How about browser bloat? Each chromium tab on linux takes an extra ~50-150mb depending on the site -- and I still have no idea what they need all of that memory for...
Mostly Javascript and caches.
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The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
201–210 of 467 posts
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#202The 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…
Apollo era space navigation is not that complex, mainly a matter of (i) pointing the ship in the right direction, (ii) firing the engines until a certain velocity change had happened, and (iii) assessing the result. (ii) in particular is a one-dimensional problem, and (iii) can be done by the guys on the ground via radar.
What the shuttle did was much more complex because it was an unstable aircraft that required many "frames per second" applied to the control surfaces to keep it stable during reentry and landing.
Back around 2006 or so I wrote a simple software 3-d rendering engine in Javascript that was 8k in size without much effort towards minimizing size other being (a) maybe the only AJAX application that actually used XML (to represent 3d models) and (b) using XML element and attribute names that were just one character long.
Not long after that, libraries such as Prototype and JQuery were becoming popular and these were all many times bigger than my 3d engine before you even started coding the app.
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#203> The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if you want to be a top website) Isn't that that the top websites have a lot more ressources available to improve asset management, cleanup and refactor?
This set of benchmarks is often helpful:
http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united-states/
Particularly the "last mile" or "Chrome Homepage" tabs.
They cover the top websites, grouped into categories like "Retail", "Travel", "Media", etc.
The disparity across competitors is pretty stunning, with some websites getting close to 1 second to download/render a page, and others taking 6, 7, 8 , even 10 seconds. And these are all big, well known, companies.
And, for the most part, it all correlates very well to total page weight, and total number of artifacts on the page (js/css/images/etc). There are some exceptions, but it's a pretty strong correlation.
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That was 1997, not 2007.
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
>make sure our computer was set to 800x600
Thaaaaaaaat's nonsense. I had relatively high-res CRTs (1600x1200) in the late 90s and early 2000s.
My father and I were able to get by with Netscape Navigator and Firefox for quite awhile as well.
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The software that builds and displays the experience is the browser. Most webpages could be cut by 90% and be visually and functionally indistinguishable. For 90% of the last 10%, the functionality cut out would improve the user experience, especially on mobile.
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with browsers. This is a horrible idea. Browser vendors would then have too much influence on development libraries.
It could be a 'use the default or link your own' situation, which then wouldn't influence a whole lot. But I agree, overall.
In this case, very very little would change. People would still link their own, as they do now.
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#208Earlier 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?
We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with browsers. This is a horrible idea. Browser vendors would then have too much influence on development libraries.
“We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with operating systems.”
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#209The 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…
Remember: It's not a waste if you (and millions of other people) have fun!
That's what NASA wants you to believe...
Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install
#210Is there a Chrome extenson that shows the size of a web page? There's a good one for page load time that I use, but I want kilobytes with and without cache.