Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

mobiforge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 467 posts

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#31

Post by Conlectus »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #23
warriorkitty wrote: post #4

Oh, you just want to add a class to the element? \ adds whole jQuery\ That's what's wrong with the web. Oh, and you need a loop? \ adds underscore.js\

It would help if the basic javascript api's were even vaguely useful I recently tried to force myself not to use any libraries for a simple site. After a while I realised I had so much re-invention of stuff (AJAX in particular is madness without a library) that I ended up adding Zepto With all the crap they're adding in ES6 you would have hoped they would add an ajax function at least

it's called the "fetch" API. Not sure if it's in ES6

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#33

Post by Tenhundfeld »

Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though.

1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images?

It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site.

For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS and a few 50KB images.

If we're just interested in total bandwidth consumption, then sure, total size is a good metric. If we're interested in how a user experiences the web, there's a lot of variability and nuance buried in that.

2) What device and methodology were used to take the measurements?

In this age of responsive design, CSS media queries, and infinite scrolling/deferred loading, it really matters how you measure and what you use to measure.

For example, if I load a page on my large retina screen and scroll to the bottom, many sites will send far more data than if I load them on my phone and don't scroll past the fold.

I only skimmed the article and didn't dig in to the references. These questions may be answered elsewhere.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#34

Post by robotnoises »

hammock wrote: post #16

Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?

Because we can! Games were slim back then because they had to be. Webpages are fat now because our computers are fast.

Now, if a webpage were to approach the size of a contemporary game...

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#35

Post by spiderfarmer »

robotnoises wrote: post #25

Before everyone jumps onto the JQuery/Bootstrap/etc sucks bandwagon, just a reminder that the minified jquery from cdnjs is 84.1kb. Bootstrap is 43.1kb. If you want your page to load fast, the overall "size" of the page shouldn't be at the top of your list of concerns. Try reducing the # of requests, first. Combine and minify your javascript, use image sprites, etc.

I see lots of websites that don't even cache static resources and use > 10 scripts and stylesheets, from a lot of different domains. Terrible.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#36

Post by swalsh »

warriorkitty wrote: post #4

Oh, you just want to add a class to the element? \ adds whole jQuery\ That's what's wrong with the web. Oh, and you need a loop? \ adds underscore.js\

Imagine how fast the web would be if browser manufacturers could "approve" frameworks, and store them as a "standard library" of sorts. A global cache. Then you have ONE copy of jQuery for all sites on your machine.

Wanting to use a framework shouldn't be discouraged. The issue here isn't developers trying to save time, the issue is the shitty tools.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#38

Post by VeejayRampay »

warriorkitty wrote: post #4

Oh, you just want to add a class to the element? \ adds whole jQuery\ That's what's wrong with the web. Oh, and you need a loop? \ adds underscore.js\

Well, not that adding the whole of underscore.js is reasonable, but maybe if Javascript had provided proper enumeration of their data structures earlier like all decent programming languages do, that wouldn't be an issue.

To this day, you still can't enumerate an object literal, yielding each key/value pair. You still can't properly enumerate a NodeList and Object.values is still "experimental technology".

I understand that people just abuse libraries in and out, but come on, let's not forget the reason those humongous libraries exist in the first place (and why they're having success success), it's because JS has long been crippled in terms of abstractions and people needed something to alleviate the pain.

EDIT #1: Regarding enumeration of object literals, it turns out it's actually possible, though Object.entries is still marked as "experimental" and returns an array of [key, value] pairs, as arrays, which doesn't exactly scream great design. I just wish I could do something like someObject.forEach(function(key, value) {}) (and same for map, reduce, filter, some, every, etc).

EDIT #2: The latter in my previous edit is actually possible if you're willing to create a Map from Object.entries, which you can call forEach on. Quite convoluted, but possible, so my bad.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#39

Post by Ruud-v-A »

ebbv wrote: post #6

I would argue two things: 1) This is an irrelevant statistic. 2) Even if this were true it's not that big of a deal. This is irrelevant because most people don't browse the average web page. They browse the top few sites on the internet and that's it. A more relevant statistic would be what have the sizes of the top 50 sites been over the last 15 years. I imagine they still may have grown on average, but download spe…

I care. I know a lot of people (here in western Europe) who are on a 1 GiB/month data plan. 2.2 MiB per page means that you can visit 15 pages per day. Better think twice before you click a link.

Besides, 2.2 MiB for a page is pure bloat. Unless the page is heavy on images, you can usually fit all of the content that matters in a tenth of the size. In 300 KiB you can fit a 500-word article with 160 KiB picture, a few webfonts, headers/footers and stylesheets. Using a factor ten more is just ridiculous.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#40

Post by spiderfarmer »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #33

Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though. 1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images? It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site. For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS an…

The speed index was invented for benchmarking this: https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...
Post reply on HN