5 ms·

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 d

by ebbv 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
  I would recommend using Opera Mini or GDrives Web Light (http://gdriv.es/l/ http://gdriv.es/l/)
radiospiel 11y 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.
manigandham 11y ago
Who cares? Everyone does. Everyone wants faster sites and downloading 2.2MB is not easy or quick. It's a ridiculous amount of data needed to display sites that don't have any special media or functionality and it burns up battery life and data plans for most mobile users. Also latency is a far bigger effect than bandwidth when interacting with sites so I would say even with bandwidth going up, the actual experience of loading a site has gone down considerably over the last few years.
jokoon 11y ago
Internet infrastructure is far from being cheap, and CPUs are not free either. > Who cares? 2.2MB is nothing in 2016. Multiply that by the amount of internet users, and now try to imagine all the hardware running this. It's also about having a format that discourage bloat so that the web can be faster on a large scale.
- ebbv 11y ago
  What? The size of a page has nothing to do with the CPU. Most of that size is going to be in images and animation, and most web pages put basically no load on your CPU. If one does it's going to be because of badly written JS, not because of the size. Shrinking the average page size even by half is not going to "the web run faster on a large scale." Most of the time your page load speed is not affected by congestion, and if it is it's likely due to a local tower or something. The problem there will be the number of users per tower, not the size of the pages they are loading.
  - jokoon 11y ago
    Parsing text can be hardly parallelized. Overall it will increase the price of your phone so it can show that webpage fast enough, which will be a cost of both CPU and battery. I have a shitty bi core smartphone, and it really doesn't like webpages. When you look at the source of a page, there is no justification for all of this, unless you like complexity. I did not want to talk about HTML on smartphones, since it already seems to be non existent since apps replaced HTML, but do you really think we should have apps instead of webpages? Apps are less open. I really think HTML parsing is power intensive, and that you could actually increase autonomy and speed on HTML, instead of just having bigger batteries. Seems to be the same argument than fuel efficiency regulations. Maybe I say all this because I like minimalism, but at the end of the day, most core formats are designed with acceptable performance in mind. In my opinion, HTML doesn't have acceptable performance.
    - detaro 11y ago
      Are you sure that parsing HTML is the step that is the biggest issue for your phone, and not e.g. rendering or JS execution? (It's certainly possible, parsing HTML with bad parsers or pathological content can take surprisingly long, but it's generally the last thing I'd expect as a reason for a browser to be slow)
detaro 11y ago
> Even on an LTE connection that's probably between 4 and 1.5 seconds to download the full page So on the fastest mobile connection type available it's a magnitude or more to slow to feel fast, and that's a good state of things?

by ebbv 11y ago

Ruud-v-A 11y 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 11y ago
I would recommend using Opera Mini or GDrives Web Light (http://gdriv.es/l/ http://gdriv.es/l/)

radiospiel 11y 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.

manigandham 11y ago

Who cares? Everyone does. Everyone wants faster sites and downloading 2.2MB is not easy or quick. It's a ridiculous amount of data needed to display sites that don't have any special media or functionality and it burns up battery life and data plans for most mobile users. Also latency is a far bigger effect than bandwidth when interacting with sites so I would say even with bandwidth going up, the actual experience of loading a site has gone down considerably over the last few years.

jokoon 11y ago

Internet infrastructure is far from being cheap, and CPUs are not free either. > Who cares? 2.2MB is nothing in 2016. Multiply that by the amount of internet users, and now try to imagine all the hardware running this. It's also about having a format that discourage bloat so that the web can be faster on a large scale.

ebbv 11y ago
What? The size of a page has nothing to do with the CPU. Most of that size is going to be in images and animation, and most web pages put basically no load on your CPU. If one does it's going to be because of badly written JS, not because of the size. Shrinking the average page size even by half is not going to "the web run faster on a large scale." Most of the time your page load speed is not affected by congestion, and if it is it's likely due to a local tower or something. The problem there will be the number of users per tower, not the size of the pages they are loading.
- jokoon 11y ago
  Parsing text can be hardly parallelized. Overall it will increase the price of your phone so it can show that webpage fast enough, which will be a cost of both CPU and battery. I have a shitty bi core smartphone, and it really doesn't like webpages. When you look at the source of a page, there is no justification for all of this, unless you like complexity. I did not want to talk about HTML on smartphones, since it already seems to be non existent since apps replaced HTML, but do you really think we should have apps instead of webpages? Apps are less open. I really think HTML parsing is power intensive, and that you could actually increase autonomy and speed on HTML, instead of just having bigger batteries. Seems to be the same argument than fuel efficiency regulations. Maybe I say all this because I like minimalism, but at the end of the day, most core formats are designed with acceptable performance in mind. In my opinion, HTML doesn't have acceptable performance.
  - detaro 11y ago
    Are you sure that parsing HTML is the step that is the biggest issue for your phone, and not e.g. rendering or JS execution? (It's certainly possible, parsing HTML with bad parsers or pathological content can take surprisingly long, but it's generally the last thing I'd expect as a reason for a browser to be slow)

detaro 11y ago

> Even on an LTE connection that's probably between 4 and 1.5 seconds to download the full page So on the fastest mobile connection type available it's a magnitude or more to slow to feel fast, and that's a good state of things?