At a certain point it makes more sense to subsidize better low-end hardware than to make every web site usable on a 20 year old flip phone. I’d argue that if saving 32 kB is considered a big win, you’re well past that point. Get that homeless guy a £50 phone and quit wasting the time of a bunch of engineers who make more than that in an hour.
Get that homeless guy a home.
Also, if you are in a basement/mountains/middle of Siberia, waiting for 32 kB takes quite some time.
I’m all for ending homelessness, but that’s really a different problem than we were discussing. I’m pretty confident jQuery isn’t stopping anyone from being housed.
Anyway, there’s no way you’re gonna convince me 32 kB is a lot of data. It’s just not. Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second. Just the text of this thread is probably more than 32 kB. If you can’t download that much data, you only technically have Internet service at all.
Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second.
Even 3G is not always avaliable, even 3G sometimes slower than 2G.
32 KB here, 32 KB there and boom - you have bitbucket.
Also, engieneers already had tech debt of updating to new jQuery version, which can result in a lot of wierd bugs, so it was achiveing two goals at once.
And probably 50£ phone IS their target device.