I'm torn here, in a way. On the one hand light page weights and other such optimizations make the internet better for everyone, on the other, there's a certain point where designing your product to target 3 decades ago (we forget 1990 was 27 years ago) gets a little absurd.
I think the greater tragedy is not that the web is bloated (an issue for sure), but that so much of America has internet worse than 3rd world mobile 2G.
The bloat affects us today. A page that's impossible to load on dialup is also going to make broadband viewing extremely sluggish and unresponsive. Each click feels like a risk, especially when even the "back" button comes with 200 ad scripts that have to spin up again.
No need to "target 3 decades ago", just be reasonable.
> Popular themes for many different kinds of blogging software and CMSs contain anti-optimizations so blatant that any programmer, even someone with no front-end experience, can find large gains by just pointing webpagetest at their site and looking at the output.
56k modem spec (V.90) appeared in 1998, so that's just two decades ago. And of course 3G networks appeared mostly in 2004 (in Europe) with (very theoretical) data rates up to 384kbps. About that same era, I recall 256-512 kbps DSL subscriptions being very common. And I can promise that browsing modern web with <512k connection (possibly with quite a bit of latency) will not be very comfortable.
I think the greater tragedy is not that the web is bloated (an issue for sure), but that so much of America has internet worse than 3rd world mobile 2G.