Let's play a fun prediction: I ask HN readers what will be the page size of NYTimes.com in 10 years? Or 20 years?
Want to bet 100 MB? 1 GB? Is it unthinkable?
20 years ago, a 49 MB home page was unthinkable.
The 49MB web page
81–90 of 389 posts
Re: The 49MB web page
#82Re: The 49MB web page
#83These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
Re: The 49MB web page
#84These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…
It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com
I’m honestly dumbfounded that these exist
In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years
Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it
It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year
Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again
Re: The 49MB web page
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds just like a "helpless" dev that shifts blame to anyone but themselves.
Do you have a suggestion how else to handle the situation I described?
There’s a magic word that can be used in scenarios like this: “No.”
Failing that, interpret the requirements.
Nobody can watch a bunch of videos at once that don’t even show up until you scroll! That’s a nonsense requirement and the dev’s failure to push back or redirect in a more viable direction is a sign of their incompetence, not that of the non-technical manager that saw YouTube’s interface and assumes that that’s normal and doable.
It is! You’d have to know about lazy loading and CDNs, but neither is black magic.
Re: The 49MB web page
#86Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…
PSA for those who aren’t aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers have a Network tab in the developer tools where you can dial down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection. Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.
I once spent around an hour optimizing a feature because it felt slow - turns out that the slower simulated connection had just stayed enabled after a restart (can’t remember if it was just the browser or the OS, but I previously needed it and then later just forgot to turn it off). Good times, useful feature though!
Re: The 49MB web page
#87It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.
There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.
Re: The 49MB web page
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the perspective of the devs, they have a responsibility for saying something literally wont fly anywhere, ever, saying the business is responsible for every bad decision is a complete abrogation of your responsibilities.
Why don't you tell your boss or team something like that and see how well that flies. The responsibility of the devs is to deliver what was asked. They can and probably do make notes of the results. So does QA. So do the other stakeholders. On their respective teams they get the same BS from everyone who isn't pleased with the outcome. Ultimately things are on a deadline and the devs must meet requirements where the…
I didn't say anything about their development abilities, what I am pointing to is their professional responsibility. If a doctor is asked by a client to cut off their arm and they say no, and the client fires them, did the doctor err? (No) This doesn't comment on their ability to do surgery.
Re: The 49MB web page
#89I also use and like the comparison in units of Windows 95 installs (~40MB), which is also rather ironic in that Win95 was widely considered bloated when it was released. While this article focuses on ads, it's worth noting that sites have had ads for a long time, but it's their obnoxiousness and resource usage that's increased wildly over time. I wouldn't mind small sponsored links and (non-animated!) banners, but th…
I would love for someone more knowledgeable in this space than I to chime in on the economics of this industry
Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth it?
I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don’t give a shit
I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I’m in my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a result, I’ve never had a tolerance for anything but the most reasonable advertisements
I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it isn’t
Re: The 49MB web page
#90I remember in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast re-launched the official Dungeons & Dragons website to coincide with the announcement of the fourth edition rules. The site was something in the region of 4 MB, plus a 20 MB embedded video file. A huge number of people were refreshing the site to see what the announcement was, and it was completely slammed. Nobody could watch the trailer until they uploaded it to YouTube later.
4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.