[b5]

For anyone thinking that this is an insignificant saving of "only" 32kb, it's really important to remember that many of the site's users will be amongst the poorest in society. Many of them will be accessing it using the oldest, slowest devices; things far slower than the average HN reader's last few phones. Anything that can be done make the site work better for them is worth the effort.

Terence Eden has a really good blog post about just this topic: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...

[icedchai]

If you load www.gov.uk, you'll see it's loading several fonts (each of which is roughly equal to the size of jquery), google analytics, several javascript bundles, and other crap. It is far from simple effective HTML as described by the link.

jQuery is probably the least of their problems. And ironically, the blog with the jquery article on it loads jquery! I realize it's not part of the same site.

[karteum]

I guess that the main benefit is not the saved 32kbytes, but rather the CPU cycles that are saved by not using jquery...

"jQuery is probably the least of their problems" : they also explicitly said that removing it was a low-priority background task, yet I like that mindset where they care about people having low-bandwidth or low-end devices "removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance"

[bergenty]

Nonsense, it’s 32kb what are you even talking about.