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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

#181

Post by pink_dinner »

pessimizer wrote: post #171
snowwrestler wrote: post #110

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 Do…

Doom was delivering an experience far more complex than the Apollo guidance computer was. The average webpage is not. It's delivering an experience as complex as a pamphlet with a few phone numbers on it.

The experience may not be complex, but the software that builds and displays the experience is way more complex than the Apollo guidance computer.

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

#182

Post by jokoon »

ebbv wrote: post #92
jokoon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet infrastructure is far from being cheap, and CPUs are not free either. > Who cares? 2.2MB is nothing in 2016. Multiply that by the amount of internet users, and now try to imagine all the hardware running this. It's also about having a format that discourage bloat so that the web can be faster on a large scale.

What? The size of a page has nothing to do with the CPU. Most of that size is going to be in images and animation, and most web pages put basically no load on your CPU. If one does it's going to be because of badly written JS, not because of the size. Shrinking the average page size even by half is not going to "the web run faster on a large scale." Most of the time your page load speed is not affected by congestion,…

Parsing text can be hardly parallelized. Overall it will increase the price of your phone so it can show that webpage fast enough, which will be a cost of both CPU and battery. I have a shitty bi core smartphone, and it really doesn't like webpages. When you look at the source of a page, there is no justification for all of this, unless you like complexity.

I did not want to talk about HTML on smartphones, since it already seems to be non existent since apps replaced HTML, but do you really think we should have apps instead of webpages? Apps are less open. I really think HTML parsing is power intensive, and that you could actually increase autonomy and speed on HTML, instead of just having bigger batteries. Seems to be the same argument than fuel efficiency regulations.

Maybe I say all this because I like minimalism, but at the end of the day, most core formats are designed with acceptable performance in mind. In my opinion, HTML doesn't have acceptable performance.

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

#183

Post by untog »

harryf wrote: post #172
snowwrestler wrote: post #110

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 Do…

> Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes What about the question "do web pages work any better than they did in 2007?" when we were using full page reloads and server side logic instead of Javascipt tricks. I see so much basic brokenness on the web today from the back button not working to horribly overloaded news websites with mystery-meat mobile navigation I find myself wondering what have we really a…

I think you are looking at the past through incredibly rose-tinted glasses. The web has been a mess for a long time, and we used to have to make sure our computer was set to 800x600 and we were using Internet Explorer 6 in order to even use it.

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

#184

Post by detaro »

jokoon wrote: post #182
ebbv wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The size of a page has nothing to do with the CPU. Most of that size is going to be in images and animation, and most web pages put basically no load on your CPU. If one does it's going to be because of badly written JS, not because of the size. Shrinking the average page size even by half is not going to "the web run faster on a large scale." Most of the time your page load speed is not affected by congestion,…

Parsing text can be hardly parallelized. Overall it will increase the price of your phone so it can show that webpage fast enough, which will be a cost of both CPU and battery. I have a shitty bi core smartphone, and it really doesn't like webpages. When you look at the source of a page, there is no justification for all of this, unless you like complexity. I did not want to talk about HTML on smartphones, since it a…

Are you sure that parsing HTML is the step that is the biggest issue for your phone, and not e.g. rendering or JS execution? (It's certainly possible, parsing HTML with bad parsers or pathological content can take surprisingly long, but it's generally the last thing I'd expect as a reason for a browser to be slow)

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

snowwrestler wrote: post #110

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 Do…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by collinmanderson »

harryf wrote: post #172
snowwrestler wrote: post #110

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 Do…

> Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes What about the question "do web pages work any better than they did in 2007?" when we were using full page reloads and server side logic instead of Javascipt tricks. I see so much basic brokenness on the web today from the back button not working to horribly overloaded news websites with mystery-meat mobile navigation I find myself wondering what have we really a…

This website itself is not far behind, weighing in at 937kb and 57 requests: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160422_KJ_18KN/1/details/

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

#188

Post by llis »

newjersey wrote: post #104
kevincox wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think this vaguely reminds me of the Content Centric Networking developed by PARC. There's 1.0 implementation of a protocol on github (https://github.com/PARC/CCNx_Distillery). A CCNx enabled browser could potentially get the script from a CCN by referring to it's signature alone (it being a sha-256 checksum or otherwise).

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

#189

Post by sametmax »

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…

Yes but no.

    - jquery.com becomes a central point of failure and attack;
    - jquery gets to be the biggest tracker of all time;
    - cache does not stay forever. Actually, with pages taking 3Mo everytime they load, after 100 click (not much), I invalidated 300 Mo of cache. If firefox allow 2go of cache (it's lot for only one app), then an the end of the day, all my cache has been busted.

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

#190

Post by seagreen »

Oh God.

Every discussion about the web will continue to be a mess until we clarify what we're talking about.

Let's try rephrasing the title a couple times.

Rephrase 1: "The average size of a webapp is now the average size of a Doom install".

Response: Interesting, but not bad! Heck, some webapps are games. "The average size of a web game is now the average size of Doom" isn't a sentence that damns the web, it's a sentence that complements the web! (or would if it was true, and it might be for all I know)

Rephrase 2: "The average size of web document is now the average size of a Doom install".

Response: Well this sucks (or would if it was true -- still we don't know). Simple documents should be a few KB, not the size of a game.

Basically our terminology is shot to crap. Imagine if 19th century engineers used the same word for "hand crank" and "steam engine". "Hand crank prices are skyrocketing! What's causing this massive bloat!" Whelp, that could mean anything.

The best solution: web browsers should enforce a clear distinction between "web documents" and "web apps". These are two different things and should be treated separately. This won't happen though, which leaves us (the rest of the tech community) to explore other options . . .

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