It does really matter - the landing page loads 1.9MB of content. This is easily 10x the size one should expect from a landing page. It's reasonable to assume that the app itself would follow similar proportions, and that means (most likely) load times upwards of 45 seconds. No thanks.

45 seconds? That sounds like a huge overestimate, especially after you've cached the assets. A reasonable internet connection should shift 1.9MB in 2-3 seconds.

Depends which country's reasonable you are talking about. In my country, broadband is anything more than 256 kbps! So, to call their services broadband, almost all providers drop speed after FUP limit (anywhere from 8-200 GB) to 256kbps.

And average speed is something like 2-3 Mbps.

Shitty internet is your problem. Fix it so you can experience the internet properly in 2014.

I would disagree. Why are pages so massive? Is the page displaying pictures and text? Like it did in 1991?

If so, why is there so much JavaScript and other fluff loaded?

The increase in average pages sizes isn't really necessary. Everyone appears to be jumping on the "let's load LOADS of data" bandwagon, which isn't much fun on a mobile connection, let alone a 2G connection.

And before you say that 2G is unacceptable, let's see how well most rural areas cope, or how well you do in a valley in Wales.

Yes, poor Internet connectivity is not great, but let's not foolishly assume that everyone is on a fibre connection. I am, but others are not, and I certainly wouldn't write software in the belief that they are running a beefy development machine that I have, nor would I write software in the belief that everyone has the same network connection. (Would the argument be "buy a better computer" really be acceptable if software that I wrote ran slowly on someone's machine due to stupid non-optimised loops????)

Not everyone is experiencing the Internet the same as you, so don't assume that they are.

Or devs could stop including fucking huge but pointless assests in what should be a simple web page.

"Test on real hardware" includes testing on the reduced bandwidth that most people have.

Don't forget to make sure it works on IE6 and on an ISDN too.

The only problem here is shitty internet in 2014. No civilized country has any excuse. Running fiber is incredibly inexpensive relative to almost all major infrastructure costs. A 2MB web page is not the problem.

Don't forget to make sure it only works on 48 core supercomputers equipped with 8 TB of RAM.

The only problem here (and everywhere) is shitty developers thinking that being in 2014 is an acceptable excuse for extremely shoddy work. No self-respecting developer has any excuse. At the global scales, it must be costing trillions of dollars in wasted electricity. All 2MB web pages in the world only compound the problem when they should be < 100kb.

As with everything, there should be balance. This certainly isn't it.

Damn shitty developers like John Carmack wasting computing power on better graphics! Where's my pong!?

It took 49 seconds for me to load the __landing page__.

It would have been done in 3 seconds (which is still an insanely long amount of time) except that this image: https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nd/4.0/88x31.png took 49 seconds to load.

Chrome's network panel shows:

    Blocking ​  27.15 s
    DNS Lookup ​0.137 ms
    Connecting ​21.76 s
    SSL        ​20.59 s
    Sending ​   0.129 ms
    Waiting ​   78.344 ms
    Receiving ​ 1.252 ms

For a damn 5kb image.

If that's the case, why do we make thumbnails of pictures instead of just using an img width tag and resizing giant pictures down to thumbnail size?

1.9MB is as large as some ENTIRE pieces of software executables (though they may be dynamically linked).

EDIT: Not meant nastily, more food for thought.