22 ms·

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

857 points by Ovid 10y ago

alasano 10y ago
I'm genuinely excited by ensuring great response times and minimal load on a website. Locally I see so many companies building good looking but horrendously optimized websites for their clientele who don't know enough to ask for it. The last company I worked at were building a local search engine and were displaying thumbnails whilst loading full size pictures which were hot linked from businesses websites. With an auto loading feature at the bottom of the page by the php backend, an initial 5-6 Mb page load could turn into 30+ Mb within a few seconds of scrolling. Add to this no gzipping and caching was not properly configured either. I tried my best to get some changes going but the senior (and only other) dev wouldn't allow any modifications to the current system "for the moment". It was a bit frustrating to see so many easy fixes ignored.
overcast 10y ago
With the majority of users moving towards mobile, I really think this is an issue, and I've been consciously building projects as lean as possible. Removing bloated jquery libraries was a big one. With native calls like document.querySelectorAll document.querySelector I've found I can 90% get by without it. For the rest, using something like vue.js, and I've taken care of all the dom manipulation, data binding, etc.
- Ruud-v-A 10y ago
  How about not using js at all? I think that for the majority of pages it doesn’t add any value.
  - overcast 10y ago
    With the instant gratification generation, not having dynamic content is going to be a tough sell. I will however agree, there is a gross overuse of it.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      The funny part about your reply is JS-heavy websites delay instant gratification on slow connections or machines. They can take 10-30 seconds then objects start jumping around as you try to click them. Whereas a cached static page or templated dynamic loads pretty instantly if it's mostly text content. In a way they understand if it's graphics.
- smrtinsert 10y ago
  I really wish more companies cared about their mobile presence. You don't need much, especially since native mobile widgets go so far along towards making web a nice thing. Also, for gods sake allow zooming. I think of that as such a major plus for mobile and yet so many mobile sites disallow it.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I lived in $nowheresville, TN for a bit. This drove me insane. Sure, your webapp works great in downtown SF, but try loading it with the spotty connection the rest of the country has, not to mention the rest of the world. One of the places I worked at had a computer hooked up to a ~800 kbps modem, and would test all their web-pages on that. It was really eye-opening, and I wish more companies would benchmark like that
  - mod 10y ago
    Chrome network tools has throttling that can simulate really shitty networks, I use that a fair bit.
collyw 10y ago
I remember thinking years ago, that my CV in Word took up more memory than my first computer (Acorn Electron 32kb ram). It amazes me that I used to play Elete on that machine.
warriorkitty 10y ago
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\
- rplnt 10y ago
  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 the community around it.
  - boredpudding 10y ago
    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.
    - rplnt 10y ago
      There are lots of legitimate reasons to not use jQuery. Not being in a browser might be one of them. So if someone asks about javascript, one should answer the question (and perhaps suggest that there are libraries such as jquery that handle it better).
  - megalodon 10y ago
    SO feels more like a race to answer fast rather than to answer with quality. I think the best way to learn about the language is through the Mozilla Developer Network. I can't speak for everyone but I feel incredibly productive when programming in javascript. I'd argue that jQuery was great, but now most (if not all) of it can be replaced by native javascript features (e.g. document.querySelector). Today I wouldn't recommend jQuery to anyone. I suggest learning a functional language (in my case it was Haskell) in parallel, as it opens up new ways of thinking about javascript and problem solving.
jmnicolas 10y ago
> The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install It's not really surprising in a world where a graphical driver is > 100 MB (Nvidia driver for Windows).
- warriorkitty 10y ago
  Oh come on, let's talk about Adobe Reader and Skype. :)
- elsurudo 10y ago
  They mean the original Doom, which ran with a software renderer anyways.
- batat 10y ago
  And 43 MB chromium mini_installer.exe
- throwanem 10y ago
  Only a hundred megabytes? You're getting off light there. I went to install the latest Nvidia CUDA driver the other day, and it's a gigabyte download.
ebbv 10y ago
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 speeds have also grown over that time. Especially on mobile. Even if we accept the premise that web sites as a whole, including the most popular ones are all growing and are now an average of 2.2MB each. Who cares? 2.2MB is nothing in 2016. Even on an LTE connection that's probably between 4 and 1.5 seconds to download the full page. And a lot of that size is probably in ads, which nobody minds if they load last or not at all. Lastly, this is a self fixing problem. If a site is too bloated, users will stop going to it. But I would propose that a lot of this increase in size is due to users (especially mobile) having higher and higher resolution displays, which necessitates higher resolution content, which of course is bigger.
- Ruud-v-A 10y ago
  I care. I know a lot of people (here in western Europe) who are on a 1 GiB/month data plan. 2.2 MiB per page means that you can visit 15 pages per day. Better think twice before you click a link. Besides, 2.2 MiB for a page is pure bloat. Unless the page is heavy on images, you can usually fit all of the content that matters in a tenth of the size. In 300 KiB you can fit a 500-word article with 160 KiB picture, a few webfonts, headers/footers and stylesheets. Using a factor ten more is just ridiculous.
  - niutech 10y ago
    I would recommend using Opera Mini or GDrives Web Light (http://gdriv.es/l/ http://gdriv.es/l/)
- radiospiel 10y ago
  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.
pljns 10y ago
The average Web page now does more than the average Doom install, I don't see the relevance of this. Although I get really annoyed when I visit a blog post whose page is 100x larger than Dostoevsky's novels in .txt format. On my blog (https://pljns.com/blog/ https://pljns.com/blog/), JQuery and genericons are often my largest file transfers, but I still clock under 500kb.
- blub 10y ago
  Displaying text on screen with some crappy ads & animations is not doing more than Doom, not even close.
- Marazan 10y ago
  Once you remove Ad Tech how much does the average we page actually do?
- batat 10y ago
  https://pljns.com/ https://pljns.com/ > 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow [x] check > You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? [x] assuming 404'ed fontawesome as shitty webfont, check > You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no [x] check > Your site has three bylines and link to your dribbble account, but you spread it over 7 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is [x] check Still pretty good site, but it's funny how accurately creator of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ has described the situation with the modern web :)
  - pljns 10y ago
    These are all good points that I knew when I hastily pushed the site last week. Still way under 1000kb! Also, I said my blog, but serves me right I guess ;-)
jessriedel 10y ago
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 calculated for the top N URLs on the web (or perhaps, an estimate based on the top M domain names and other signals) and downloaded to the client (so no privacy issues). People will very quickly learn to associate red URLs with the feeling "ugh, this page is taking forever". So long as the metric was reasonably robust to gaming, websites would face a greater pressure to cut the bloat. And yet, it's still ultimately feedback determined by a user's revealed preferences, based on what they think is worth waiting how long for, rather than a developer's guess about what's reasonable.
- ma2rten 10y ago
  I thought Google already punishes slow loading websites.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    When Google does this they are explicitly making a trade off between relevance and speed on behalf of the user. I'd rather leave that choice to the user, especially when the user can infer that this is the correct destination from the search result text. Also, it doesn't work other places.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I also like how Opera now allows you to benchmark websites with and without ads. I think other browsers should expand on that idea (benchmarking sites, and not just for ads). Give some kind of reminder to both users and developers about how slow their sites are. Those with the slowest websites probably won't like it too much initially, but it's going to be better for all of us in the long term. http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad-blocking-feature-opera-for-computers/ http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad-blockin...
- 10y ago
hammock 10y ago
Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?
- robotnoises 10y ago
  Because we can! Games were slim back then because they had to be. Webpages are fat now because our computers are fast. Now, if a webpage were to approach the size of a contemporary game...
- degif 10y ago
  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.
- shawabawa3 10y ago
  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.
- ufo 10y ago
  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 http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
- rhinoceraptor 10y ago
  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.
- cm3 10y ago
  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
dreamlayers 10y ago
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?
