Not all frameworks are bloated though. Mithril, for example, is pretty small[1].

[1]http://tobyzerner.com/mithril/#front-end-performance

Very nice. But are you sure it doesn't load things in the background, as needed?

In fact, if it didn't do this, I'd be disappointed :)

It appears that it is mostly assets and graphics that are being loaded dynamically.

I wish more front-end dev's would focus on this.

I agree, but I'm two months behind on implementing important features. While I can take a week here and there to optimize, my time is best spent delivering business value.

Unless you allow performance to genuinely suck (and I don't) slimming down web apps won't help my business make money. You get what current fashionable JS frameworks and build tools give me.

As long as your customers are in the vast majority accessing your web apps over non-cellular data connections this makes sense. As more folks are cell-phone-first, ignoring the size of the payload you expect users to accept will increasingly represent a sub-optimal experience.

It's not a question of cellular connection quality but of data quantity on a plan.

But you're not the one implementing the frameworks. For those, being slim is business value.

also, page size is not the biggest performance killer. too many http requests (for example, requests out to CDNs and advertising networks) is a more likely source of problems.

amazing that its 194kb and you think this is very small. what world are ver living in that web development has made us so sloppy and inefficient, when MB's of script downloads are considered slim.

Yes, because in 2015 194kb is so incredibly much.

Maybe the carriers' are sloppy and inefficient. See, whatever I do, when I access anything web-based on my mobile phone, it is slow. And I live in Paris.

It's funny how suposedly the 3G/4G stuff should be fast but in reality it is not, I believe that is mostly because in large areas the access points are overcrowded.

In other words, the technology used to access internet is saturated, and developpers should be blamed for having websites >200kb heavy!

Who's crazy now?

I don't disagree that the main culprit is the carriers, but access points would not be so saturated if websites were smaller.

To be fair, 194kb is pretty far from "MB's of script downloads".

Devtools says that this page is 131KB.