The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 - Infrequently Noted
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Embedded in this year's network and device estimates is hopeful news about the trajectory of devices and networks. It has never been easier to deliver pages quickly, but we are not collectively hitting the mark. Indeed, the latest CrUX data shows not even half of origins have passing Core Web Vitals scores for mobile users. Browsers will need to provide stronger incentives. This will be unpopular, but it is clearly necessary.

Meanwhile, sites are ballooning. The median mobile page is now 2.6 MiB, blowing past the size of DOOM (2.48 MiB) in April. The 75th percentile site is now larger than two copies of DOOM, and P90+ sites are more than 4.5x larger, and sizes at each point have doubled over the past decade. Put another way, the median mobile page is now 70 times larger than the total storage of the computer that landed men on the moon.

      • codeinabox@programming.devOPEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        This quote really sums up the situation:

        This is a technical and business challenge, but also an ethical crisis. Anyone who cares to look can see the tragic consequences for those who most need the help technology can offer. Meanwhile, the lies, half-truths, and excuses made by frontend’s influencer class are in defence of these approaches are, if anything, getting worse.

        Through no action of their own, frontend developers have been blessed with more compute and bandwidth every year. Instead of converting that bounty into delightful experiences and positive business results, the dominant culture of frontend has leant into self-aggrandising narratives that venerate failure as success. The result is a web that increasingly punishes the poor for their bad luck while paying developers huge salaries to deliver business-undermining results.

        The developer community really needs to be building websites that work on all devices and connections, and not just for those who can afford the latest technology and high-speed internet connections.

      • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        5 days ago

        Before the enshittification you know today, there was Flash, everywhere, whether the page needed it or not. Tech debt, scope-creep, and feature removal, are drivers of enshittification, not-at-all outside of its definition or unrelated to it, particularly where they drive forced-obselecence and unnecessary up-grade cycles, aka consumerism.

        It doesn’t have to be intentional to be enshittification. Laziness and group-think will suffice.

          • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            5 days ago

            If you don’t understand the relationship between technical debt and enshittification, how the business desire for quick and easy (and marketing friendly, user-as-product)solutions now helps drive intentional degredation, deprication, and abandonment of features later, I don’t know what to tell you. This shit has literally happened in Open-Source products.

            Enshittification, as a brand-new word, is en vogue, and its “definition”, misused as a quick-and-easy way to dismiss @SanctimoniousApe’s entirely correct and appropriate linking of it to OP, is itself an example of Platform Degredation.

            Enshittification is often consumer-driven. That is to say, “giving the users what they want”, only so long as its what the majority will go along with, and leaves-out “edge-cases” that were originally a major feature.

            Tired of supporting a feature that doesn't drive profit or has become hard to support or update after years of neglect?

            (your original devs, the ones who understand how anything marketting doesn’t care about works have probably moved to other positions by this point as well)

            Poll the users, ask them if they care about it. The fact the platforms have the data to pick and choose users who don’t use said feature is conveniently left-out