It’s an old idea that keeps resurfacing and frankly I think it misses the real problem of modern websites: they’re too bloated with code that the user is expected to run and yet isn’t there to serve the user.

I’d love to see a world where cloud computing / time sharing was tipped on its head and users and businesses could charge back their compute time spent running JavaScript trackers, analytics, etc from the sites their users visit. Of course this fantasy would never be technically possible but one can dream.

> It’s an old idea that keeps resurfacing and frankly I think it misses the real problem of modern websites: they’re too bloated with code that the user is expected to run and yet isn’t there to serve the user.

I agree that the latter is a problem with many modern websites. That, however, does not mean that this approach does not have a place; many people (especially people among the HN and HN-adjacent crowd, who tend towards simple layouts and static site generators) optimise their sites as much as is reasonably possible, and specifically, don't pessimise their sites with megabytes of tracker & ad scripts. For those people, instant.page might well be a worthwhile optimisation.

>It’s an old idea that keeps resurfacing and frankly I think it misses the real problem of modern websites: they’re too bloated with code that the user is expected to run and yet isn’t there to serve the user.

I can't find it now, but I thought there was an article recently that looked at page rendering times and how they have changed over the years (as bandwidth has also increased). In general, page rendering time hasn't decreased as much over the last few decades as you would expect, and a part of that is the amount of js (often for tracking - not to serve the user) that is pervasive nowadays.