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

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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

kevincox wrote: post #73
d33 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that a possible solution is also to better rank websites that mention the checksums of their external resources and make web browsers keep them in cache much longer... if pretty much every website uses jQuery, perhaps we should ship jQuery with the web browser?

I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser. It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN l…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by tedmiston »

swalsh wrote: post #36
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.

I wish this could be possible.

Eventually you'll have to track every minor version of every library when not every site stays up to date. At that point it's (almost) effectively a CDN.

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

#103

Post by alasano »

I'm genuinely excited by ensuring great response times and minimal load on a website.

Locally I see so many companies building good looking but horrendously optimized websites for their clientele who don't know enough to ask for it.

The last company I worked at were building a local search engine and were displaying thumbnails whilst loading full size pictures which were hot linked from businesses websites. With an auto loading feature at the bottom of the page by the php backend, an initial 5-6 Mb page load could turn into 30+ Mb within a few seconds of scrolling. Add to this no gzipping and caching was not properly configured either.

I tried my best to get some changes going but the senior (and only other) dev wouldn't allow any modifications to the current system "for the moment". It was a bit frustrating to see so many easy fixes ignored.

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

#104

Post by newjersey »

kevincox wrote: post #73
d33 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that a possible solution is also to better rank websites that mention the checksums of their external resources and make web browsers keep them in cache much longer... if pretty much every website uses jQuery, perhaps we should ship jQuery with the web browser?

I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser. It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN l…

What if the checksum was the same and you accepted the cache hit if the checksum agrees and get your own copy if it doesn't? Maybe the application should get to declare a canonical URL for the js file instead of the browser? So something like

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.2/jquery.m... sha-256="31be012d5df7152ae6495decff603040b3cfb949f1d5cf0bf5498e9fc117d546">

Would this cause more problems than it would solve? I'm assuming disk access is faster than network access.

I'm concerned about people like me who use noscript selectively. How easy is it to create a malicious file that matches the checksum of a known file?

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

#105

Post by jessriedel »

ma2rten wrote: post #100
jessriedel wrote: post #15

I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…

I thought Google already punishes slow loading websites.

When Google does this they are explicitly making a trade off between relevance and speed on behalf of the user. I'd rather leave that choice to the user, especially when the user can infer that this is the correct destination from the search result text.

Also, it doesn't work other places.

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

#106

Post by eterm »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #35
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.

And link the non-minified versions.

(but the different domains actually helps speed up loading with http because it helps parallelise transfers.)

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

#107

Post by tedmiston »

Conlectus wrote: post #28
Retric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery is not that large and very likely to be cached an a users machine. So, it's IMO disingenuous to harp on it. If your playing with larger and less 'standard' library's then that's a different story.

There are approximately 5 million different CDNs hosting different versions of jQuery. Cache hits are actually quite low.

Three popular ones is not "approximately 5 million": Google, cdnjs, MaxCDN.

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

#108

Post by alasano »

K0nserv wrote: post #75

Quite happy with my own web page/blog. Pages hover at around 10kb, 30kb if I include some images. I think the page size can be attributed a lot to there being no JS except for GA. I have taken a lot of inspiration from http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ Of course the size will differ depending on the site's purpose, but I feel like most web pages could stand to loose a lot of…

http://i.imgur.com/wB5B35g.png

My user experience was great, I have to agree.

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

#109

Post by pljns »

batat wrote: post #84
pljns wrote: post #9

The average Web page now does more than the average Doom install, I don't see the relevance of this. Although I get really annoyed when I visit a blog post whose page is 100x larger than Dostoevsky's novels in .txt format. On my blog ( https://pljns.com/blog/ ), JQuery and genericons are often my largest file transfers, but I still clock under 500kb.

https://pljns.com/ > 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow [x] check > You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? [x] assuming 404'ed fontawesome as shitty webfont, check > You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no [x] check > Your site has three bylines and link to you…

These are all good points that I knew when I hastily pushed the site last week. Still way under 1000kb!

Also, I said my blog, but serves me right I guess ;-)

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

#110

Post by snowwrestler »

The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer.

Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game.

My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating.

Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem:

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Does comparing web pages to Doom help understand or improve the situation? No, not any more than comparing Doom to Apollo memory size helps us understand the difference between a video game and a history-altering exploration.

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