Finally someone's saying what I've been saying for half my life. At least I don't feel so alone in this now.
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I'm just now getting into Web Development. This. This is what every person in my circumstance should see.
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Caution spoilers!
Summary
√ Web page size sucks!
√ Browser RAM usage sucks!
√ Websites that detect your location are stupid!
√ Compatibility sucks!
√ DRM. It sucks!
√ #MakeTheWebHTMLAgain
Brian is batting 1000 today!!!
I learned to write HTML in notepad. Never used any of those BS sitebuilding tools.
Whenever I look at the source code of a webpage, the header alone probably contains more text than the entire HTML file would contain if I were to re-create the same page.
Of course having written sites for iMode (early form of mobile internet) phones was a big help, you tend to become creative when you're working with a hard limit of 10kb per page (including images). Still, that's no excuse for how bloated everything has become.
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aaaaaaaaaand fuck DRM.
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I hope you and other web devs like you who follow this kind of stuff and don't just slap frameworks willy nilly just coz insert big corp here is using it, will lead The Web back to glory. 
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20 minutes in and my opinion of lunduke is much higher then it ever has been. he won me over.
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Couldn't agree more with him, I can't remember the web being all that slow on dial-up (equivalent to GPRS (EDGE is closer ISDN) on mobile. Now with a 2G connection the web barely even loads 8/10 times, even relatively simply e-mails won't download.
However, tested Safari 10.1.1. No widows open uses 350Mb, once I open L1T (this page), YT (playing a video PIP), CNN it only goes up to 373Mb. That isn't all that bad really, iTunes doing nothing consumes 502Mb.
Software has just become bloated, we have more RAM now-a-days so they probably don't optimise the software as much as they used to.
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Nah. I intend to kill javascript dead anywhere I go and decrease my size.
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I am avid JS hater that's fine by me
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I remember reading something about the number of homes in the US still on dial-up. What must the modern web be like for them? I would guess on older hardware too... Must be hell.
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I can commiserate about the quality of websites. Now, I don't know if anyone else has had a similar experience with this, but I've noticed a trend over the the last 3-4 years that if there is a mobile app AND a website for any given service, in most cases, the website experience has gotten markedly worse over time, while the apps generally have stayed the same (or in some cases, improved slightly). I would have expected the browser experience to have just stagnated, but no, it's gotten worse.
For example, my parents subscribe to Winder Farms, a weekly milk/grocery delivery service. Some weeks, they don't need anything and want to skip a delivery for the week. Winder changed the website layout a couple of years ago and added alongside it a mobile app to manage your orders. In the app, it shows you a list of your next several scheduled deliveries, and you can simply uncheck the delivery dates. On the new and improved website, there is a menu option to 'skip next delivery.' It's never worked since they "improved" it. You have to navigate to a separate page to skip orders. However, this is also not without issues, because it gives you no visual indication that you successfully skipped a delivery. Instead, you have to wait and make sure you get the confirmation email stating that you skipped it. That's the only way to be sure. My mom complains to me all the time about that (so basically...every time she wants to skip a delivery).
Additionally, I use TOR browser (on occasion, not most of the time, or anything like that) and have noticed over the same time an increase in the number of pages that have become unusable unless you explicitly enable JS. Frequently, only a navigation bar will show up with no content on the page. Very annoying.
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Fuck Java. Fuck flash. The end.
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I HATE when content is dependant on JS, I feel your pain so much. If one must use JS use it to fluff things up, add something CSS can't, but don't make content depend on AJAX or something, load it from server ffs, page that shit if you have a lot of it.
Don't forget insert latest framework from big company here, coz surely if Google uses it it's good. Like it doesn't matter that your traffic is 0.0001% of theirs and they optimized for that.
Oh and ofc, fuck JS as a whole.
Well, you are using a forum software that relies heavily on JS (EmberJS) and AJAX. I don't think it's too bad, is it?
It's not bad, but I'd prefer it to be without it. Also I acknowledge the distinction between web pages and webapps.
If one is creating a web page kind of site, there's usually very little need for JS. Think blogs, articles, portfolios and galleries, et al.
Otherwise, if one is making a webapp, I can totally see the use of JS. Even though I dislike webapps, because one has little control over them unlike the actual desktop app.
Anyways, maybe I am wrong. I mostly dislike JS from the tech standpoint though, as a lang it's pretty shitty. And to all the JS devs who says otherwise, why then are you all praising TypeScript and stuff like that, and why all those langs even exist then? Coz enough people dislike working in vanilla JS.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What is shitty about the tech of JavaScript? I get that JS has certain quirks, that can be a nuisance, especially if you don't know them. But most things are just a question of getting used to something you are unfamiliar.
You can say a lot of bad things about probably just any language in computer science. But more often than not, it comes down to taste.
Why I'm asking you these questions: It seems to me (and you confirmed it in your OP), that you care more about finding anything to hold against web and JS to then yell "I always said so!!". This is a reaction that is normal, a reaction I probably have on a daily basis. I just don't think it leads to any improvement, just rants. And rants never directly lead to solutions or improvements.
There are many things you can criticize about current and passed web development. But generally making progress, even though it's not always very elegant and causes new problems, is something you cannot stop. By saying we should go back to static websites and rather write desktop apps than web apps you are denying yourself the reality we live in. Look at this forum, it is built with EmberJS (https://github.com/discourse/discourse) and I have to say, it is by far the best forum software there is.
Sure, you could go back to PHPbulletin, PHPbb and all the others with static pages, no editor. But would that really be an improvement? You could also write a standalone client for this forum, which then everyone would need to install, and I shall be damned if everyone can install it without any issues on all the different OS's we run. Oh, and don't forget about updating issues, version issues, etc. etc.
Web apps are here to stay, and that is a good thing. Not everything should be built as web app, but browsers solve a huge problem software has had over the past decades: distribution.
Is it always elegant? No.
Is it sometimes a nuisance to develop on? Too often.
Would we be better off without it? Definitely not.
(that doesn't mean I disagree with criticism on JS and it's ecosystem. I just think that rants are just rants, and if you want to improve something, you also have to come up with a better plan)
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I can't watch the video right now, but...
Really depends what you do... there are ways of getting them smaller and faster loading.
Definitely, but that's not exactly the WWW's fault.
Yeah, but there are a multitude of ways of getting the location. And location data is the smallest issue. Uniquely identifying a visitor is a whole other issue.
Don't use 800 year old browsers maybe? The cutting edge stuff is and always will be a problem, but that's with everything new in the history of ever. And there's enough tooling around to get around those issues.
Am I the only one who thinks that content creators should have a right to protect their property?
I am not advocation to make all web static. Hell, I don't want it. I am just tired of simple websites with more dependencies than Xorg. I need to wait for all that shit to load. Also the reinvent the wheel mentality is killing me. New frameworks every year that do same thing over and over again.
And I dislike JS because it's not statically typed mostly.
But hey, honestly, I don't know a thing about web dev, this is subjective I guess.