Every millisecond does count. But design is about compromise. By that logic we shouldn't use CSS at all, but we choose to pay the price of a few KBs for the returned value.
I'm all for efficiency, I'll use Zepto or a focused custom made solutions whenever I can, I'll squeeze every byte out of the images, serve resolution specific versions, gzip, etc.
But there are some compromises that I'm not willing to make. Take images for example. If I can see image quality degradation on something that I find important, I won't compress it further, even if it's huge. Add a few iPad retina display PNGs and suddenly 45KB seems like small change. Sometimes I'd rather have the user wait for a great result than deliver a poor one fast.
In the case of jQuery 2.0, dropping IE8 support seems a poor and premature kind of optimization. If your target is a memory starved 128MB iPhone 3G on Edge, than 45K for a single JS library is still way too much. Not only it would take forever to load and run, but unresponsiveness and eventual crashing would still be a problem.
I think the effort would be better spent on improving jQuery mobile. People on 56kbps connections could be running even older versions of IE.
There's also a difference when you're developing your own site compared to when you're developing a framework or library. If your library is used on more than half of the top 100,000 websites (as jQuery is) then a 45KB saving or a 100ms speed boost, 50,000 times over is a big deal.
I'm all for efficiency, I'll use Zepto or a focused custom made solutions whenever I can, I'll squeeze every byte out of the images, serve resolution specific versions, gzip, etc.
But there are some compromises that I'm not willing to make. Take images for example. If I can see image quality degradation on something that I find important, I won't compress it further, even if it's huge. Add a few iPad retina display PNGs and suddenly 45KB seems like small change. Sometimes I'd rather have the user wait for a great result than deliver a poor one fast.
In the case of jQuery 2.0, dropping IE8 support seems a poor and premature kind of optimization. If your target is a memory starved 128MB iPhone 3G on Edge, than 45K for a single JS library is still way too much. Not only it would take forever to load and run, but unresponsiveness and eventual crashing would still be a problem.
I think the effort would be better spent on improving jQuery mobile. People on 56kbps connections could be running even older versions of IE.