degradation.
Web developers worldwide take note.
This is a concept which you need to be familiar with! Did nobody tell you this in your 5-day Web development course?
Obviously not, because so many sites I see nowadays whore jQuery/Prototype/MooTools to the point where a page is unusable on low-memory systems.
The Web isn’t meant to have “minimum system requirements”, yet to reasonably browse the Web nowadays you need a system capable of playing at least Crysis before you can even THINK about browsing many modern Web pages.
Emma is often forwarding me cool StumbleUpon finds via e-mail and Twitter and while Google Apps and Twitter work fine with low-RAM systems;
- Wordpress
- Slashdot (you’d think Geeknet would know better)
- 80% of the rest of the Web
take multiple minutes to load with any less than 1GB RAM. This is unacceptable! All your corner cutting to save a few hours of effort is going to cost your client many times that in customers lost to 150sec+ loading times, is going to piss your users off no end, and uses unnecessary bandwidth.
I for one eschew “cool features” in lieu of speed, performance and reliablity. Cool features are pointless if they’re non-functional due to the rest of the page jarring the experience.
I know from experience many Web developers use either Core 2 or faster machines, or top-of-the-line Intel Macs, making Conroe multicore CPUs with lots of memory the norm in the Web development industry.
What you have to bear in mind is your machine is probably far faster than probably 90% of your users. So if a page is slow on your box it’s going to be torturously slow on a slower machine.
The next dev I see using jQuery + plugins with no fallback is going to get the entire source code of Linux 3.1 (666MB) through their letterbox.
/rant
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