Possibly; I've never actually looked at how large advertising-/tracking-related JS is, compared to other JS. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was indeed rather large, but from all I hear so are many "mainstream" JS libraries.
FWIW I don't think the problem with advertising is really related to how large the chunks of JS served up are, anyway.[1] The biggest problem with advertising, in my book, isn't even the advertising; although it can be distracting, in its basic form it's no worse than, say, a billboard by the road or a print ad in a magazine.
The real problem with advertising on the web is the tracking, or (more generally) the fact that advertising has become an "active" medium rather than a "passive" one, like the aforementioned billboard that merely sits there and gets viewed (or not, as the case may be). Ads' ability to collect data and "phone home" to report said data, allowing it to be stored, collated, and combined with data from other sources, is the real problem.
That's not something that depends on the size of the Javascript blobs, though. You can do as much harm in 5 KB as you can in 5 MB.
And the problem's exacerbated by two things: a) browsers, by default, not offering control over how gets to run Javascript or what it gets to do -- in fact, browsers have been actively moving away from allowing the user to configure such things, including Firefox with its claimed "users first" attitude --, and b) websites relying on Javascript and failing to function without it. For example, none of the following should require Javascript:
* Loading stylesheets * Submitting forms (including search boxes) * Displaying images * Displaying text (i.e., anything at all)
Yet there's a large number of sites that don't manage to do some (or all) of these in the absence of JS.
I don't think this is necessarily down to evil, either ("if we'll make our site break without JS, then users will have to turn it on, and then we can track them! Muahahahaha!"). By Hanlon's razor it might just as well be down to uninformed designers who don't really understand the World Wide Web, its standards (such as HTML), and what makes good design - and what doesn't.
("Good", FWIW, is not the same as "visually pleasing". Whether such sites as the one created for that National Park font-face are visually pleasing is another question still, but as the Bauhaus slogan goes: form follows function. I'd prefer a site that's functional and beautiful to one that's functional and ugly, I'd prefer functional and ugly to non-functional and beautiful.)
As such, I see sites such as that National Park site as part of the problem (one of many). If nothing else they serve to entrench Javascript, and the attitude (and, perhaps, mistaken belief, on part of designers) that it is essential for doing things which it is in fact in no way essential for. And in doing so it indirectly helps tracking that happens without the user's knowledge or consent.
So, as for the resource constraints for JS... yeah, I think that may well be a step in the right direction[2], but I don't think it'll solve the problems with advertising on the WWW.
1. In fact one might argue, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that large chunks of JS regularly being encountered "in the wild" drove browser makers to aggressively optimize their JS engines, to everyone's benefit. ;)
2. There'll be downsides, of course. archive.org allows you to play old DOS games in the browser, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was done with Javascript. Resource limits would have to be configurable on a per-site basis at the very least, and then you're already left wondering if they're really going to be that useful in practice after all. But that's a different story.
FWIW I don't think the problem with advertising is really related to how large the chunks of JS served up are, anyway.[1] The biggest problem with advertising, in my book, isn't even the advertising; although it can be distracting, in its basic form it's no worse than, say, a billboard by the road or a print ad in a magazine.
The real problem with advertising on the web is the tracking, or (more generally) the fact that advertising has become an "active" medium rather than a "passive" one, like the aforementioned billboard that merely sits there and gets viewed (or not, as the case may be). Ads' ability to collect data and "phone home" to report said data, allowing it to be stored, collated, and combined with data from other sources, is the real problem.
That's not something that depends on the size of the Javascript blobs, though. You can do as much harm in 5 KB as you can in 5 MB.
And the problem's exacerbated by two things: a) browsers, by default, not offering control over how gets to run Javascript or what it gets to do -- in fact, browsers have been actively moving away from allowing the user to configure such things, including Firefox with its claimed "users first" attitude --, and b) websites relying on Javascript and failing to function without it. For example, none of the following should require Javascript:
* Loading stylesheets
* Submitting forms (including search boxes)
* Displaying images
* Displaying text (i.e., anything at all)
Yet there's a large number of sites that don't manage to do some (or all) of these in the absence of JS.
I don't think this is necessarily down to evil, either ("if we'll make our site break without JS, then users will have to turn it on, and then we can track them! Muahahahaha!"). By Hanlon's razor it might just as well be down to uninformed designers who don't really understand the World Wide Web, its standards (such as HTML), and what makes good design - and what doesn't.
("Good", FWIW, is not the same as "visually pleasing". Whether such sites as the one created for that National Park font-face are visually pleasing is another question still, but as the Bauhaus slogan goes: form follows function. I'd prefer a site that's functional and beautiful to one that's functional and ugly, I'd prefer functional and ugly to non-functional and beautiful.)
As such, I see sites such as that National Park site as part of the problem (one of many). If nothing else they serve to entrench Javascript, and the attitude (and, perhaps, mistaken belief, on part of designers) that it is essential for doing things which it is in fact in no way essential for. And in doing so it indirectly helps tracking that happens without the user's knowledge or consent.
So, as for the resource constraints for JS... yeah, I think that may well be a step in the right direction[2], but I don't think it'll solve the problems with advertising on the WWW.
1. In fact one might argue, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that large chunks of JS regularly being encountered "in the wild" drove browser makers to aggressively optimize their JS engines, to everyone's benefit. ;)
2. There'll be downsides, of course. archive.org allows you to play old DOS games in the browser, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was done with Javascript. Resource limits would have to be configurable on a per-site basis at the very least, and then you're already left wondering if they're really going to be that useful in practice after all. But that's a different story.
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