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Calling this a "Crisis" is definitely blowing this out of proportion. True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a

Calling this a "Crisis" is definitely blowing this out of proportion. True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a look at your favourite websites on the waybackmachine and see how god awful most of them looked just 6-7 years ago, compare the functionality they provided vs what we have now. Yes I agree some websites do really need to go on a diet, loading unused css, js and multimedia has to be removed, but 1-2MB is not a reason anyone should be throwing their hands in air screaming CRISIS!! Definitely I would applaud anyone who would spend their time optimising their websites to be as small as they can be, but Jesus Christ 2BM and we have a crisis... no way! I for one think this is a sign we are making progress a very good thing, we are improving as a community and we are getting more out of our web.

_pmf_ 10y ago
> and so has functionality If a web site is no longer readable because it layouts every 2 seconds to accommodate 145 ads, it does not have more functionality; it has less.
- scott_s 10y ago
  That is true. However, that does not describe all webpages, and I think implies a false dichotomy. There are plenty of sites which use modern functionality to deliver an experience that did not exist a decade ago.
  - vegabook 10y ago
    It strikes me that my browsing experience not has seen a net improvement in the past 6-7 years. Whereas the functionality of websites is undoubtedly better, the ad-swamp is definitely greater too. I call it a draw. For all the content/UI improvement, there is a corresponding increase in advertising encroachment. If we assume that in tech things are supposed to improve over time, 6-7 years of static is a regression versus expectations.
    - _pmf_ 10y ago
      Today, it's faster and uses less bandwidth to watch a video than to visit a major news site.
WA 10y ago
I just got a text this morning from my phone company: "Your exceeded your monthly 500MB limit". It's probably not a crisis, but it has some quite real economic consequences if I have to download 2MB worth of nothing whenever I click a link. Yes, Adblockers to the rescue. But you know, Apple doesn't support Adblockers on an iPhone 5 for whatever stupid reason.
- oolongCat 10y ago
  See the main problem then, is not a problem with if websites are obese or paper thin, the question is are websites and our browsers doing a good job of using already existing features for helping users. I think we should be complaining about developers and admins who doesn't enable gzipping, we should be angry with the fact some websites don't even bother setting headers to cache static resources. We should not be throwing out hands up in air screaming crisis because our web is becoming more useful.
  - exodust 10y ago
    "Useful" doesn't need to mean bloated. You seem to miss the point that many websites these days are bloated even basic articles. We don't need a V8 engine and oversize tyres to go buy milk and bread. You're forgetting that mobile devices quickly run out of cache memory. This includes iPads. You might visit a news site once every few days, but quite often the same resources need downloading again and again because your iPad has not kept them in cache memory because it ran out already. Desktop browsers have a lot more capacity to keep web resources cached. Not only that, but RAM memory is also limited on mobile devices. Forget about expecting multiple websites to remain in memory across numerous tabs. My iPad3 can pretty much handle only one tab open. If I switch tabs to another website, then switch back, the whole page loads again. A less bloated web would help this issue. And then there's accessibility for low-speed areas. Did you even read the article?
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Most static servers enable If-Modified-Since header, as well as other detections... Cache sizes, specifically on mobile are very small, and ineffective... it's more often than not, a very small http request to recheck if a cached file is still valid. Optimizing images is a pretty huge thing, as is enabling gz compression on the streams... these two alone add up to far more saving than setting cache headers, not that they can't or shouldn't be set.
emodendroket 10y ago
Not to mention... I remember the dial-up days. We were all worrying about pages being too big and taking too long to load then, although "too big" was obviously a different size and had more to do with images than scripts. It's not surprising that people are going to use the resources available to them.
vanderZwan 10y ago
This edit:following medium.com article clocks in at over 100mb in total, due to unoptimised gifs (so don't open it on mobile): https://medium.com/@tubikstudio/ui-animation-microinteraction-for-macroresult-668cd9e71101#.cvux0ueyh https://medium.com/@tubikstudio/ui-animation-microinteractio... http://imgur.com/SsurT3W http://imgur.com/SsurT3W Aside from the fact that it's impressive to make flat-styled animations that big in gif form, I think the people behind medium.com are just as much to blame for not giving feedback to the uploader about the size of the attached images, nor offering a non-destructive optimising pass or serving the gifs reencoded as .WebM for browsers that support it.
- jklinger410 10y ago
  Certainly a type of juicy irony that the article author writing about a "crisis" should include his own post in that crisis. Not to mention that their sentiment is unoriginal by a factor of possibly a decade.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    I wasn't talking about the posted article, I was talking about the article that I linked myself.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
> True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a look at your favourite websites on the waybackmachine and see how god awful most of them looked just 6-7 years ago, compare the functionality they provided vs what we have now. Well, the article disagrees that this is always what is going on, for example: > Here's the PayPal website as it looks today. The biggest element on the page is an icon chastising me that I haven't told PayPal what I look like. Next to that is a useless offer to 'download the app', and then an offer for a credit card. I can no longer control the sort order, there are no filter tools, and you see there are far fewer entries visible without scrolling. and > It's like we woke up one morning in 2008 to find that our Lego had all turned to Duplo. Sites that used to show useful data now look like cartoons. Interface elements are big and chunky. Any hint of complexity has been pushed deep into some sub-hamburger. Of course many things improved, today you can make more with less, a lot more. But all of that can easily be undone by just piling on a bunch of hires stock photographs or even video, 20 ad networks and 5 tracking scripts. And one might also to consider the memory footprint and CPU usage of multiple open tabs, and how leet efficient pages and bloated crap alike get put into the browser cache which is of finite size and flushes out older things to make room. Then multiply that by number of visitors. Crisis or not, it's a LOT of waste if you really think it through.
Lagged2Death 10y ago
True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality... What functionality do you have in mind when you're talking about the average read-only news-article type of web page?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

