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The 49MB web page

thatshubham.com

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Re: The 49MB web page

#141

Post by nativeit »

jopsen wrote: post #15
h4ch1 wrote: post #7

This rubbish also exists disproportionately for recipe pages/cooking websites as well. You have 20 ads scattered around, an autoplaying video of some random recipe/ad, 2-3 popups to subscribe, buy some affiliated product and then the author's life story and then a story ABOUT the recipe before I am able to see the detailed recipe in the proper format. It's second nature to open all these websites in reader mode for m…

Good sites do exist. It's just that they drown.

I remember browsing the web in 1993-1994. It was literally a list of webpages. Yahoo was there, though, so presumably they've fallen farthest?

Re: The 49MB web page

#142

Post by vunderba »

KronisLV wrote: post #86
vunderba wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA for those who aren’t aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers have a Network tab in the developer tools where you can dial down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection. Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.

I once spent around an hour optimizing a feature because it felt slow - turns out that the slower simulated connection had just stayed enabled after a restart (can’t remember if it was just the browser or the OS, but I previously needed it and then later just forgot to turn it off). Good times, useful feature though!

hahaha - I've done something similar. I had an automated vitest harness running and at one point it ended up leaving a bunch of zombie procs/threads just vampirically leeching the crap out of my resources.

I naturally assumed that it was my code that was the problem (because I'm often the programmer equivalent of the Seinfeld hipster doofus) and spent the next few hours optimizing the hell out of it. It turned out to be unnecessary but I'm kind of glad it forced me into that "profiling" mindset.

Re: The 49MB web page

#143

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #20

Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…

> We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit

Marketing dept. too. They're the primary culprits in all the tracking scripts.

Re: The 49MB web page

#144

Post by nativeit »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #134

The sad thing is, this is already a paywalled site. I’m afraid someone who wants to support professional journalism and agrees to pay ~$300/yr for an NYT subscription still gets most (all?) of this nonsense?

It's certainly one of the reasons why I ended my NY Times subscription in 2024, and split that money between recurring donations to public media, Archive.org, and the EFF.

Re: The 49MB web page

#145

Post by CommenterPerson »

alpinisme wrote: post #22
hilbert42 wrote: post #11

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

What does playing fair mean in this context? It would be one thing if you were a paid subscriber complaining that even paying sucks so you left, but it sounds like you’re not.

I am a paid subscriber to NYT and have been reading it paper / internet for 30+ years. It is an Enshittification winner in terms tracking and click bait. It doesn't feel like a serious news outlet anymore, feels like Huff Post or similar.

Re: The 49MB web page

#146

Post by squidbeak »

jaredklewis wrote: post #131

I just loaded the nytimes.com page as an experiment. The volume of tracking pixels and other ad non-sense is truly horrifying. But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads). So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg o…

Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page, what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user before they explicitly click play?

Re: The 49MB web page

#149

Post by benbristow »

Bit unfair, turned off my adblocker and ran NY Times website with cache disabled via Dev Tools, came to 3MB. Still pretty damn high but not 49MB. (Will say I'm in the UK so might be different across the pond).

Re: The 49MB web page

#150

Post by benbristow »

TheMode wrote: post #74
keane wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com

https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS

Comes to about 2MB for me, which seems to be because they've added the EU cookie policy compliance bloat (probably from a third-party). Once that's agreed to via cookies the page is 47KB.
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