Making the web great again

#javascript #heavywebsites

After a number of years getting increasingly frustrated at how slow websites were on my phone, I finally bit the bullet and disabled Javascript.

I mostly use my phone to read news websites/aggregator such as slashdot, which are text heavy. Javascript really only serves the useless function of serving ads, which I don’t read. I really only kept Javascript on because many sites do not work properly without it.

When I open up slashdot with Javascript disabled, I get the message:

It looks like your browser doesn't support Javascript or it is disabled. Please use the desktop site instead.

The link to the desktop site just takes you back to the same address, but in the web browser (using just the standard Android browser, as Chrome is rather heavy weight), there is the option “Desktop view”. Setting this now takes one to the desktop version of the Slashdot website. And apart from having to zoom in a bit to be able to read the text, load times are, well, blisteringly fast. Pages load in seconds, rather than minutes. And no more browser crashes. Bliss!!!!

So I’m going all retro, and reading the web like its 1996. And it is so much better!

How I fixed 20 seconds of lag for every user in just 20 minutes.

Our AI agent was running 10-20 seconds slower than it should, impacting both our own developers and our early adopters. See how I used Sentry Profiling to fix it in record time.