Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.
Also please consider how many seconds will it take for a cheap Android phone to parse 5 Mb of JS (and how much memory it would take after parsing, which can be up to 10 times more that original code size). I think it can become much more than 8 seconds, and during parsing the browser will likely become unresponsive.
Should try all your Dev and browsing on a 2gb low end Chromebook, and last gen lower end phone for a couple months. Then see how you feel about it all.
I develop apps for tvs, so size and performance matters a lot since they are a lot of tvs already shipped with low end SOCs. newer ones are more powerful, but people doesn't change tv as frequently as phones.
Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.