The State of JavaScript - The State of the Web

Rick speaks with Addy Osmani about the state of JavaScript. Addy is an Engineering Manager on the Google Chrome team, and he has been a web developer for 17 years. He has a deep understanding of JavaScript, as it is today and how it’s changed over the years, and he shares his insights in this episode of The State of the Web.

Resources for measuring the state of JavaScript:

Resources for using JavaScript responsibly:

Resources for monitoring JavaScript performance:

[eniever]

Look at that T-Shirt. I think he's a FF spy! 🦊

[elliemay]

A lot of this is due to business requirements, I.E. the trend to have the frontend completely separate from the backend so that the backend is just API, so that the same API can be deployed cross platform. That led to the rise of things like React, which require twice as much code to do the same thing just because people went "Oh cool look how fast it renders! We must build everything in React now!", and enforces all these insane rules about one way data binding for the sake of the all mighty "convention". Then usually about 30-40 libraries on top of that to get you out of the hole that React creates. The issue is not momentJS lol. But what can you do? Most businesses are way to strapped for cash and time to be worried about optimizing to that level. If you're worried about minimizing your JS code base because it's over 1mb, it's either because there is some sort of technical limitation you're hitting due to it, or you're somehow completely out of other much more critical issues, which has never happened anywhere I've worked in 15 years.

[ThadHumphries]

Greedy ads and too many ads drive users to AdBlock and Ghostery.

[rowolta]

One of the biggest problems is that developers are too keen on importing external libraries. Keep it simple folks.

[mitchelldunaway]

Closed Captions: 10:10 - "time to get interactive" / 10:25 - yes, it's Travis CI / 10:26 - "in the pull request"

[nixtoshi]

A lot more bandwidth is lost to images, SVGs and audio files. I think optimization and the recommendations are important, but UX is more important at the end of the day. Because most users will be able to load 1mb in less than 5 seconds, in return they get a nicer UX

[arbaazkhan]

is it only me or this host guy looks and sound like Will Wheaton?

[Bulbophile]

Exceptions prove rules in languages. A ratio that makes a language a language. There are more exceptions to the rules in JavaScript than what are needed to make it a language.

[herrbasan]

In the age of bloated frameworks most of what he's saying is lost on most people. The odd fact is that i have to defend my way of doing it (creating my own tooling for the task at hand) because JS Frameworks are seen as "Best Practice", which is insane to me. I usually get the same results with 1/10 of code that runs twice as fast in half the time.

[lsping]

There is framework out there that support code splitting out of the box, it's call Next.js (it's a react.js isomorphic framework)

[TheUnknownFactor]

One thing I really dislike about these types of things, and other content google puts out recently, is stuff like "promises are well supported for a few years now"; yeah, if you're talking about evergreen. Almost all actual web-developers still need to support IE11. I mean sure, it'd be better to only include those polyfills on IE11, but this whole pretense that IE11 doesn't exist or doesn't still typically need to be supported is absurd.

[SudoProgrammer]

So much valuable information at one place❤..keep doing👏

[psn]

ad networks and other 3rd party scripts that deal with user data are BY FAR the biggest problem with web performance and destroy the user experience. I wish this topic was discussed more in public mediums such as twitter, etc. Chrome has been THE leader in advancing browser features and security and I hope they consider '3rd party scripts' as an important problem.

[AungBaw]

Addy's design pattern book is epic

[samuelgrahame]

Well if someone needs that much js. It's fine if you are making a business application. Where you treat the entire js is the application.

[hrteby]

"Promises have been well supported for a number of years"
According to Google Analytics, 25% of our users are still on Internet Explorer :(
Even on Windows 10, Internet Explorer beats Edge...

[HoracioMiguelGomez]

Of all the T-Shirts in the world you woke up, remembered you had a Chrome interview and put on a Firefox 🦊 one?

[carloalberto]

Javascript has made the web a playground for hackers.

[samuelgrahame]

Why not just let the programmer export the code that is not used. From Google dev console.

[frank]

wait is that the guy who used to have long hair