- fredley 10y ago
  This, and Javascript, and browser bloat.
  - zokier 10y ago
    Unless the browser ends up swapping a lot I doubt that browser bloat would cause significant perceptible performance regressions compared to the quite significant amount of optimization that has happened in the meanwhile.
- toyg 10y ago
  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.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
...and my first computer had 128 bytes of RAM. And a 300-baud modem.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  That's amazing, what was it? My first computer had 5K of RAM.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Altair 8800, kit from MITS. And I wrote a game on it, using keyboard and screen.
jokoon 10y ago
I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY this video about the early HTML standardization process, and it seems to explain all the ills of HTML. So indeed, there is a huge optimization opportunity of having a stricter error model. Also, I'm really wondering how much battery could be saved when surfing such pages. Also I'm sure there is a lot of potential going in the pre-parsed document model. But that's a next level kind of engineering I guess.
robotnoises 10y ago
Before everyone jumps onto the JQuery/Bootstrap/etc sucks bandwagon, just a reminder that the minified jquery from cdnjs is 84.1kb. Bootstrap is 43.1kb. If you want your page to load fast, the overall "size" of the page shouldn't be at the top of your list of concerns. Try reducing the # of requests, first. Combine and minify your javascript, use image sprites, etc.
- madawan 10y ago
  or use HTTP2 which should make the number of requests largely irrelevant.
  - acdha 10y ago
    HTTP/2 helps with that but the total size still matters. This is particularly relevant for resources like CSS which block rendering – even with HTTP/2 making it less important whether that's one big resource or a dozen small ones, the page won't render until it's all been transferred. https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS#recommended-usage-pattern https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS#recommended-usage-p... has a rather nice way to load CSS asynchronously in browsers which support rel=preload.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  I see lots of websites that don't even cache static resources and use > 10 scripts and stylesheets, from a lot of different domains. Terrible.
  - eterm 10y ago
    And link the non-minified versions. (but the different domains actually helps speed up loading with http because it helps parallelise transfers.)
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      Domain sharding almost never makes any sense, especially on mobile, and with HTTP2 it's working against you. http://www.mobify.com/blog/domain-sharding-bad-news-mobile-performance/ http://www.mobify.com/blog/domain-sharding-bad-news-mobile-p...
aorth 10y ago
> The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if you want to be a top website). Wow. That's nice to see actually.
- faitswulff 10y ago
  I suspect that the top ten sites are lighter because they must perform under load rather than being a top ten site because they load quickly, but it is nice to see. Imagine the billions of man hours that would be wasted by humanity waiting for the top ten sites to load.
Tenhundfeld 10y ago
Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though. 1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images? It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site. For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS and a few 50KB images. If we're just interested in total bandwidth consumption, then sure, total size is a good metric. If we're interested in how a user experiences the web, there's a lot of variability and nuance buried in that. 2) What device and methodology were used to take the measurements? In this age of responsive design, CSS media queries, and infinite scrolling/deferred loading, it really matters how you measure and what you use to measure. For example, if I load a page on my large retina screen and scroll to the bottom, many sites will send far more data than if I load them on my phone and don't scroll past the fold. I only skimmed the article and didn't dig in to the references. These questions may be answered elsewhere.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  The speed index was invented for benchmarking this: https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/metrics/speed-index https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...
  - Tenhundfeld 10y ago
    Ah, very cool, thanks for sharing. I'm familiar with a lot of the tools for evaluating the performance of a single site (e.g., that I'm developing), but I'm pretty ignorant of the standard approaches for these types of larger scale benchmarking projects.
    - artificial 10y ago
      If you're developing you may not be aware of Page Speed Insights, extremely handy for SEO. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
imaginenore 10y ago
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.
thom 10y ago
There's a reason that the economics of web development mostly work and the economics of games development mostly do not.
- thedevil 10y ago
  This probably requires more explanation.
stegosaurus 10y ago
If web bloat is a problem, I don't think that looking at whether <insert buzzword framework of CURRENT_YEAR> can be removed is the answer. I suggest that at the moment, we have basically two camps of website, with rough, fuzzy boundaries. 1. A place where someone sticks up an insight, or posts a wiki page, or whatever, to share some thought to others (if anyone actually cares). The blogs of many users of HN. Hacker News itself. Wikipedia. The Arch Linux Wiki. lwn.net. Etc. The sites are very roughly concerned with 'this is what I care about, if you do, great, this is useful to you'. 2. Commercial web sites that employ sophisticated means to try and enlarge market share and retain users. AB testing. 'Seamless' experiences which are aimed at getting more views, with user experience as an afterthought (a sort of evolutionary pressure, but not the only one). Complaining that camp #2 exists is strange. It's a bit like lamenting the fact that chocolate bars aren't just chocolate bars, they have flashy wrappers, clever ingredients, optimized sugar ratio, crunchy bit and non crunchy bit, etc. It works! A snickers bar is a global blockbuster, and 'Tesco chocolate bar' is the functional chocolate bar that just does the job, but will never attain that level of commercial success, it serves a different role. ----- My personal view: Fundamentally what I want when we click a link from an aggregator, is an 'article.txt' with perhaps a relevant image or two. Something like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ maybe. But if a site actually does that, a website like The Guardian, I'd fire up wget, strip all the advertising, strip the fact it's even The Guardian, and read it like a book. If everyone does it then no-one makes any money, site dies. So what we actually have is this constant DRM-style race to try and fight for our brains to get us to look at adverts. It's not about jQuery, it's about advertising, branding, 'self vs other' (the integrity of a company as a coherent thing), etc. I don't know what the answer is here. I think this is why I find concepts like UBI so appealing - I find it kind of alarming that we seem doomed to infect more and more of the commons with commercialization because we haven't found a solution to keep each other alive otherwise.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  With stories like these, you have to know where to find the real problem. At least some percentage can be ignored whenever nerds use the word "bloat" because it's a code word for "the only things that should be allowed are things I approve" in a surprisingly large number of contexts.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
How about browser bloat? Each chromium tab on linux takes an extra ~50-150mb depending on the site -- and I still have no idea what they need all of that memory for...
- r1ch 10y ago
  Mostly Javascript and caches.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- niutech 10y ago
  Chromium is a memory hog, it is a well known fact. Use Otter Browser or QupZilla instead.
Jerry2 10y ago
Maciej Cegłowski has a great talk/writeup on this very problem: The Website Obesity Crisis http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Here’s the video of the talk if you prefer to hear him speak: https://vimeo.com/147806338 https://vimeo.com/147806338
datalist 10y ago
Not too long ago Medium pushed an "invisible" 1MB image to clients https://binarypassion.net/digital-decadence-6ea59251d64d https://binarypassion.net/digital-decadence-6ea59251d64d and the video it refers to https://vimeo.com/147806338 https://vimeo.com/147806338
- damptowel 10y ago
  At my frst job I once had to fix a wordpress site that was 'too slow' which loaded a 12MB 4k by 4k favicon. I kid you not. It also loaded jquery 4 times, had about 20 unminified stylesheets linked in the header. When I told this to my manager he told me 'oh but you only need to load that stuff once and then its cached, so that can't be an issue'. I did not last long in that place. The backend was even more of a wasteland.
  - datalist 10y ago
    A 16 megapixel favicon does sound scary.
donkeyd 10y ago
Visited a website a few days ago, which used 2048x1365 jpegs for 190x125 buttons. They had multiple buttons like this on multiple pages. I sent them an e-mail about this, but I don't expect them to fix it.
K0nserv 10y ago
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/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ 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 https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html
- gonzo41 10y ago
  Plus one for you. It used to be the internet was a book, now it's a movie.
  - gkya 10y ago
    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.
- alasano 10y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/wB5B35g.png http://i.imgur.com/wB5B35g.png My user experience was great, I have to agree.
- gradi3nt 10y ago
  "You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." - Eleanor Roosevelt
