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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

#211

Post by chriswarbo »

gradi3nt wrote: post #133
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…

"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." - Eleanor Roosevelt

I find it hard to take advice from anyone who makes such strong claims, in such a provocative manner, whilst failing so utterly in their own demonstration: https://imagebin.ca/v/2eeSxQABPMX9

Apparently that's "legible" and "looks the same in all... browsers".

I certainly agree that BMFW has less contrast than the MFW; so little that it's difficult to read!

For comparison, here's how MFW looks: https://imagebin.ca/v/2eeVa5QksF6e

White text on a black background, exactly as I asked for when I configured Firefox. Content taking up my whole widescreen monitor, exactly as I asked for when I made the Firefox window that size.

The only thing BMFW seems to have correct is using sans-serif font; which I expect is because I unticked Firefox's "allow pages to override these fonts" option. Other than that, it looks like a me-too cargo-cult of MFW which completely misses the point.

Presumably the creators of BMFW are using, and only ever test anything with, a black-on-white style which is, let me guess, the browser's default? What would that make them, in their own (jokingly "quoted") words?

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

#212

Post by bradleyjg »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #200
bradleyjg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument proves too much. If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money. The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it. Or to put it more elegantly: "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not…

>If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money. The problem with this type of attitude is that discovery doesn't work like this. Incremental improvements can sometimes work this way, but big discoveries do not. If there had been a mandate to "find a way to communicate without wires" I'm going to guess that it would not have…

Going to the moon wasn't pure science research. Such research could have been an alternative use of those millions of man-hours of effort.

That said, I do take chriswarbo's point that it could have easily instead been even more baroque weapons or proxy wars, as well as yours and manaskarekar's about the uncertainty inherent in counterfactuals. I just wanted to make the point just finding some positives is not enough, you need to look at opportunity costs. If we both look at them and come to different conclusions, that's life, but at least we agree on the basis of measurement.

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

#213

Post by jordache »

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…

network latency still fails to catch up to human awareness' time resolution.

client-side logic, done right is much improved over a server-side solution.

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

#214

Post by achairapart »

d33 wrote: post #49
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 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?

Why only jQuery, anyway?

What if browsers shipped with a repository instead of a cache? Download once, stay forever.

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

#216

Post by nickpsecurity »

K0nserv wrote: post #163
nickpsecurity wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That loaded SOOO fast on mobile with no delays or scrolling problems. Great job! Note: Might try it with NoScript later. Always a good indicator of... something...

Fun story about NoScript. I used to use AMP[0]. But I reverted that for two reasons. 1. The size of their js is ~170kb roughly 17 times larger than most of my pages. 2. It loads from a 3d party domain which means that NoScript/uBlock Origin users will see a blank white page. The project does impose some constraints that will help reduce page weight and increase page speed, but for my page sizes it's ridiculous to use…

The site certainly loaded fast. Never heard of them before. Thanks for the link.

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

#217

Post by treebeard901 »

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…

To be fair, Doom wasn't a waste by any metric. Doom has had an history altering impact on 3D engines. The huge advancements that came from the Doom and Quake engines have found their way into software that benefits society as a whole.

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

#218

Post by soperj »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #205
untog wrote: 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.

>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.

Firefox was released in November 2004.

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

#219

Post by cortesoft »

extrapickles wrote: post #196
dkopi wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with hosting JS libraries on CDNs is that the cache has a network effect. You only gain performance if the browser already has a cached version of this specific version on this specific CDN. If you don't - you end up losing performance, because now an additional DNS lookup needs to be performed, and an additional TCP connection needs to be opened. Here are a few reasons people choose to avoid CDNized vers…

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 in the US.

Latency is one of the main reasons TO use a CDN. A CDN's entire business model depends on making sure they have reliable and low latency connections to end users. They peer with multiple providers in multiple regions, to make sure links aren't congested and requests are routed efficiently.

Unless you are going to run datacenters all around the world, you aren't going to beat a CDN in latency.

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

#220

Post by ArkyBeagle »

untog wrote: post #183
harryf wrote: post #172

Earlier 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.

I'm pretty sure I had > 1024x768 graphics and have used nothing but Netscape/Seamonkey (because inertia) since the mid '90s.
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