Interesting and at times hilarious article on web performance.

We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

» Yes, good old jQuery is at the top. JQuery was first released in 2006, which is 14 years ago in human years, but much longer in JavaScript years. Measured in Angular versions, it is probably hundreds of versions ago. 2006 was a different time. The most used browser was called Internet Explorer 6, the largest social network was MySpace, and rounded corners in web pages were such a revolution that people called it web 2.0. JQuery’s primary use case was cross-browser compatibility, which is a different beast in 2020 than it was in 2006. Still, 14 years later, a full half of the web pages in our sample loaded jQuery.
Funnily enough, 2.2% of the websites threw an error because JQuery was not loaded.
Judging by this top 10, our browsers are mostly running analytics, ads, and code to be compatible with old browsers. Somehow 8% of web sites define a setImmediate/clearImmediate polyfill for a feature that isn’t on track to be implemented by any browser. «

read the rest at:
https://catchjs.com/Blog/PerformanceInTheWild

alternately at:
https://itnext.io/we-rendered-a-million-web-pages-to-find-out-what-makes-the-web-slow-72bbba9ade96