Yes, Bill Gates has nefariously plotted to "mop up" your data as you read his annual letter...in stark contrast to all of the world's most popular sites that don't touch your data, ever.
Once he knows what browser version you're using, he's going to steal your wife. Till death to us part, until she realizes you haven't upgraded to Microsoft Edge, the superior browsing experience, yet.
I KNOW that because multi-billionaires running multiple super large companies do not sit at their desks and think about PR releases or blogs or, sometimes, even have a computer on their desk. Yes, there are exceptions but I can guarantee Gates does not sit and write this up.
I honestly can't fault Microsoft alone per se for this, TBH. It's just, as someone said, the modern web.
The highest KB bloaty JS I see is the Youtube embedded video player (about 500K of JS and CSS). There's also a bloaty 200-300K "sprite sheet" gifs, which per the code I guess they are using as some sort of video. (I wonder if that could be optimized.)
There's a lot of the usual tracking and analytic scripts, of course. Microsoft has their own in this (Application Insights) but of course you've got the Google and FB and other standard social media scripts.
It's true that it's a waste and a shame that it's the new normal today. But the person is not being downvoted for pointing out something obvious, the person is being downvoted for not adding to the conversation that is relevant, the actual content of the letter.
But by all means, create a new post or link a blogpost in a new submission on how terrible this world we live in with 2MB of JS for just a bit of text. I would agree with that sentiment.
But when the topic is optimism, foundation spending, education and other topics, the size of the embedded JS is simply not interesting.
Both the content and the execution are worth mentioning. Especially on an article about inequality of access. 17MB text is not an issue if you're in one of the few broadband enabled rich locations of the world. But there are large parts of the world where you'd need a few hours on dial-up to read this article. Heck, even a sizeable portion of Americans are still on dial-up (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dvd-rental-windows-3-aol-2017...),
> Especially on an article about inequality of access
I did not read the full article, only skimmed. If this is mentioned then yes, it's very relevant and indeed valuable to discuss. Thanks for bringing that up and I agree, 17MB is not very accessible, and bit weird to talk about inequality of access when serving so huge pages that won't even work in some parts of the world.
With that said, tcd did not mention the same things as you did. There was no reaction about "article about inequality of access when your site is not accessible!", but more of a knee-jerk reaction of "Large JS, boo!". That's the part that is not constructive and I'm guessing, is why it was downvoted.
>I did not read the full article, only skimmed. If this is mentioned then yes, it's very relevant and indeed valuable to discuss. Thanks for bringing that up and I agree, 17MB is not very accessible, and bit weird to talk about inequality of access when serving so huge pages that won't even work in some parts of the world.
It's not talking directly about inequality of access to websites. But inequality of access to education, vaccinations and other things is one of the general themes in the blog post. So it's only slightly hypocritical.
>With that said, tcd did not mention the same things as you did. There was no reaction about "article about inequality of access when your site is not accessible!", but more of a knee-jerk reaction of "Large JS, boo!". That's the part that is not constructive and I'm guessing, is why it was downvoted.
True, I think the comments might really be the wrong place to bring this up. It would be kind of cool to have the ranking algorithms on Google, Reddit, HN and other webpages downrank pages with large non-content sections. I'm not sure if such a metric is feasible without accidentally blocking some good pages, but we need harder measures to fight this internet cancer.
> But when the topic is optimism, foundation spending, education and other topics, the size of the embedded JS is simply not interesting.
Okay, look at it this way. If it was all about the foundation and the content of the page it would look like a Word Document. Just a wall of text, maybe some graphics with stats. But this is not the case here. Somehow the Gates Foundation decided they need 17MB of sugar to get this message out. If the JS to content ratio is that blatant I'd argue that they know they don't have anything of value to say.
https://i.imgur.com/5tREuGB.png
Just for a blog? Yeah, I'll pass. Anyone who wants to bypass this crap can do so here:
https://archive.fo/teorC
Guess they're liking mopping up all that data as we know MS likes to do :)