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0 pointsjefftk3y ago0 comments

It's the same speed/utility tradeoff that mankyd is describing. There was a whole team staffed primarily to improve speed here, but you run into issues where functionality that is very important to publishers (or that makes money for them and so is indirectly important) just needs a lot of client-side javascript.

(I used to work in this area when I was at Google)

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leeoniya3y ago

when i looked through the JS, it was not written in a way that took size or performance seriously. perhaps it was transpiled from Dart or something. additionally, i think tag manager includes an entire [likely complex] visual DOM tagging UI that gets downloaded even when not used, etc. (correct me if i'm wrong!)

embedding the youtube player downloads 576KB of compressed JS (2MB decompressed) [1], instead of 0 bytes for a cdn-hosted mp4 video; i'm quite certain there is not 2MB of value delivered to embedded youtube watchers.

i think there were/are a lot of low hanging fruit to give technical users / devs the ability to opt out of the whole kitchen sink.

[1] https://developers.google.com/youtube/youtube_player_demo

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