  - 10y ago
webscalist 10y ago
What happened to semantic markups? In the name of rendering optimizations, many web sites use css background image instead of <img>
AdamN 10y ago
The only real solution is a search engine that allows the end user to clip the results based on the maximum size of the total page. I've often wondered why Duck Duck Go doesn't do this as well as filter search results based on number of ad networks used, etc...
jordigh 10y ago
Just to clarify, since I was confused (I remembered that Doom 2 was about 30 megs uncompressed, which websites are still a long ways from), this metric appears to refer to the compressed size of the Doom 1 shareware distribution. http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&ContentsFolderId=216 http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&Conten...
snowwrestler 10y ago
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 http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Does comparing web pages to Doom help understand or improve the situation? No, not any more than comparing Doom to Apollo memory size helps us understand the difference between a video game and a history-altering exploration.
- skoczymroczny 10y ago
  > Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. Well, to be honest, Episode 1 and Episode 2 of Doom takes place on Phobos and Deimos, so you could say Apollo software got us to the moon but Doom got us to Mars :)
  - jordigh 10y ago
    Since 2.1 megs is only the compressed size of the shareware distribution[1], we are not going any further than Phobos. Since this is only for v1.0, it is going to be a buggy Phobos. [1] http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&ContentsFolderId=216 http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&Conten...
- StavrosK 10y ago
  That link inspires me to print and bind the code of a webpage into a book, and put it on a shelf next to other literature masterpieces. One Hundred Years of Solitude The Count of Monte Cristo Anna Karenina Don Quixote Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    I want the audio version, narrated by Malcolm McDowell.
flexterra 10y ago
what is the average size of a native mobile app?
- oraculo 10y ago
  https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-averages/ https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-average...
spriggan3 10y ago
The average data plan here is 10GB : 1,000,000 * 10 / 2250 = 4444 web pages a month 4444 / 31 = 143 web pages a day at most on mobile. While it is somehow acceptable, I don't see data plans getting cheaper yet the size of the average webpage is raising fast. It doesn't seem like most websites have heavily invested in using HTML5 offline capabilities or actual mobile first design either, something easy to check with chrome dev tools. Also let's talk about ads : Polygon.com a site I visit often , first article on the homepage with an Iphone 5 : - with ads/trackers 1.5mb - without ads 623kb More than half of the load is ad/tracking related. This isn't normal.
intrasight 10y ago
The publishers really have no incentive to address this until a critical mass of users install adblock software.
elcapitan 10y ago
Doom would have been the superior solution to the World Wide Web.
fnfnfjnd 10y ago
I legitimately do not understand why webdevs insist on learning new, equally complicated API's to do things that raw HTML/ CSS/ javascript are already perfectly capable of doing just as easily. Not only do you have to write your code, but you also have to learn the new API for the framework flavor of the month. So much about frameworks just flat out doesn't make sense. Are you honestly telling me that it's more efficient to make a second DOM in a language with much more overhead than the native C++ implementation? Best case scenario is that you consume twice the resources. There seems to be a serious case of monkey-see-monkey-do in the web development community.
njharman 10y ago
So, were can I play Doom in the browser?
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  Here: http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on-earth.html http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on-earth.html (yes, it's Doom 2, and yes it requires a fast machine since it emulates a DOS PC in the browser)
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I can't help but add that it's a DOS PC + a game that still loads faster than some web pages. At some point, even the apples to oranges comparisons start saying something because it's glaringly obvious.
  - njharman 10y ago
    Ok, awesome. Now I'm wondering if we PCDOS in a broswer... 1) Can we say the claim (I think of mozilla's) that the web was going to be the new OS is true? 2) If DOS today, will it be 5 or 10 years before we get BSD or *nix in the browser?
skarap 10y ago
Looks like most of the discussion here is on network traffic. Minifying JS and CSS, compression, CDNs and caching won't keep your browser from having to render all the stuff. --- The stewardess on a new jet airliner: - Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard of our new airplane. On the second deck you'll find a couple of bars and a restaurant. The golf course is on the third deck. You're also welcome to visit the swimming pool on the fourth deck. Now - ladies and gentlemen - please fasten your seatbelts. With all this sh*t we'll try to take off.
dempseye 10y ago
I once bought a pre-made landing page template with all kinds of whizz bang Javascript libraries built in. The demo page was 4 MB. In the time it took to strip all the trash out of the template I could have designed the page myself. I'll never do that again. I wonder how much of the problem is due to bloated templates.
Kurtz79 10y ago
It is hardly surprising, considering that a single picture taken with an average smartphone is probably already surpassing that by quite a bit. Times change, and 20 years in tech is equivalent to several geological ages. If anything, it cannot really be underestimated how some developers were able to craft such compelling gaming experiences, with the limited resources available at the time. My personal favorite as "most impressive game for its size": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II
CaptSpify 10y ago
disclaimer: my own blog - https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads I kept looking for a "minimal" blogging platform, but they all had too much bloat/JS/etc. I guess minimal means different things to different people. I ended up just writing my own. The biggest post I have is 7.41 KB. I used to be interested in front-end design, but since it's the industry standard to use $latest_framework, instead of tried and proven practices, I've given up on that idea.
- detaro 10y ago
  One extreme end of the scale ;) I feel like investing a few hundred extra bytes on some styling might be worth it, a la http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ vs http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    I'm of the mindset that our browsers are built backwards. For "content-oriented" sites, we should present text, and give the users tools in their browsers to present them as the user sees fit. Instead, we expect the site to design it. Something like Firefox Reader View. Some people may like bettermotherfuckingwebsite better, but I personally don.t "presentation-oriented" sites are a different story, of course
    - detaro 10y ago
      Basic styles don't mess with Reader View or other customization, so I don't see a large downside to include them, they just make it nicer for people not using such tools. Unless the point is to get people to use different tools?
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        > Unless the point is to get people to use different tools? Kind of. I dream of an Internet where people have their own CSS/styles, and they can make it look how they want, rather than how the website wants it. I think of it like this: I'm a linux guy. I want my tools to output plainly to stdout. If I want to format them, I'll pipe them into my own formatting tools. I wish websites worked that way as well.
sergiotapia 10y ago
Arguably sites have been increasing in size for one simple reason: It directly results in increased sales. Everything is sales. If cleaner, 'purer' sites made more money you bet the average web page would be 10kb. It's all about what translates to more sales. As such, you won't ever see a return to more traditional websites. Look at Amazon with it's virtual dress models, heavy as hell, but they most certainly land more sales.
- niutech 10y ago
  Quite opposite. It is proved that longer page loading time is less conversion.
Joof 10y ago
From this title; maybe hacker news needs a twitter? Also: You can't use average page weight when you are just looking at the top ten. That downturn could represent a single website; all others could be increasing in size.
bb85 10y ago
> The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if you want to be a top website) Isn't that that the top websites have a lot more ressources available to improve asset management, cleanup and refactor?
- tyingq 10y ago
  This set of benchmarks is often helpful: http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united-states/ http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united-states/ Particularly the "last mile" or "Chrome Homepage" tabs. They cover the top websites, grouped into categories like "Retail", "Travel", "Media", etc. The disparity across competitors is pretty stunning, with some websites getting close to 1 second to download/render a page, and others taking 6, 7, 8 , even 10 seconds. And these are all big, well known, companies. And, for the most part, it all correlates very well to total page weight, and total number of artifacts on the page (js/css/images/etc). There are some exceptions, but it's a pretty strong correlation.
seagreen 10y ago
