Size of application in old days and now…
Maybe you still remember days where we were trying to make application smaller to fit it to floppy. UPX, ARJ and all this stuff. Then the internet came and the limits were transformed to to application size itself, but to a download time of the installer. Yes in these days every application had installer, even the simplest one. And do you remember the magic numbers around how quickly it will download on 56kbits modem? Nostalgia.
And I think the history repeats self now. Obviously nobody cares how big the application is if it’s distributed on CD or DVD, it’s big enough. Same for download. In fact I think only few of you are using CDs/DVDs now. It’s easier to download the image from internet (or the application itself). But more and more applications run in browser, using JavaScript (and HTML, CSS) for doing something useful. And though we have reasonably fast lines now it still matters how quickly the code files will be downloaded, because it might take significant waiting when i.e. there’s a lot of JavaScript files or the files are huge. Every good site is minimizing JS code and also compressing them, like the old days.
Wondering what the next step will be…
