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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

#271

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…

Google is already starting to base rankings on page speed, thats enough to get companies to spend money on page speed.

Yes, this would for sure be valuable.

Also, browsers could default to http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ for sites that loaded too slowly. AdBlock Plus and NoScript speed loads greatly. Maybe browsers could do triage on sites that load too slowly. Perhaps switch to reader mode or whatever.

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

#272

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…

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

Keep in mind that the AGC was a necessary but not sufficient piece of hardware for navigating to the moon, and was extremely special-purpose. NASA had several big (for the time) mainframes that

1) calculated the approximation tables that were stored in AGC ROM (each mission required a new table because the relative positions of the earth, sun and moon was different)

2) reduced soundings from earth-based radars to periodically update the AGC's concept of its position.

3) other things that I've forgotten

In other words, the AGC required the assistance of a ground-based computer with dozens of megabytes of RAM and hundreds of megabytes of storage. That will fit on your phone quite easily, but let's not minimize the requirements for celestial navigation.

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

#273
post #12

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\

The community is the worst. The adds whole jQuery comes from every single js topic on SO in the past five+ years being answered by "just use jquery". Many times they are not even web related at all. > "How do you do something in javascript?" > "With jQuery you do it like this..." I had the worst time ever when I had to work with jscript. I really wonder if my dislike of the language comes from the language itself or…

Sorry for the political tangent, but this reminds me of how much I dislike Hillary: I really wonder how much of it comes not from my dislike of her, but rather of her snide, obnoxious, condescending supporters. I hate them so much I'd almost rather vote for Cruz even though rationally I know he'd be much worse from my perspective. But I feel I'd rather have Trump or Cruz or any Republican really, just to spite the Hillary supporters.

So yeah, I think the community that arises around something or someone can really affect your perception of that thing or person, and make you lose your objectivity.

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

#274

Google developed SPDY, an efficient binary representation of HTTP messages. Maybe they will do the same thing but for HTML. It would be much more efficient if one could design a binary representation of HTML that can only express well-formed HTML.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML

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

#275
post #161

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 think a plugin that enables the chrome "regular 2G" throttling (developer tools / network tab), permanently, for anyone that works in marketing or web development might help :) Edit: Joking aside, that throttling feature is a nice easy way to let a dev team, or business counterpart, see what their site is like for say, a customer with a low-end DSL connection: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools…

To me the bigger problem is the javascript bloat making it crawl on a mobile device with 1Gb of ram and a 1.3 ghz processor.

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

#276
post #161

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 think a plugin that enables the chrome "regular 2G" throttling (developer tools / network tab), permanently, for anyone that works in marketing or web development might help :) Edit: Joking aside, that throttling feature is a nice easy way to let a dev team, or business counterpart, see what their site is like for say, a customer with a low-end DSL connection: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools…

Sounds like the perfect addition to corporate provisioning policies/profiles for all their machines!

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

#277
post #245
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a plugin that enables the chrome "regular 2G" throttling (developer tools / network tab), permanently, for anyone that works in marketing or web development might help :) Edit: Joking aside, that throttling feature is a nice easy way to let a dev team, or business counterpart, see what their site is like for say, a customer with a low-end DSL connection: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools…

I have to think that the devs want to make the page lighter, but their managers keep pushing more tracking and ad networks at them that they're forced to integrate.

I'm sure that's true of a certain class of developer. However, given what I've seen in the frontend & JS community in past years, I don't think there is a pervasive desire to make pages lighter. If it is, very few of them are showing that in the way they actually build things.

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

#278
post #204
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was 1997, not 2007.

IE 6 was released with Windows XP in 2001 and IE 7 didn't come out until the end of 2006.

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

#279
> Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects.

Doom isn't in true 3D, its an advanced raycasting engine. The levels are all 2D, there are no polygons, you can't look up and down. Doom has been ported to a TI Calculator. Lets maintain some perspective here.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency of a new request as mentioned in one of those articles is the main reason why I self host everything. Since HTTPS needs an extra round trip to startup, it's now even more important to not CDN your libraries. The average bandwidth of a user is only going to go up, and their connection latency will remain the same. If you are making a SaaS product that business want, using CDNs also make it hard to offer a ente…

This might make sense, if all of your users are located near your web servers and you can comfortably handle the load of all the requests hitting your web servers. If the user making the request is in Australia, for example, and your web server is in the US, the user is going to be able to complete many round trip requests to the local CDN pop in Australia in the time it takes to make a single request to your server…

If the only thing you have on the CDN is libraries, it's faster to have your site host them even if it's on the other side of the world. When HTTP2 file push is widely supported, it becomes even more in favor of hosting locally, as you can start sending your libraries right after you are done sending the initial page without waiting for the browser to request them.

If you are using a CDN for images/video, then yes, you would have savings from using a CDN since your users will have to nail up a connection to your CDN anyways.

Then again a fair number of the users for the site I'm currently working on have high latency connections (800ms+), so it might be distorting my view somewhat.

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