Worth noting this webpage is ~1MB itself. However it does have a lot of images - I'm not entirely sure why it has all of those images, but the size is not a surprise given that.
The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Craigslist is great design. I'll take that over what "UX experts" come up with any day.
Craigslist seems overwhelming and like bad design when you first encounter it, but start using it for awhile and being able to go exactly where you need to go with one click and know exactly where on the page it will be located, without scrolling, and have your mouse ready to click it, is actually really nice.
Craigslist only seems like bad design if you've been programmed to use successful application of current design trends as a shortcut to figuring out whether a site is abandoned, under-funded, or incompetently-executed. Which we all have, and that signal often works so it's not useless. With some "badly designed" (several design trends out-of-date) sites that signal's incorrect, though.
For most sites I really miss the blocky header+sidebar-nav+footer-fallback-nav trend of 2006-2012. Fast, efficient, predictable. Current design trends are much worse to use for most purposes. But, of course, if I see a site still using the former design, I assume bad things about it until proven otherwise (at least until I see a recent date associated with something) and I'm not inclined to trust them with any money.
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#73Worth noting this webpage is ~1MB itself. However it does have a lot of images - I'm not entirely sure why it has all of those images, but the size is not a surprise given that.
And that's sort of the point, in my mind: the page is about a megabyte, while something comparable on the modern sites he's talking about would be many times larger. As you say, it's a megabyte because there's a megabyte of content, not a megabyte of Javascript and trackers and "From Around The Web"
Back when I was on 28.8K dialup, I'd typically figure I could fetch a megabyte a minute. Because the site is just plain old HTML, even over a terrible connection you'll be able to start reading pretty much immediately, and the images will pop in as you go. It's a good user experience.
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#74"This is a screenshot from an article on NPR discussing the rising use of ad blockers. It is 12 megabytes in size..." Hmmm. When I save this page from my browser it's 116k. "... in a stock web browser." Ah-ha. Perhaps the web browser I am using is not "stock". If so, I can still read the article without a "stock" browser, so not sure what is behind this "stock" idea. I am assuming reading the article is the goal? Cou…
FYI the browser I use does not download resources automatically. This way I just get the page with the content: the text of the article. That is all I want. To read articles, which are just text, I access the web in VGA textmode with a text-only browser. I never see any ads. There is no such thing as "load time" with this "UX". All pages load fast. I do DNS lookups in bulk and store IPs before doing any HTTP requests…
Mr Stallman, I had no idea you were a Hacker News user!
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#75Worth noting this webpage is ~1MB itself. However it does have a lot of images - I'm not entirely sure why it has all of those images, but the size is not a surprise given that.
It has all those image because it's the text version of a presentation. Those are the slides the text is referring to.
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#76Worth noting this webpage is ~1MB itself. However it does have a lot of images - I'm not entirely sure why it has all of those images, but the size is not a surprise given that.
It has all those image because it's the text version of a presentation. Those are the slides the text is referring to.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I missed that.
Yeah, I wasn't criticising the size, rather just making a meta-comment of the same form the author made himself in the article.
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's a nephew, and they are old enough to not asphyxiate themselves, then the obvious answer is always Lego. Little boys fucking love Legos.
Lego is great. But don't forget that this is also an idea that is shaped by advertising: why is Lego not for girls? Why do girls need pink blocks with figures that wear make up? Why this genderification?
Girls don't need pink and makeup. It's simply what sells to them.
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#78Worth noting this webpage is ~1MB itself. However it does have a lot of images - I'm not entirely sure why it has all of those images, but the size is not a surprise given that.
And that's sort of the point, in my mind: the page is about a megabyte, while something comparable on the modern sites he's talking about would be many times larger. As you say, it's a megabyte because there's a megabyte of content, not a megabyte of Javascript and trackers and "From Around The Web" Back when I was on 28.8K dialup, I'd typically figure I could fetch a megabyte a minute. Because the site is just plain…
28.8kbps = 3.6KB/s = 216KB/minute
I know what you mean, but I remember waiting about 10 minutes for a megabyte on a 14.4k connection, and about 5 minutes on 56k. Because the phone wires were crap, the modem never synced faster than about 35k.
Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#79Re: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
#80They will slim down after net neutrality is over. But they'll still be user-hostile. Ads are about tracking. The fact that you might see the ad is what we call "langiappe" where I come from. If everyone disabled third-party cookies right now, networks would not be able to easily aggregate browsing profiles. And everything else --- the things you actually care about --- would still work. Of course, then attention woul…
They still use all sorts of dirty tricks like browser fingerprinting (which has a lot of ways to go about), IP, geolocation, timing / usual usage patterns...
Honestly, unless you're using VPN + Tor + no 3rd party cookies + no JS, I don't think you can hide. :(