Maciej Ceglowski - The Website Obesity Crisis →

(The original video I refer to below is now only viewable here. A newer version of the the same talk is embedded above.)

Great talk. Page weight, speed, and JavaScript jank are constant considerations when I'm making sites, and I attribute that awareness in part to talks like this one. Being unable to view a site on my phone because of page bloat that crashes Safari or junk that actively blocks what I'm trying to read drives me bonkers.

My favorite part from Maciej's roast:

In May 2015, Facebook introduced ‘Instant Articles’, a special format for news stories designed to appear within the Facebook site, and to load nearly instantly.

Facebook made the announcement on a 6.8 megabyte webpage dominated by a giant headshot of some dude....

Further down the page, you'll find a 41 megabyte video, the only way to find out more about the project....

Facebook has also launched internet.org, an effort to expand Internet access. The stirring homepage includes stories of people from across the developing world, and what getting Internet access has meant for them.

You know what’s coming next. When I left the internet.org homepage open in Chrome over lunch, I came back to find it had transferred over a quarter gigabyte of data.

Surely, you'll say, there's no way the globe in the background of a page about providing universal web access could be a giant video file?

But I am here to tell you, oh yes it is. They load a huge movie just so the globe can spin.

This is Facebook's message to the world: "The internet is slow. Sit and spin."

Update 2017-12-30:

The embedded Vimeo video I originally included is now only viewable here. I've updated the one above to the newer 2016 version which can be embedded on external sites like mine.