Oh God. Every discussion about the web will continue to be a mess until we clarify what we're talking about. Let's try rephrasing the title a couple times. Rephrase 1: "The average size of a webapp is now the average size of a Doom install". Response: Interesting, but not bad! Heck, some webapps are games. "The average size of a web game is now the average size of Doom" isn't a sentence that damns the web, it's a sentence that complements the web! (or would if it was true, and it might be for all I know) Rephrase 2: "The average size of web document is now the average size of a Doom install". Response: Well this sucks (or would if it was true -- still we don't know). Simple documents should be a few KB, not the size of a game. Basically our terminology is shot to crap. Imagine if 19th century engineers used the same word for "hand crank" and "steam engine". "Hand crank prices are skyrocketing! What's causing this massive bloat!" Whelp, that could mean anything. The best solution: web browsers should enforce a clear distinction between "web documents" and "web apps". These are two different things and should be treated separately. This won't happen though, which leaves us (the rest of the tech community) to explore other options . . .
- nulltype 10y ago
  Web apps/documents both look pretty good compared to modern games, those things are 100s of MB at least.
seanwilson 10y ago
Lots of people are focusing on excessive JavaScript and CSS but these combined are easily dwarfed by a single high quality image. Try visiting Apple's website for example. I can't see how you can have a small page weight if your page includes several images that are meant to look good on high quality screens. You're not going to convince marketing and page designers to go with imageless pages. Doom's original resolution was 320x200 = 64K pixels in 8-bit colour mode. Even an Apple Watch has 92K pixels and 24-bit colour (three times more space per pixel) now, and a 15" MacBook display shows 5.2M pixels. The space used for high quality images on newer displays is order of magnitudes higher to what Doom hardware had to show.
- arohner 10y ago
  Images can load progressively, so pure HTML + one large image absolutely can appear faster to the user. The JS and CSS to load a SPA won't. Page weight is a good rule of thumb, but it isn't the be all end all of a good experience.
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > Try visiting Apple's website for example. Indeed, right now on mobile the biggest asset on apple.com is a 1.7 MB picture. http://images.apple.com/v/home/cm/images/heros/environment_earth_day_large_2x.jpg http://images.apple.com/v/home/cm/images/heros/environment_e... The total size of the webpage being 2.5 MB.
- niutech 10y ago
  That's why anybody should optimize their images, using e.g. Kraken.io or converting to WebP.
NelsonMinar 10y ago
Is there a Chrome extenson that shows the size of a web page? There's a good one for page load time that I use, but I want kilobytes with and without cache.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sugarfactory 10y ago
Google developed SPDY, an efficient binary representation of HTTP messages. Maybe they will do the same thing but for HTML. It would be much more efficient if one could design a binary representation of HTML that can only express well-formed HTML.
- person15 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML
maerF0x0 10y ago
This all comes down to cost. It is much cheaper to have "bloat" than it is to pay devs to fix it. And customers find it much cheaper to deal with "bloat" than to find smaller alternatives. Sure the average webpage is bigger than doom, but the CPU in my phone is approximately 100x (times multicore too?) than the 486 that ran Doom. Sure, if man hours were free, we could trim it all down to (my rough guess) about 1/10th the size. But at $100 or even $10 an hour its just not worth it. Pay the GBs to your carrier, spend $50 more on a better phone.
- niutech 10y ago
  It would cost no extra time if devs made websites from scratch with performance in mind. Save optimized images, minify code as a build task, etc.
apeace 10y ago
This page clocks in at 935kb in my browser. According to this same page, that is roughly the size of Sim City 2000.
CM30 10y ago
It's also about 2 times bigger than a lot of SNES and Mega Drive games. Or about 4 times bigger than Super Mario World (512KB). As for why it's getting so insane, probably either: 1. Frameworks, since most people don't remove the code they're not using. For Bootstrap or Foundation, that can be a lot of extra code. 2. Content Management Systems, since stuff like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, any forum or social network script, tend to add a lot of extra code (more so if you've added plugins). 3. The aforementioned tracking codes, ads, etc.
chasing 10y ago
The only conclusion I can legitimately draw from this article is that in twenty years a single web page will be larger than the 65GB Grand Theft Auto V install.
oraculo 10y ago
https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-averages/ https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-average...
perseusprime11 10y ago
Enable Ghostery and load cnn.com and you will see why the web pages are so heavy these days.
jakobdabo 10y ago
Yesterday I discovered that Twitter's HTTP headers alone are ~3500 bytes long (25 tweets!) with several long cookies, custom headers and the Content Security Policy[1] containing ~90 records. Is this considered normal nowadays? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy
stepvhen 10y ago
> Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. Doom isn't in true 3D, its an advanced raycasting engine. The levels are all 2D, there are no polygons, you can't look up and down. Doom has been ported to a TI Calculator. Lets maintain some perspective here.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Lets maintain some perspective here. I see what you did here.
qaq 10y ago
Too bad we can not measure it football fields
kgr 10y ago
Send “models” rather than code. Low-level code is relatively unexpressive, contains considerable redundancy, and as a result, is relatively large. By sending high-level models instead, which are then expanded on the client to working code, application download size can be greatly decreased. Models typically provide one to two orders of magnitude of compression over code. This video shows how we do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ This document gives some results (like a GMail client that is 100X smaller): https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE72Ut0EsoPNFr9YKDkaw6DIfCDgExYkS2k/pub https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE7...
damon_c 10y ago
In 20 years the average size of web pages will be the size of a Quake 3 install. This is progress.
dclowd9901 10y ago
Are we really complaining about webpage size when fully 30% of web traffic is Netflix? This might be an unpopular opinion but websites are no longer just html, css and js. They're full on applications with rich interaction and data visualization. Call me when they're larger than an average modern native app install.
Shivetya 10y ago
and here I remember that the PDF of the Turbo Pascal manual was so many multiples of the compiler's size I needed a calculator to figure it out
hackertux 10y ago
I also recommend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445
jccalhoun 10y ago
and the .kkreiger beta only uses 96k! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
brownbat 10y ago
ronan has an account here, commented on this as it was developing a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981707
AndyKelley 10y ago
I wanted to see how one of my personal projects compared, so I looked at Groove Basin. Groove Basin [1] is an open source music player server. It has a sophisticated web-based client with the ability to retag, label, create playlists, stream, browse the library, chat with other users, upload new music, and import music by URL. I just checked the payload size of a cold load, and it's 68 KB. I'll just keep doing my thing over here. [1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin
awqrre 10y ago
It's initially cheaper to make larger web pages, you don't have to optimize for size (most of the time it would probably execute faster if it was smaller but probably not always). Some others make it larger on purpose for obfuscation (like Google).
partycoder 10y ago
For Internet 3 we should call John Carmack and put all of the internet in a MegaTexture.
myared 10y ago
GTA 5 is ~65GB in size. One day, web pages will be bigger than that.
LordKano 10y ago
Great, another kooky unit of measure. "This new re-design gets us down to 0.4 Doom installs without sacrificing any of the visual elements."
tacone 10y ago
But they load faster than Doom used to.
systematical 10y ago
Amazon isn't what I'd call "light" at 4.7 MB, but looking at my companies market all the bigger players are way lighter than us.
ivanhoe 10y ago
Doom is not a good measure, when web pages become bigger and more bloated than your average printer or scanner driver, then it will be alarming :)
bendbro 10y ago
Why can't all these frameworks just be cached? If a cross site request to cdn.com/react-v1.0.js is cached under cdn.com, at most one download will trigger. That seems to solve the problem, but maybe I'm missing something.
- bendbro 10y ago
  I've seen people mention that caching is broken since it only works when the name and version are the same; however, I don't see how this is any different than two packages of the same functionality being uploaded to an APT repo with different names.
chowes 10y ago
Wondering if an idea like this would work: Bundlers like Webpack already import JS in a modular structure. I'm wondering if we could do some profiling into popular npm module combinations (I know many people using React + Lodash + Redux Router, etc), bundle them up, and have Webpack load in those combos from a CDN via <script>? Now this would probably require some work on webpack's end (the __webpack_require__(n) would have to be some sort of consistent hash), but at least everyone who blindly require('lodash') will see an improvement?
- necessity 10y ago
  Web pages shouldn't need JS at all, except for the basic eye candy it was originally used for, and most importantly shouldn't break without it. A web page that doesn't work without JS is broken. Web apps are another deal though.
jrl 10y ago
This is one of the reasons why I love a simple website without too many whistles and bells.
Khaine 10y ago
Isn't the answer to just create a reasonable standard library for javascript so people don't need to link in megabytes of frameworks

