’s not a hard concept, people.
but you ask candidates to explain “graceful degradation” and they’ll sit and look at you with a blank stare.
JavaScript is directly related to almost everything that makes browser tabs take up more RAM than a typical PC in 1998. There are ways to use it in targeted ways that improve responsiveness (objectively or subjectively). The web as it stands is so far beyond that justification that it’s almost laughable to even bring it up.
I run a personal blog with zero JavaScript; just HTML, CSS, and some pictures. Firefox’s memory snapshot says it uses <3MB on the homepage. Amazon’s homepage is currently giving me 38MB, and this comment section with the Alexandrite frontend is giving me 30MB. Those two may even be at the low end of what’s out there.
Oh yeah. There’s no doubt that modern web tech stacks are inefficient slop - patchwork built upon patchwork.
However, JS has been included in every major browser for well over a decade. It’s industry standard at this point, so I found the position of expecting commercial services to be backwards compatible with a 1998 browser setup a little odd.
What do you think about WebGL apps?
I don’t have a fundamental problem with web apps having access to GPU resources. There’s obviously games that can benefit from that. Engines like Godot and Unreal can directly use a web stack as a build target. It makes sense there.
In general, I don’t have a fundamental problem with any of this being there provided the attack surface area can be managed. Which it isn’t, but that’s another discussion.
I have a problem with the tools being applied indiscriminately. I’d almost say that every site should start vanilla, and you’d have to specifically justify any use of JavaScript.
then you have outlook and google docs, which use a half a gigabyte of memory each.
Microsoft Teams