> I'd like news pages that don't empty my mobile data cap just by existing.

To be fair, this is because they mostly care about serving ads. Without the ads, the pages are often fine.

Many things are slow because few programmers (or managers) care. Because they'll argue about "value" but all those notions of value are made up anyways.

People argue "sure, it's not optimal, but it's good enough". But that compounds. A little slower each time. A little slower each application. You test on your VM only running your program.

But all of this forgets what makes software so powerful AND profitable: scale. Since we always need to talk monetary value, let's do that. Shaving off a second isn't much if it's one person or one time but even with a thousand users that's over 15 minutes, per usage. I mean we're talking about a world where American Airlines talks about saving $40k/yr by removing an olive and we don't want to provide that same, or more(!), value to our customers? Let's say your employee costs $100k/yr and they use that program once a day. That's 260 seconds or just under 5 minutes. Nothing, right? A measly $4. But say you have a million users. Now that's $4 million!

Now, play a fun game with me. Just go about your day as normal but pay attention to all those little speedbumps. Count them as $1m/s and let me know what you got. We're being pretty conservative here as your employee costs a lot more than their salary (2-3x) and we're ignoring slowdown being disruptive and breaking flow. But I'm willing to bet in a typical day you'll get on the order of hundreds of millions ($100m is <2 minutes).

We solve big problems by breaking them into a bunch of smaller problems, so don't forget that those small problems add up. It's true even if you don't know what big problem you're solving.

I have uBO, they're still obscenely large.

untrue. what bloats the modern web is the widespread AND suboptimal use of web frameworks. otherwise, making adblockers would dramatically speed up the loading of every website that uses ads, while it is true to some extent, is not the entire picture. anyways, i'm not saying that these libraries are always slow, but the users aren't aware of the performance characteristics and perf habits they should use while making use of such libraries. do you have any idea how many tens of layers of abstractions a "website" takes to reach your screen?