857 points by Ovid 10y ago

I'm genuinely excited by ensuring great response times and minimal load on a website. Locally I see so many companies building good looking but horrendously optimized websites for their clientele who don't know enough to ask for it. The last company I worked at were building a local search engine and were displaying thumbnails whilst loading full size pictures which were hot linked from businesses websites. With an auto loading feature at the bottom of the page by the php backend, an initial 5-6 Mb page load could turn into 30+ Mb within a few seconds of scrolling. Add to this no gzipping and caching was not properly configured either. I tried my best to get some changes going but the senior (and only other) dev wouldn't allow any modifications to the current system "for the moment". It was a bit frustrating to see so many easy fixes ignored.

overcast 10y ago

With the majority of users moving towards mobile, I really think this is an issue, and I've been consciously building projects as lean as possible. Removing bloated jquery libraries was a big one. With native calls like document.querySelectorAll document.querySelector I've found I can 90% get by without it. For the rest, using something like vue.js, and I've taken care of all the dom manipulation, data binding, etc.

Ruud-v-A 10y ago
How about not using js at all? I think that for the majority of pages it doesn’t add any value.
- overcast 10y ago
  With the instant gratification generation, not having dynamic content is going to be a tough sell. I will however agree, there is a gross overuse of it.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    The funny part about your reply is JS-heavy websites delay instant gratification on slow connections or machines. They can take 10-30 seconds then objects start jumping around as you try to click them. Whereas a cached static page or templated dynamic loads pretty instantly if it's mostly text content. In a way they understand if it's graphics.
smrtinsert 10y ago
I really wish more companies cared about their mobile presence. You don't need much, especially since native mobile widgets go so far along towards making web a nice thing. Also, for gods sake allow zooming. I think of that as such a major plus for mobile and yet so many mobile sites disallow it.
CaptSpify 10y ago
I lived in $nowheresville, TN for a bit. This drove me insane. Sure, your webapp works great in downtown SF, but try loading it with the spotty connection the rest of the country has, not to mention the rest of the world. One of the places I worked at had a computer hooked up to a ~800 kbps modem, and would test all their web-pages on that. It was really eye-opening, and I wish more companies would benchmark like that
- mod 10y ago
  Chrome network tools has throttling that can simulate really shitty networks, I use that a fair bit.

collyw 10y ago

I remember thinking years ago, that my CV in Word took up more memory than my first computer (Acorn Electron 32kb ram). It amazes me that I used to play Elete on that machine.

warriorkitty 10y ago

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\

rplnt 10y ago
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 the community around it.
- boredpudding 10y ago
  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.
  - rplnt 10y ago
    There are lots of legitimate reasons to not use jQuery. Not being in a browser might be one of them. So if someone asks about javascript, one should answer the question (and perhaps suggest that there are libraries such as jquery that handle it better).
- megalodon 10y ago
  SO feels more like a race to answer fast rather than to answer with quality. I think the best way to learn about the language is through the Mozilla Developer Network. I can't speak for everyone but I feel incredibly productive when programming in javascript. I'd argue that jQuery was great, but now most (if not all) of it can be replaced by native javascript features (e.g. document.querySelector). Today I wouldn't recommend jQuery to anyone. I suggest learning a functional language (in my case it was Haskell) in parallel, as it opens up new ways of thinking about javascript and problem solving.

jmnicolas 10y ago

> The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install It's not really surprising in a world where a graphical driver is > 100 MB (Nvidia driver for Windows).

warriorkitty 10y ago
Oh come on, let's talk about Adobe Reader and Skype. :)
elsurudo 10y ago
They mean the original Doom, which ran with a software renderer anyways.
batat 10y ago
And 43 MB chromium mini_installer.exe
throwanem 10y ago
Only a hundred megabytes? You're getting off light there. I went to install the latest Nvidia CUDA driver the other day, and it's a gigabyte download.

ebbv 10y ago

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 speeds have also grown over that time. Especially on mobile. Even if we accept the premise that web sites as a whole, including the most popular ones are all growing and are now an average of 2.2MB each. Who cares? 2.2MB is nothing in 2016. Even on an LTE connection that's probably between 4 and 1.5 seconds to download the full page. And a lot of that size is probably in ads, which nobody minds if they load last or not at all. Lastly, this is a self fixing problem. If a site is too bloated, users will stop going to it. But I would propose that a lot of this increase in size is due to users (especially mobile) having higher and higher resolution displays, which necessitates higher resolution content, which of course is bigger.

Ruud-v-A 10y ago
I care. I know a lot of people (here in western Europe) who are on a 1 GiB/month data plan. 2.2 MiB per page means that you can visit 15 pages per day. Better think twice before you click a link. Besides, 2.2 MiB for a page is pure bloat. Unless the page is heavy on images, you can usually fit all of the content that matters in a tenth of the size. In 300 KiB you can fit a 500-word article with 160 KiB picture, a few webfonts, headers/footers and stylesheets. Using a factor ten more is just ridiculous.
- niutech 10y ago
  I would recommend using Opera Mini or GDrives Web Light (http://gdriv.es/l/ http://gdriv.es/l/)
radiospiel 10y ago
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.

pljns 10y ago

The average Web page now does more than the average Doom install, I don't see the relevance of this. Although I get really annoyed when I visit a blog post whose page is 100x larger than Dostoevsky's novels in .txt format. On my blog (https://pljns.com/blog/ https://pljns.com/blog/), JQuery and genericons are often my largest file transfers, but I still clock under 500kb.

blub 10y ago
Displaying text on screen with some crappy ads & animations is not doing more than Doom, not even close.
Marazan 10y ago
Once you remove Ad Tech how much does the average we page actually do?
batat 10y ago
https://pljns.com/ https://pljns.com/ > 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow [x] check > You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? [x] assuming 404'ed fontawesome as shitty webfont, check > You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no [x] check > Your site has three bylines and link to your dribbble account, but you spread it over 7 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is [x] check Still pretty good site, but it's funny how accurately creator of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ has described the situation with the modern web :)
- pljns 10y ago
  These are all good points that I knew when I hastily pushed the site last week. Still way under 1000kb! Also, I said my blog, but serves me right I guess ;-)

jessriedel 10y ago

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 calculated for the top N URLs on the web (or perhaps, an estimate based on the top M domain names and other signals) and downloaded to the client (so no privacy issues). People will very quickly learn to associate red URLs with the feeling "ugh, this page is taking forever". So long as the metric was reasonably robust to gaming, websites would face a greater pressure to cut the bloat. And yet, it's still ultimately feedback determined by a user's revealed preferences, based on what they think is worth waiting how long for, rather than a developer's guess about what's reasonable.

ma2rten 10y ago
I thought Google already punishes slow loading websites.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  When Google does this they are explicitly making a trade off between relevance and speed on behalf of the user. I'd rather leave that choice to the user, especially when the user can infer that this is the correct destination from the search result text. Also, it doesn't work other places.
mtgx 10y ago
I also like how Opera now allows you to benchmark websites with and without ads. I think other browsers should expand on that idea (benchmarking sites, and not just for ads). Give some kind of reminder to both users and developers about how slow their sites are. Those with the slowest websites probably won't like it too much initially, but it's going to be better for all of us in the long term. http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad-blocking-feature-opera-for-computers/ http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad-blockin...
10y ago

hammock 10y ago

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

robotnoises 10y ago
Because we can! Games were slim back then because they had to be. Webpages are fat now because our computers are fast. Now, if a webpage were to approach the size of a contemporary game...
degif 10y ago
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.
shawabawa3 10y ago
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.
ufo 10y ago
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 http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
rhinoceraptor 10y ago
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.
cm3 10y ago
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

dreamlayers 10y ago

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?

fredley 10y ago
This, and Javascript, and browser bloat.
- zokier 10y ago
  Unless the browser ends up swapping a lot I doubt that browser bloat would cause significant perceptible performance regressions compared to the quite significant amount of optimization that has happened in the meanwhile.
toyg 10y ago
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.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

...and my first computer had 128 bytes of RAM. And a 300-baud modem.

