Alex Russell has written a fantastic series of posts on the “JavaScript-industrial-complex” where he explores how the current state of web performance has become unacceptable and how dire the situation has become:
We are not getting better UX for the escalating capital and operational costs. Instead, the results are getting worse for folks on the margins. JavaScript-driven frontend complexity hasn't just driven out the CSS and semantic-markup experts that used to deliver usable experiences for everyone, it is now a magnifier of inequality.
Each post is endlessly quote-worthy because so much of it matches my experience working on big, slow web apps which, for the most part, have ignored the lessons of progressive enhancement. Why are websites like this? Why are they embarrassing?
Well, Alex makes this great point:
Unacceptable performance is the consequence of a chain of failures to put the user first. Breaking the chain usually requires just one insistent advocate.
He then takes this one step further and argues that the biggest threat to the web is the JavaScript-ification of it; bloated, slow websites make an argument against the web ‘platform’ as a whole and might even threaten its future existence. Why not download an app if the website is obviously going to suck?
And so, to save the web, we must first care for the user—and then make our websites fast as hell.