The Modern Web sucks. Trackers everywhere and stuping long load times for showing nothing more than a bunch of text.

The web is slow

Think about this. Your computer can (probably) simulate a realistic 3D environment in real time, updating the screen 60 or more times per second. And yet, if you want to get basic info about a topic you are researching, you have to wait several seconds while Ads, trackers, and a bunch of JavaScript loads. For what? Basically just a bunch of text.

We have computers the engineers at Apollo XI couldn’t even dream of. But our machines still cripple when they need to load a page made with React, or open an app made with Electron.

Many say that, since computers are so much faster now, we need not worry about optimization or performance the way it was. That is true, but people take it too far. Computers now are faster, but they are also much slower than before. Programs and websites are getting more and more demanding, at a higher rate than Moore’s Law. If things keep going the way they are, we will hit a wall, hard.

Developing for the web is becoming harder and harder

I have the bad fortune of having learnt how to do web development. However, I have had the good fortune of learning it from the basics.

I was first taught basic html, along with the use of a backend language (Python with Django, PHP) so that I could serve requests made by users. I also learnt the basics of relational databases so that those users could store information on the server. For sites which need interativity, I was taught JavaScript. With that basic knowledge, you can get quite far. I build a (bad) touch-typing site. The page was made after only a month of learning, and I kinda understood the concepts behind it.

Over time, I was introduced to SPAs, PWAs, frameworks like Angular NodeJS for JavaScript on the backend, all that web stuff. It was more complicated, as in there is a lot of complexity behind it all. But the development process was somewhat improved. You don’t need to focus too much on low level stuff, but on shipping features. That’s pretty good!.

I guess, over time you forget to explicitly think about all that complexity that is abstracted away, because some years later I was forced in University to re-learn web development in a couple of weeks “the modern way”, using JavaScript frameworks, build frameworks, styling frameworks, from the very start. It sucks! The only reason I could keep along was because I already knew web-dev.

The sheer amount of stuff that simply does not make sense unless you have spend a little time without them is astonishing. Why do I need to download all these things to make a website? Why does the console throw these unintelligible errors at me? Why does the client need to download 10 MB of data to display my Hello World App? Why do people tell me to rebuild my app using the new shiny tool? Why do companies want applicants to have experience on every single new Framework out there?

We need the web, or rather the tools we use to develop it, to simplify, so that developers can actually understand it, and so they can actually make new things, instead of relearning time and time again.

The web tracks you

One of the reasons browsing the web sucks so much is that it seem like every single website wants to track you. Why? To serve Ads to you. They are reckless in the lenghts they go to in order to learn more about you and show you the perfect add so that you buy their products. Nevermind your privacy! New advancements from Google in order to neutralize Ad Blockers threatents to leave us defenseles to the surveillance and infinite scams down in the Ad hell.

We need better

We need simpler websites, which are fast to load, easy to read, that don’t track its users, with actual accesibility. Websites that actually empower the users of the Internet.