NoGravitas 10y ago
That's amazing, what was it? My first computer had 5K of RAM.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Altair 8800, kit from MITS. And I wrote a game on it, using keyboard and screen.

jokoon 10y ago

I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY this video about the early HTML standardization process, and it seems to explain all the ills of HTML. So indeed, there is a huge optimization opportunity of having a stricter error model. Also, I'm really wondering how much battery could be saved when surfing such pages. Also I'm sure there is a lot of potential going in the pre-parsed document model. But that's a next level kind of engineering I guess.

robotnoises 10y ago

Before everyone jumps onto the JQuery/Bootstrap/etc sucks bandwagon, just a reminder that the minified jquery from cdnjs is 84.1kb. Bootstrap is 43.1kb. If you want your page to load fast, the overall "size" of the page shouldn't be at the top of your list of concerns. Try reducing the # of requests, first. Combine and minify your javascript, use image sprites, etc.

madawan 10y ago
or use HTTP2 which should make the number of requests largely irrelevant.
- acdha 10y ago
  HTTP/2 helps with that but the total size still matters. This is particularly relevant for resources like CSS which block rendering – even with HTTP/2 making it less important whether that's one big resource or a dozen small ones, the page won't render until it's all been transferred. https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS#recommended-usage-pattern https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS#recommended-usage-p... has a rather nice way to load CSS asynchronously in browsers which support rel=preload.
spiderfarmer 10y ago
I see lots of websites that don't even cache static resources and use > 10 scripts and stylesheets, from a lot of different domains. Terrible.
- eterm 10y ago
  And link the non-minified versions. (but the different domains actually helps speed up loading with http because it helps parallelise transfers.)
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    Domain sharding almost never makes any sense, especially on mobile, and with HTTP2 it's working against you. http://www.mobify.com/blog/domain-sharding-bad-news-mobile-performance/ http://www.mobify.com/blog/domain-sharding-bad-news-mobile-p...

aorth 10y ago

> The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if you want to be a top website). Wow. That's nice to see actually.

faitswulff 10y ago
I suspect that the top ten sites are lighter because they must perform under load rather than being a top ten site because they load quickly, but it is nice to see. Imagine the billions of man hours that would be wasted by humanity waiting for the top ten sites to load.

Tenhundfeld 10y ago

Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though. 1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images? It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site. For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS and a few 50KB images. If we're just interested in total bandwidth consumption, then sure, total size is a good metric. If we're interested in how a user experiences the web, there's a lot of variability and nuance buried in that. 2) What device and methodology were used to take the measurements? In this age of responsive design, CSS media queries, and infinite scrolling/deferred loading, it really matters how you measure and what you use to measure. For example, if I load a page on my large retina screen and scroll to the bottom, many sites will send far more data than if I load them on my phone and don't scroll past the fold. I only skimmed the article and didn't dig in to the references. These questions may be answered elsewhere.

spiderfarmer 10y ago
The speed index was invented for benchmarking this: https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/metrics/speed-index https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...
- Tenhundfeld 10y ago
  Ah, very cool, thanks for sharing. I'm familiar with a lot of the tools for evaluating the performance of a single site (e.g., that I'm developing), but I'm pretty ignorant of the standard approaches for these types of larger scale benchmarking projects.
  - artificial 10y ago
    If you're developing you may not be aware of Page Speed Insights, extremely handy for SEO. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

imaginenore 10y ago

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.

thom 10y ago

There's a reason that the economics of web development mostly work and the economics of games development mostly do not.

thedevil 10y ago
This probably requires more explanation.

stegosaurus 10y ago

If web bloat is a problem, I don't think that looking at whether <insert buzzword framework of CURRENT_YEAR> can be removed is the answer. I suggest that at the moment, we have basically two camps of website, with rough, fuzzy boundaries. 1. A place where someone sticks up an insight, or posts a wiki page, or whatever, to share some thought to others (if anyone actually cares). The blogs of many users of HN. Hacker News itself. Wikipedia. The Arch Linux Wiki. lwn.net. Etc. The sites are very roughly concerned with 'this is what I care about, if you do, great, this is useful to you'. 2. Commercial web sites that employ sophisticated means to try and enlarge market share and retain users. AB testing. 'Seamless' experiences which are aimed at getting more views, with user experience as an afterthought (a sort of evolutionary pressure, but not the only one). Complaining that camp #2 exists is strange. It's a bit like lamenting the fact that chocolate bars aren't just chocolate bars, they have flashy wrappers, clever ingredients, optimized sugar ratio, crunchy bit and non crunchy bit, etc. It works! A snickers bar is a global blockbuster, and 'Tesco chocolate bar' is the functional chocolate bar that just does the job, but will never attain that level of commercial success, it serves a different role. ----- My personal view: Fundamentally what I want when we click a link from an aggregator, is an 'article.txt' with perhaps a relevant image or two. Something like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ maybe. But if a site actually does that, a website like The Guardian, I'd fire up wget, strip all the advertising, strip the fact it's even The Guardian, and read it like a book. If everyone does it then no-one makes any money, site dies. So what we actually have is this constant DRM-style race to try and fight for our brains to get us to look at adverts. It's not about jQuery, it's about advertising, branding, 'self vs other' (the integrity of a company as a coherent thing), etc. I don't know what the answer is here. I think this is why I find concepts like UBI so appealing - I find it kind of alarming that we seem doomed to infect more and more of the commons with commercialization because we haven't found a solution to keep each other alive otherwise.

oldmanjay 10y ago
With stories like these, you have to know where to find the real problem. At least some percentage can be ignored whenever nerds use the word "bloat" because it's a code word for "the only things that should be allowed are things I approve" in a surprisingly large number of contexts.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

How about browser bloat? Each chromium tab on linux takes an extra ~50-150mb depending on the site -- and I still have no idea what they need all of that memory for...

r1ch 10y ago
Mostly Javascript and caches.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
niutech 10y ago
Chromium is a memory hog, it is a well known fact. Use Otter Browser or QupZilla instead.

Jerry2 10y ago

Maciej Cegłowski has a great talk/writeup on this very problem: The Website Obesity Crisis http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Here’s the video of the talk if you prefer to hear him speak: https://vimeo.com/147806338 https://vimeo.com/147806338

datalist 10y ago

Not too long ago Medium pushed an "invisible" 1MB image to clients https://binarypassion.net/digital-decadence-6ea59251d64d https://binarypassion.net/digital-decadence-6ea59251d64d and the video it refers to https://vimeo.com/147806338 https://vimeo.com/147806338

damptowel 10y ago
At my frst job I once had to fix a wordpress site that was 'too slow' which loaded a 12MB 4k by 4k favicon. I kid you not. It also loaded jquery 4 times, had about 20 unminified stylesheets linked in the header. When I told this to my manager he told me 'oh but you only need to load that stuff once and then its cached, so that can't be an issue'. I did not last long in that place. The backend was even more of a wasteland.
- datalist 10y ago
  A 16 megapixel favicon does sound scary.

donkeyd 10y ago

Visited a website a few days ago, which used 2048x1365 jpegs for 190x125 buttons. They had multiple buttons like this on multiple pages. I sent them an e-mail about this, but I don't expect them to fix it.

