Front-End: What Are We Even Doing?
Yesterday I quickly threw together a simple web app for visualizing ongoing costs and profits from a product based on configurable parameters. Since I've been experimenting with egui in the last few weeks, I decided I'd just write the app using this Rust layout library and just... make it work on the web. To my surprise, not only was the experience of developing this app straightforward but the resulting website performs quite well. It passes Google's performance evaluator with flying colours and remains snappy on every browser I throw at it.
Don't get me wrong: I am not saying I think a second-long page load and 3-megabyte bundle download is "lightweight." I'm just flabbergasted that the state of modern web development is so bad that my poorly optimized WASM binary that just draws everything to a canvas is more slick than half of websites I visit.
My best attempt at explaining this state of affairs is that most websites aren't really optimized for user experience. When I look at the homepages for web frameworks, like Svelte's for example, the first thing I see mentioned is developer experience. Guides for web developers devote more paragraphs to optimizing for search engines than human users. Between search engine optimization and anti-bot measures, it seems like automata are taking up more developer mindshare than humans.
I don't see this situation changing in the current tech-startup climate, and due to WebAssembly's performance issues I can't recommend you write all your websites in Rust, so my principle recommendation is for users, people like you and me, to avoid these bloated monstrocities billion-dollar companies seem to think can pass for websites and use privacy- and bandwidth-preserving alternative front-ends like Invidious, Redlib and GotHub. If you want to embrace the hacker in you, you can reach for tools like yt-dlp or Instaloader to fully break free of the clutches of Big Tech by storing files you care about on your device, where they can't be taken from you without breaking into your house.
Fortunately, computers are powerful and offer many ways for individual users to fight back against powerful corporations. My overarching advice is, if you find some aspect of an app or website annoying, to fix it yourself or find someone who already has, like the web was intended to work. There is hope.
