Web bloat isn’t a knowledge problem Monday, January 2nd, 2017 at 11:09 pm

There is a consensus among all browser makers and lovers of the web: the current state of the web is a mess. The average web page is 2.4 megabyte big and has over 200 requests.

We spend more time waiting for trackers and ads to load than we spend reading content. Our high-powered computers and phones, our excellent mobile devices choke on megabytes of JavaScript and CSS. Code that often isn’t needed in the environments it currently gets delivered to. Code that fixes issues of the past that aren’t a problem anymore these days.

Our reaction to this is a lot of times an assumption that people use libraries and frameworks because they don’t know better. Or that people use them to solve an issue they have that we don’t — like having to support legacy environments.

I’m getting more and more the impression that we are wrong in our approach. This is not about telling people that “you don’t need to use a framework” or that “using XYZ is considered harmful”. It isn’t even about “if you do this now, it will be a maintenance nightmare later”. These are our solutions to our problems.

We’ve done this. Over and over again.

Information is plentiful and tools aren’t a problem

We try to do our best to battle this. We make our browsers evergreen and even accessible as headless versions for automatic testing. We create tools to show you without a doubt what’s wrong about a certain web product. We have simulators that show you how long it takes for your product to become available and responsive to interaction. We allow you to simulate mobile devices on your desktop machine and get a glimpse of what your product will look like for your end users.

We create toolchains that undo the worst offenses when it comes to performance. We concatenate and minify scripts and CSS, we automatically optimise images and we flag up issues in a build process before they go live.

We give talks and record training videos on how to build a great, responsive product using modern browsers whilst supporting old browsers. We release all of this for free and openly available — even as handy collections and checklists.

And yet, the web is a mess. And I’m not even talking about products that bloat because of maintenance issues or age. Brand new, celebrated and beautiful products get even the basics of performance wrong. Why?

One reason for bloat — a lack of suffering the same problems

One of the biggest reasons is that developers in general don’t suffer the same issues end users do. We check our products on fast, well equipped devices on fast and steady connections. We use ad blockers. We don’t test our products on a mobile device with a flaky connection. We don’t test them on outdated setups that may well still be in use out there. We don’t even test them on other operating systems than ours. If it isn’t broken on our machine, it is good enough to release.

This is not malice on our behalf, it is at the worst indifference to other people’s needs. But most likely something else is the real problem.

The main reason for bloat

I think it is much more likely that the code quality of the end product and its performance isn’t even on the radar of many companies. We live in a market that moves at breakneck speed. Being first to market is paramount.

Companies that are funded to create hype and get millions of users posting random stuff, liking and adding emoji or commenting and sharing don’t care if they send a lot of unused JavaScript down the wire. They want to be the first to roll out a new feature that also can be turned off a month later when people don’t want it any more. They want to be the first to have the feature or be fast to add it when a competitor has success with it.

A lot of our messaging is the total opposite of that. With good reason. This is not a healthy way to work, this is not how you build a quality product. This is how you build an un-maintainable mess full of security holes and bloat. But this is how you make investors and prospective buyers happy.

We live in a market of hype and quick turnaround and we preach about longevity and quality thinking that takes time and effort and will yield results in the long run. We are right, we have proven over and over that we are, but the business model of our quick success poster child web companies is utterly and totally not about that.

I am not saying that this is good. At all. This constant push for innovation for the sake of showing something new and getting people even more addicted to using our products is killing the web. And it is killing our community and leads to an overly competitive work environment that favours 10x developers who have time and the drive to work 20 hours a day for a few months on a product that is destined to be scrapped a few weeks after the pivot.

Our job is to battle this.

Our job is to shine a bright light on all the bullshit cinderella stories of the unknown startup that made millions in a month by moving fast and breaking things.

Our job is to push back as developers when project managers want us to deliver fast and fix later — that never happens.

Our job is to give sensible estimates as to what we can deliver in a certain time and be proud of what we delivered.

And our job is to work closely with library and framework creators to ensure that products based on things that promise “deliver more by writing less” result in quality code instead of overly generic bloat.

People don’t bloat products because they don’t know better. They do it because they want to be seen as incredibly productive and faster than others. And that comes at a cost that is not immediately evident and seems not important in comparison.

The biggest problem we need to solve is that we celebrate re-inventing our way of working every few months. Instead of dealing with our jobs asking us to deliver too much in not enough time we started falling into the same trap. We want to be seen using the newest and coolest and follow patterns and ways of working of the fast companies out there. Quality and working with the platform isn’t sexy. Inventing new things and discarding them quickly is.

No, I am not against innovating and I’d be the last to pretend that the web stack is perfect. But I am also tired of seeing talented developers being burned out. We have a 1–2 year average retention span of developers in companies. This is not sustainable. This is not how we can have a career. This is not how we can become more diverse. The ugly brogrammer is only in part our own biases and faults. It is a result of an unhealthy work environment based on “release fast and break things”. We broke a lot. Let’s try to fix it by fixing what people use, not telling them what they should be using.