K0nserv 10y ago

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/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ 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 https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html

gonzo41 10y ago
Plus one for you. It used to be the internet was a book, now it's a movie.
- gkya 10y ago
  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.
alasano 10y ago
http://i.imgur.com/wB5B35g.png http://i.imgur.com/wB5B35g.png My user experience was great, I have to agree.
gradi3nt 10y ago
"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." - Eleanor Roosevelt
- 10y ago

webscalist 10y ago

What happened to semantic markups? In the name of rendering optimizations, many web sites use css background image instead of <img>

AdamN 10y ago

The only real solution is a search engine that allows the end user to clip the results based on the maximum size of the total page. I've often wondered why Duck Duck Go doesn't do this as well as filter search results based on number of ad networks used, etc...

jordigh 10y ago

Just to clarify, since I was confused (I remembered that Doom 2 was about 30 megs uncompressed, which websites are still a long ways from), this metric appears to refer to the compressed size of the Doom 1 shareware distribution. http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&ContentsFolderId=216 http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&Conten...

snowwrestler 10y ago

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 http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Does comparing web pages to Doom help understand or improve the situation? No, not any more than comparing Doom to Apollo memory size helps us understand the difference between a video game and a history-altering exploration.

skoczymroczny 10y ago
> Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. Well, to be honest, Episode 1 and Episode 2 of Doom takes place on Phobos and Deimos, so you could say Apollo software got us to the moon but Doom got us to Mars :)
- jordigh 10y ago
  Since 2.1 megs is only the compressed size of the shareware distribution[1], we are not going any further than Phobos. Since this is only for v1.0, it is going to be a buggy Phobos. [1] http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&ContentsFolderId=216 http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&Conten...
StavrosK 10y ago
That link inspires me to print and bind the code of a webpage into a book, and put it on a shelf next to other literature masterpieces. One Hundred Years of Solitude The Count of Monte Cristo Anna Karenina Don Quixote Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I want the audio version, narrated by Malcolm McDowell.

flexterra 10y ago

what is the average size of a native mobile app?

oraculo 10y ago
https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-averages/ https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-average...

spriggan3 10y ago

The average data plan here is 10GB : 1,000,000 * 10 / 2250 = 4444 web pages a month 4444 / 31 = 143 web pages a day at most on mobile. While it is somehow acceptable, I don't see data plans getting cheaper yet the size of the average webpage is raising fast. It doesn't seem like most websites have heavily invested in using HTML5 offline capabilities or actual mobile first design either, something easy to check with chrome dev tools. Also let's talk about ads : Polygon.com a site I visit often , first article on the homepage with an Iphone 5 : - with ads/trackers 1.5mb - without ads 623kb More than half of the load is ad/tracking related. This isn't normal.

intrasight 10y ago

The publishers really have no incentive to address this until a critical mass of users install adblock software.

elcapitan 10y ago

Doom would have been the superior solution to the World Wide Web.

fnfnfjnd 10y ago

I legitimately do not understand why webdevs insist on learning new, equally complicated API's to do things that raw HTML/ CSS/ javascript are already perfectly capable of doing just as easily. Not only do you have to write your code, but you also have to learn the new API for the framework flavor of the month. So much about frameworks just flat out doesn't make sense. Are you honestly telling me that it's more efficient to make a second DOM in a language with much more overhead than the native C++ implementation? Best case scenario is that you consume twice the resources. There seems to be a serious case of monkey-see-monkey-do in the web development community.

njharman 10y ago

So, were can I play Doom in the browser?

Kristine1975 10y ago
Here: http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on-earth.html http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on-earth.html (yes, it's Doom 2, and yes it requires a fast machine since it emulates a DOS PC in the browser)
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I can't help but add that it's a DOS PC + a game that still loads faster than some web pages. At some point, even the apples to oranges comparisons start saying something because it's glaringly obvious.
- njharman 10y ago
  Ok, awesome. Now I'm wondering if we PCDOS in a broswer... 1) Can we say the claim (I think of mozilla's) that the web was going to be the new OS is true? 2) If DOS today, will it be 5 or 10 years before we get BSD or *nix in the browser?

skarap 10y ago

Looks like most of the discussion here is on network traffic. Minifying JS and CSS, compression, CDNs and caching won't keep your browser from having to render all the stuff. --- The stewardess on a new jet airliner: - Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard of our new airplane. On the second deck you'll find a couple of bars and a restaurant. The golf course is on the third deck. You're also welcome to visit the swimming pool on the fourth deck. Now - ladies and gentlemen - please fasten your seatbelts. With all this sh*t we'll try to take off.

dempseye 10y ago

I once bought a pre-made landing page template with all kinds of whizz bang Javascript libraries built in. The demo page was 4 MB. In the time it took to strip all the trash out of the template I could have designed the page myself. I'll never do that again. I wonder how much of the problem is due to bloated templates.

Kurtz79 10y ago

It is hardly surprising, considering that a single picture taken with an average smartphone is probably already surpassing that by quite a bit. Times change, and 20 years in tech is equivalent to several geological ages. If anything, it cannot really be underestimated how some developers were able to craft such compelling gaming experiences, with the limited resources available at the time. My personal favorite as "most impressive game for its size": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II

CaptSpify 10y ago

disclaimer: my own blog - https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads I kept looking for a "minimal" blogging platform, but they all had too much bloat/JS/etc. I guess minimal means different things to different people. I ended up just writing my own. The biggest post I have is 7.41 KB. I used to be interested in front-end design, but since it's the industry standard to use $latest_framework, instead of tried and proven practices, I've given up on that idea.

detaro 10y ago
One extreme end of the scale ;) I feel like investing a few hundred extra bytes on some styling might be worth it, a la http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ vs http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I'm of the mindset that our browsers are built backwards. For "content-oriented" sites, we should present text, and give the users tools in their browsers to present them as the user sees fit. Instead, we expect the site to design it. Something like Firefox Reader View. Some people may like bettermotherfuckingwebsite better, but I personally don.t "presentation-oriented" sites are a different story, of course
  - detaro 10y ago
    Basic styles don't mess with Reader View or other customization, so I don't see a large downside to include them, they just make it nicer for people not using such tools. Unless the point is to get people to use different tools?
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      > Unless the point is to get people to use different tools? Kind of. I dream of an Internet where people have their own CSS/styles, and they can make it look how they want, rather than how the website wants it. I think of it like this: I'm a linux guy. I want my tools to output plainly to stdout. If I want to format them, I'll pipe them into my own formatting tools. I wish websites worked that way as well.

sergiotapia 10y ago

Arguably sites have been increasing in size for one simple reason: It directly results in increased sales. Everything is sales. If cleaner, 'purer' sites made more money you bet the average web page would be 10kb. It's all about what translates to more sales. As such, you won't ever see a return to more traditional websites. Look at Amazon with it's virtual dress models, heavy as hell, but they most certainly land more sales.

niutech 10y ago
Quite opposite. It is proved that longer page loading time is less conversion.

Joof 10y ago

From this title; maybe hacker news needs a twitter? Also: You can't use average page weight when you are just looking at the top ten. That downturn could represent a single website; all others could be increasing in size.

bb85 10y ago

> The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if you want to be a top website) Isn't that that the top websites have a lot more ressources available to improve asset management, cleanup and refactor?

tyingq 10y ago
This set of benchmarks is often helpful: http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united-states/ http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united-states/ Particularly the "last mile" or "Chrome Homepage" tabs. They cover the top websites, grouped into categories like "Retail", "Travel", "Media", etc. The disparity across competitors is pretty stunning, with some websites getting close to 1 second to download/render a page, and others taking 6, 7, 8 , even 10 seconds. And these are all big, well known, companies. And, for the most part, it all correlates very well to total page weight, and total number of artifacts on the page (js/css/images/etc). There are some exceptions, but it's a pretty strong correlation.

seagreen 10y ago

Oh God. Every discussion about the web will continue to be a mess until we clarify what we're talking about. Let's try rephrasing the title a couple times. Rephrase 1: "The average size of a webapp is now the average size of a Doom install". Response: Interesting, but not bad! Heck, some webapps are games. "The average size of a web game is now the average size of Doom" isn't a sentence that damns the web, it's a sentence that complements the web! (or would if it was true, and it might be for all I know) Rephrase 2: "The average size of web document is now the average size of a Doom install". Response: Well this sucks (or would if it was true -- still we don't know). Simple documents should be a few KB, not the size of a game. Basically our terminology is shot to crap. Imagine if 19th century engineers used the same word for "hand crank" and "steam engine". "Hand crank prices are skyrocketing! What's causing this massive bloat!" Whelp, that could mean anything. The best solution: web browsers should enforce a clear distinction between "web documents" and "web apps". These are two different things and should be treated separately. This won't happen though, which leaves us (the rest of the tech community) to explore other options . . .

