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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

#71

Post by manigandham »

ebbv wrote: 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…

Who cares? Everyone does. Everyone wants faster sites and downloading 2.2MB is not easy or quick.

It's a ridiculous amount of data needed to display sites that don't have any special media or functionality and it burns up battery life and data plans for most mobile users.

Also latency is a far bigger effect than bandwidth when interacting with sites so I would say even with bandwidth going up, the actual experience of loading a site has gone down considerably over the last few years.

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

#72

Post by dagw »

Houshalter wrote: post #37
warriorkitty wrote: post #4

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\

But shouldn't the browser have those libraries cached?

Given the number of combination of CDNs and jQuery versions out there I'm guessing the chances of already having the 'right' jQuery in cache the first time you visit a site is quite low. Would be interesting to see some numbers though.

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

#73

Post by kevincox »

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?

I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser.

It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN link is right on their site) then requiring jQuery will be effectively free because it will be in everyone's cache.

Also the cache is supported by all browsers with an elegant fallback. Instead of having to manually having to check if your user's browser has the resource you want preloaded you just like the URL and the best option will automatically be used.

TL;DR Rather then turning this into a political issue stop bundling resources, modern protocols and intelligent parallel loading allow using the cache to stove this problem.

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

#74

Post by cm3 »

warriorkitty wrote: post #4

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\

If instead of JavaScript a more fitting domain language was used for scripting web apps, this would be less of an issue.

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

#75

Post by K0nserv »

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 weight.

EDIT: I have a guide to setup a similar blog/site here[0]

0: https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html

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

#77

Post by NoGravitas »

swalsh wrote: post #36
warriorkitty wrote: post #4

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\

Imagine how fast the web would be if browser manufacturers could "approve" frameworks, and store them as a "standard library" of sorts. A global cache. Then you have ONE copy of jQuery for all sites on your machine. Wanting to use a framework shouldn't be discouraged. The issue here isn't developers trying to save time, the issue is the shitty tools.

This is basically what [Decentraleyes](https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes) does. It helps especially on mobile, though it's not exactly life-changing IME.

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

#78

Post by tehbeard »

Xophmeister wrote: post #56
d33 wrote: post #49

Earlier 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?

Common libraries and frameworks are usually loaded from a CDN. These should stay in the browser's cache for some time.

The problem is the quantity of CDNs on which jQuery for example can be found.

For instance, your site might pull it in from cdnjs, while I have the one from ajax.googleapis.com already cached. I still have to go fetch your selected version.

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

#79

Post by cm3 »

hammock wrote: post #16

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

Because modern web sites circumvent the HTML engine and request JSON from the server which they then render via JavaScript.

Other bugs with the modern web authoring style:

1. broken back/forward functionality

2. broken scroll bars

3. broken accessibility

4. broken memory of where the page was at when closed, leading to a fresh load of the page on Re-Open-Closed-Tab

5. infinite scroll being highly unnatural

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

#80

Post by hzoo »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #38
warriorkitty wrote: post #4

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\

Well, not that adding the whole of underscore.js is reasonable, but maybe if Javascript had provided proper enumeration of their data structures earlier like all decent programming languages do, that wouldn't be an issue. To this day, you still can't enumerate an object literal, yielding each key/value pair. You still can't properly enumerate a NodeList and Object.values is still "experimental technology". I understa…

Yeah, there will be Object.keys/Object.values/Object.entries and you can use it in an for of loop.

for (let [key, value] of Object.entries({a: 1})) { console.log(key, value); }

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