I think a plugin that enables the chrome "regular 2G" throttling (developer tools / network tab), permanently, for anyone that works in marketing or web development might help :)
It used to work; unfortunately, Apple removed ipfw from recent versions of OS X.
The new method uses dummynet and pf but isn't reliable and I've never got it to work consistently, despite trying for hours and hours.
The only method that works reliably on recent versions of OS X is the free Network Link Conditioner. It is absolutely bulletproof.
Edited to add: Network Link Conditioner seems to use pf and dummynet under the hood; you can see the rules appear. But there's an interaction with the nlcd daemon that I don't understand yet. I want to do protocol-specific bandwidth throttling and I've not got that to work with nlcd interfering. But if you can live with throttling all traffic on the box, NLC works a treat.
I have to think that the devs want to make the page lighter, but their managers keep pushing more tracking and ad networks at them that they're forced to integrate.
Yeah, but I've seen projects using bootstrap, themes, extensions, and extras... in addition to jQueryUI & Mobile all loaded... as well as 2-3 versions of jQuery in different script tags.
That doesn't reflect responsible, light-minded development. Hell, load a couple of Airline website home pages... I don't think any of them are loading uncer 400kb of JS. that's for the homepage alone. Let alone the number of individual assets being requested (less of an issue once http/2 takes hold.. but still.
This. I have my own site slim and lean even with javascript (analytics) in there and it loads in 300-500ms. I developed a site for a client that was slim and lean and then it started. Sliders, full page background images, photos of random people, 3x analytics, this and that. It became a mammoth of 2-3mb and loading times of 1.5-3s.
When we tracked conversion the best converting page on the site was one made specifically for that and it is 100kb and loaded instantly. Two images and lots of text. They still insist on slow, beautiful pages elsewhere instead of making them convert as well.
I'm sure that's true of a certain class of developer. However, given what I've seen in the frontend & JS community in past years, I don't think there is a pervasive desire to make pages lighter. If it is, very few of them are showing that in the way they actually build things.
Especially, since many frameworks are really easy to use from source (Bootstrap comes to mind), but almost nobody does... they have the framework, the patched css, and then in the project, maybe there's scss/less etc. Instead of having a project that starts off composed with the appropriate pieces of bootstrap.
That's just bootstrap, not even the shear number of jQuery UI bits floating around, and heaven forbid you see both in a project.. and all the "bugs" that the input in one page doesn't match others. sigh
That's true in some cases, but there are lots of big company sites with no ad networks that are crazy bloated and slow. Some have trackers, but would be bloated (2,3,4MB+ over the wire) without them as well.
Edit: Joking aside, that throttling feature is a nice easy way to let a dev team, or business counterpart, see what their site is like for say, a customer with a low-end DSL connection: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/prof...