nulltype 10y ago
Web apps/documents both look pretty good compared to modern games, those things are 100s of MB at least.

seanwilson 10y ago

Lots of people are focusing on excessive JavaScript and CSS but these combined are easily dwarfed by a single high quality image. Try visiting Apple's website for example. I can't see how you can have a small page weight if your page includes several images that are meant to look good on high quality screens. You're not going to convince marketing and page designers to go with imageless pages. Doom's original resolution was 320x200 = 64K pixels in 8-bit colour mode. Even an Apple Watch has 92K pixels and 24-bit colour (three times more space per pixel) now, and a 15" MacBook display shows 5.2M pixels. The space used for high quality images on newer displays is order of magnitudes higher to what Doom hardware had to show.

arohner 10y ago
Images can load progressively, so pure HTML + one large image absolutely can appear faster to the user. The JS and CSS to load a SPA won't. Page weight is a good rule of thumb, but it isn't the be all end all of a good experience.
spriggan3 10y ago
> Try visiting Apple's website for example. Indeed, right now on mobile the biggest asset on apple.com is a 1.7 MB picture. http://images.apple.com/v/home/cm/images/heros/environment_earth_day_large_2x.jpg http://images.apple.com/v/home/cm/images/heros/environment_e... The total size of the webpage being 2.5 MB.
niutech 10y ago
That's why anybody should optimize their images, using e.g. Kraken.io or converting to WebP.

NelsonMinar 10y ago

Is there a Chrome extenson that shows the size of a web page? There's a good one for page load time that I use, but I want kilobytes with and without cache.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sugarfactory 10y ago

Google developed SPDY, an efficient binary representation of HTTP messages. Maybe they will do the same thing but for HTML. It would be much more efficient if one could design a binary representation of HTML that can only express well-formed HTML.

person15 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML

maerF0x0 10y ago

This all comes down to cost. It is much cheaper to have "bloat" than it is to pay devs to fix it. And customers find it much cheaper to deal with "bloat" than to find smaller alternatives. Sure the average webpage is bigger than doom, but the CPU in my phone is approximately 100x (times multicore too?) than the 486 that ran Doom. Sure, if man hours were free, we could trim it all down to (my rough guess) about 1/10th the size. But at $100 or even $10 an hour its just not worth it. Pay the GBs to your carrier, spend $50 more on a better phone.

niutech 10y ago
It would cost no extra time if devs made websites from scratch with performance in mind. Save optimized images, minify code as a build task, etc.

apeace 10y ago

This page clocks in at 935kb in my browser. According to this same page, that is roughly the size of Sim City 2000.

CM30 10y ago

It's also about 2 times bigger than a lot of SNES and Mega Drive games. Or about 4 times bigger than Super Mario World (512KB). As for why it's getting so insane, probably either: 1. Frameworks, since most people don't remove the code they're not using. For Bootstrap or Foundation, that can be a lot of extra code. 2. Content Management Systems, since stuff like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, any forum or social network script, tend to add a lot of extra code (more so if you've added plugins). 3. The aforementioned tracking codes, ads, etc.

chasing 10y ago

The only conclusion I can legitimately draw from this article is that in twenty years a single web page will be larger than the 65GB Grand Theft Auto V install.

oraculo 10y ago

https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-averages/ https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-average...

perseusprime11 10y ago

Enable Ghostery and load cnn.com and you will see why the web pages are so heavy these days.

jakobdabo 10y ago

Yesterday I discovered that Twitter's HTTP headers alone are ~3500 bytes long (25 tweets!) with several long cookies, custom headers and the Content Security Policy[1] containing ~90 records. Is this considered normal nowadays? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy

stepvhen 10y ago

> Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. Doom isn't in true 3D, its an advanced raycasting engine. The levels are all 2D, there are no polygons, you can't look up and down. Doom has been ported to a TI Calculator. Lets maintain some perspective here.

coldtea 10y ago
>Lets maintain some perspective here. I see what you did here.

qaq 10y ago

Too bad we can not measure it football fields

kgr 10y ago

Send “models” rather than code. Low-level code is relatively unexpressive, contains considerable redundancy, and as a result, is relatively large. By sending high-level models instead, which are then expanded on the client to working code, application download size can be greatly decreased. Models typically provide one to two orders of magnitude of compression over code. This video shows how we do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ This document gives some results (like a GMail client that is 100X smaller): https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE72Ut0EsoPNFr9YKDkaw6DIfCDgExYkS2k/pub https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE7...

damon_c 10y ago

In 20 years the average size of web pages will be the size of a Quake 3 install. This is progress.

dclowd9901 10y ago

Are we really complaining about webpage size when fully 30% of web traffic is Netflix? This might be an unpopular opinion but websites are no longer just html, css and js. They're full on applications with rich interaction and data visualization. Call me when they're larger than an average modern native app install.

Shivetya 10y ago

and here I remember that the PDF of the Turbo Pascal manual was so many multiples of the compiler's size I needed a calculator to figure it out

hackertux 10y ago

I also recommend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445

jccalhoun 10y ago

and the .kkreiger beta only uses 96k! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

brownbat 10y ago

ronan has an account here, commented on this as it was developing a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981707

AndyKelley 10y ago

I wanted to see how one of my personal projects compared, so I looked at Groove Basin. Groove Basin [1] is an open source music player server. It has a sophisticated web-based client with the ability to retag, label, create playlists, stream, browse the library, chat with other users, upload new music, and import music by URL. I just checked the payload size of a cold load, and it's 68 KB. I'll just keep doing my thing over here. [1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin

awqrre 10y ago

It's initially cheaper to make larger web pages, you don't have to optimize for size (most of the time it would probably execute faster if it was smaller but probably not always). Some others make it larger on purpose for obfuscation (like Google).

partycoder 10y ago

For Internet 3 we should call John Carmack and put all of the internet in a MegaTexture.

myared 10y ago

GTA 5 is ~65GB in size. One day, web pages will be bigger than that.

LordKano 10y ago

Great, another kooky unit of measure. "This new re-design gets us down to 0.4 Doom installs without sacrificing any of the visual elements."

tacone 10y ago

But they load faster than Doom used to.

systematical 10y ago

Amazon isn't what I'd call "light" at 4.7 MB, but looking at my companies market all the bigger players are way lighter than us.

ivanhoe 10y ago

Doom is not a good measure, when web pages become bigger and more bloated than your average printer or scanner driver, then it will be alarming :)

bendbro 10y ago

Why can't all these frameworks just be cached? If a cross site request to cdn.com/react-v1.0.js is cached under cdn.com, at most one download will trigger. That seems to solve the problem, but maybe I'm missing something.

bendbro 10y ago
I've seen people mention that caching is broken since it only works when the name and version are the same; however, I don't see how this is any different than two packages of the same functionality being uploaded to an APT repo with different names.

chowes 10y ago

Wondering if an idea like this would work: Bundlers like Webpack already import JS in a modular structure. I'm wondering if we could do some profiling into popular npm module combinations (I know many people using React + Lodash + Redux Router, etc), bundle them up, and have Webpack load in those combos from a CDN via <script>? Now this would probably require some work on webpack's end (the __webpack_require__(n) would have to be some sort of consistent hash), but at least everyone who blindly require('lodash') will see an improvement?

necessity 10y ago
Web pages shouldn't need JS at all, except for the basic eye candy it was originally used for, and most importantly shouldn't break without it. A web page that doesn't work without JS is broken. Web apps are another deal though.

jrl 10y ago

This is one of the reasons why I love a simple website without too many whistles and bells.

Khaine 10y ago

Isn't the answer to just create a reasonable standard library for javascript so people don't need to link in megabytes of frameworks