Users with the fastest devices and networks -- which includes ~all developers and business decision makers -- are leaning into technologies (JS) that, by their very nature, are decreasing the reach and usability of their services for users outside the bubble.
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These devs & managers benefit from the Performance Inequality Gap in many (often indirect) ways, but not nearly as much as their now-margninalized users (and their businesses) lose.
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JS-first moves services away from a Pareto frontier. If they had continued to produce their services with ~mostly HTML, they'd maximize reach at a cost to richness. By moving it to ~mostly JS, they *think* they're keeping reach -- it's on the web -- but that's not what happens.
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If each KB of JS had the same win in richness as the reduction in reach, they'd be at the frontier, just at a different location. Instead, the marginal KB added by Babel/Webpack/NPM/React/etc. is *almost never* an equivalent win in richness as the reduction in reach.
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The cumulative impact is that the web reaches fewer people...and that's not a crisis for folks inside the high-performance bubble because they've got theirs.
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I got distracted by this when thinking through teams I've worked on/with which had slow DBs and servers vs. bloated frontends. Why does the former usually get fixed but not the latter?
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Answer? Slow DBs are equally slow for everyone. The server boundary is a *class solidarity boundary*.
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JS has broken the "we're all in it together" aspect of frontend.
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I almost think it should be forbidden to test using fast devices + network combos. In a way, it gives already privileged developers/teams a pat on the back that they’re doing good work, while in reality, they’re furthering the gap in the adoption of the web.
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For years I've fought a (losing) battle to convince my co-workers that developers should have to *work* to retreat into the perf privilege bubble. The number of times the devtools team has nixed on-by-default CPU/network throttling is something I try not to think about.
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