Linked List: May 27, 2018

Sunday, 27 May 2018

My thanks to Quip for sponsoring last week’s DF RSS feed to promote their electric toothbrush. Created by dentists and designers, Quip guides good habits that help improve oral health. To help you brush longer, Quip has a nifty 2-minute timer. And to help you freshen old, worn out bristles, Quip delivers new brush heads every 3 months (as dentists recommend). Not only does this make Quip incredibly simple, it’s also effective with a Seal of Acceptance from the American Dental Association.

Refresh your routine with the quip electric toothbrush, starting at just $25.

Tracking Scripts Make The Verge 6 Times Slower ★

Marcel Freinbichler, from the same thread on Twitter:

The Verge shows a tracking-consent message when visiting the site from the EU. Most people will click “I Accept” to make it go away, but if you don’t and hide the message via CSS, you won’t be tracked and the site is way faster:

32 vs 5 secs load time

61 vs 2 JS files

2 vs 1 MB

Brutal.

USA Today Serves Different Site to EU Visitors That Is Way Faster Than Regular Site ★

Marcel Freinbichler:

Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! 5.2MB → 500KB

They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34.

The privacy implications of all the JavaScript that gets loaded for user-tracking is alarming enough, but practically speaking the bigger problem is that it makes the web slow. Web developers, generally speaking, are terrible at their craft. 124 JavaScript files and over 500 HTTP requests for a single goddamn web page is just shameful.

Again I say: the web would be better off if browsers had never added support for scripting.