I think you distilled the best quote from the article. What's most interesting about this is the manifestation of tangible gains from shifting from the open web into native applications for content that isn't necessarily even media-heavy. Here's an interesting article that dovetails with the one above: Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the proble Why all these tools? I see two related reasons: emulating native, and the fact that people with a server-side background coming to JavaScript development take existing tools because they do not have the training to recognise their drawbacks. Thus, the average web site has become way overtooled, which exacts a price when it comes to speed. That’s the problem. Remove the tools, and we’ll recover speed. He doesn't touch on design and ads to monetize, but by virtue of their absence I'd guess he feels they are secondary and tertiary issues w/regards to the speed tax.The movement toward toolchains and ever more libraries to do ever less useful things has become hysterical, and with every day that passes I’m more happy with my 2006 decision to ignore tools and just carry on. Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem. There’s just too many of them and they all include an incredible amount of features that you don’t use on your site — but that users are still required to download and execute.
I'll have to give this a look-see when I have more time! My gut is that I don't use a ton of tools at work but there are a buttload of tools that help me not think about the boring parts of web development. Those tools seem great. Libraries I'm kinda in agreement with the quote you posted. But who wants to write their own sign-in code when its been done a million times?!