Live data from Hacker News

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

mobiforge.com

251–260 of 467 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was definitely speaking whimsically because it is a huge chicken and egg problem. But theoretically if every site that used jQuery referenced a version at https://code.jquery.com/ there would be a very good hit ratio, even considering different versions. However we are a very, very far way away from that.

That may seem like a good solution for some sites, but the name of the page and the requestor's IP address and other information is also 'leaked' to jquery.com. This is not always welcomed. For example, a company has an acquisition tracking site (or other legal-related site) and the name of the targets are part of the page name (goobler, foxulus, etc.) which get sent as the referrer page and IP address to jquery.com…

But it's only leaked when you don't have it cached. Otherwise the client doesn't even make the request.

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

#252

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…

the Disconnect Me (https://disconnect.me) add-on is doing something sort of similar. It will try blocking the useless external content (tracking, etc.) and will show you how much your loading time decreased and how many KB you saved by not loading those.

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

#253
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…

No need for a plugin if you are running Linux or OSX:

# Bandwidth trottling, enabling 150kB/s on port 80

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 15KByte/s

sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

# Bandwidth trottling, disable

sudo ipfw delete 1

More useful stuff here as well, please star the repo :) https://github.com/logotype/useful-unix-stuff/blob/master/us...

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/2…

I'm a fan of white-on-black too, but whatever setting/addon you are using to acheive that effect seems to be very broken. It's unfair to blame BMFW for a problem created by, and unique to, your specific configuration.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/2…

"I messed up my browser's settings, and now I'm upset that my browser looks messed up."

> "I messed up my browser's settings" ...

Wrong. I changed my browser's settings to perfectly reasonable values. White text on a black background. Now I'm reasonably upset because my browser looks messed up.

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

#256
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…

No need for a plugin if you are running Linux or OSX: # Bandwidth trottling, enabling 150kB/s on port 80 sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 15KByte/s sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80 # Bandwidth trottling, disable sudo ipfw delete 1 More useful stuff here as well, please star the repo :) https://github.com/logotype/useful-unix-stuff/blob/master/us...

It used to work; unfortunately, Apple removed ipfw from recent versions of OS X.

The new method uses dummynet and pf but isn't reliable and I've never got it to work consistently, despite trying for hours and hours.

The only method that works reliably on recent versions of OS X is the free Network Link Conditioner. It is absolutely bulletproof.

Edited to add: Network Link Conditioner seems to use pf and dummynet under the hood; you can see the rules appear. But there's an interaction with the nlcd daemon that I don't understand yet. I want to do protocol-specific bandwidth throttling and I've not got that to work with nlcd interfering. But if you can live with throttling all traffic on the box, NLC works a treat.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/2…

I'm a fan of white-on-black too, but whatever setting/addon you are using to acheive that effect seems to be very broken. It's unfair to blame BMFW for a problem created by, and unique to, your specific configuration.

The setting isn't broken. It's not an add-on. It's BMFW's fault, and it's fair to blame it for this. BMFW sets a foreground color, and does not set a background color.

Here are the settings in stock Firefox. http://imgur.com/h4SmKYs

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

#258

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…

Penalize any historically slow loading (for some arbitrary cut-off value, say 600 ms) site client side with an additional 10 seconds of waiting before any request is sent. This way users will hit the back button well before any data is sent to the server and the site operators will see traffic plummet.

If any browser vendor implemented my proposal, their users would switch to another browser. If it was an addon, only a handful of people would use it so there would be no impact. If it was done on the network level of a corporate business, users would complain. Still, one can dream :)

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

#259
post #93
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…

Plus one for you. It used to be the internet was a book, now it's a movie.

I think the case of WWW and Internet is one of the biggest collective misunderstandings and tragic fails in the history of technology (and maybe humanity). If there would be a study of average ratio of information in kilobytes to page size in kilobytes, the result would make us cry. I have a Notes.org file that holds most of my notes, a list of most movies I watched and I'll watch, most books I read and I'll read, most places I saw and I'll see... basically my life and its about 200kb, where most probably more nearly 100% of it is information, whereas most multi-meg webpages have two paragraphs worth of information on them.

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

#260

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…

Honestly if a native Android or iOS app can be several Gb in size then a webapp can be a few Mb. That said there are lots of optimizations that we're missing out on. I hope http2 and other advances in server side render + tree shaking help reduce the size of payloads further.
Post reply on HN