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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

#41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery is not that large and very likely to be cached an a users machine. So, it's IMO disingenuous to harp on it. If your playing with larger and less 'standard' library's then that's a different story.

There are approximately 5 million different CDNs hosting different versions of jQuery. Cache hits are actually quite low.

Source? And even then it's ~83KB vs the average page of ~2250K.

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

#42
post #16

Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?

A simple web page nowadays is bigger than a whole game in 1993. A whole budget game nowadays is several gigabytes in size and that is far from a simple website.

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

#43
post #6

I would argue two things: 1) This is an irrelevant statistic. 2) Even if this were true it's not that big of a deal. This is irrelevant because most people don't browse the average web page. They browse the top few sites on the internet and that's it. A more relevant statistic would be what have the sizes of the top 50 sites been over the last 15 years. I imagine they still may have grown on average, but download spe…

The reality, however, is that depending on where they are many users don't have an LTE connection to begin with. My personal experience is that every so often a page begins to load, then shows text invisibly, then loads ads, and only after around 10 secs, I guess, I see the content I was interested in in the first place. Well, usually I closed my browser by then already.

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

#44

In the late 00s I remember turning on an old computer with a 650 MHz Athlon CPU and being surprised that web browsing performance in Firefox wasn't bad. Now if I try that with a 1 GHz Pentium 3, performance is absolutely horrible. Is this why?

Basically -- ultimately, it's the rise of javascript for third-party content (ads, trackers, APIs, add-ons, etc etc) that drives both page bloat and poor rendering performance.

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

#45
post #16

Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?

More because that "whole game" was incredibly small, not because a web page is particularly big.

A single good quality jpeg is around 1MB. If you have 2 nice pictures on your web page, suddenly it's bigger than doom.

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

#46
For the last project I built the initial page load with the absolutely minimal JS that was embedded into the page. Then it loaded the rest whenever it needed it. My coworkers were shocked how quickly the page loaded.

It's actually better to show the user some progress bar, than the standard browser's "Waiting for yoursite.com".

You can get away with a lot without jQuery, while still having clean-ish code.

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

#47
post #16

Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?

The biggest culprits are the layers of Javascript for and and tracking/analytics and unoptimized, high-resolution images and videos...

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

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

#48
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…

A long time the web was like this:

In IE6, you do it like this.

In IE8, you do it like this.

In Firefox, you do it like this.

Then jQuery came along. And it was like 'Now you do it like this, and jQuery handles it for all browsers perfectly'.

Just because some tasks are now performed easily in native javascript on all browsers, doesn't mean it was always that way.

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

#49

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?

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

#50
post #16

Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?

For one, Javascript is used as source code text, whereas games benefit from being compiled to binary form. There's also a monetary cost for file size if your game requires two floppy disks rather than one.
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