_pmf_ 10y ago

> and so has functionality If a web site is no longer readable because it layouts every 2 seconds to accommodate 145 ads, it does not have more functionality; it has less.

scott_s 10y ago
That is true. However, that does not describe all webpages, and I think implies a false dichotomy. There are plenty of sites which use modern functionality to deliver an experience that did not exist a decade ago.
- vegabook 10y ago
  It strikes me that my browsing experience not has seen a net improvement in the past 6-7 years. Whereas the functionality of websites is undoubtedly better, the ad-swamp is definitely greater too. I call it a draw. For all the content/UI improvement, there is a corresponding increase in advertising encroachment. If we assume that in tech things are supposed to improve over time, 6-7 years of static is a regression versus expectations.
  - _pmf_ 10y ago
    Today, it's faster and uses less bandwidth to watch a video than to visit a major news site.

WA 10y ago

I just got a text this morning from my phone company: "Your exceeded your monthly 500MB limit". It's probably not a crisis, but it has some quite real economic consequences if I have to download 2MB worth of nothing whenever I click a link. Yes, Adblockers to the rescue. But you know, Apple doesn't support Adblockers on an iPhone 5 for whatever stupid reason.

oolongCat 10y ago
See the main problem then, is not a problem with if websites are obese or paper thin, the question is are websites and our browsers doing a good job of using already existing features for helping users. I think we should be complaining about developers and admins who doesn't enable gzipping, we should be angry with the fact some websites don't even bother setting headers to cache static resources. We should not be throwing out hands up in air screaming crisis because our web is becoming more useful.
- exodust 10y ago
  "Useful" doesn't need to mean bloated. You seem to miss the point that many websites these days are bloated even basic articles. We don't need a V8 engine and oversize tyres to go buy milk and bread. You're forgetting that mobile devices quickly run out of cache memory. This includes iPads. You might visit a news site once every few days, but quite often the same resources need downloading again and again because your iPad has not kept them in cache memory because it ran out already. Desktop browsers have a lot more capacity to keep web resources cached. Not only that, but RAM memory is also limited on mobile devices. Forget about expecting multiple websites to remain in memory across numerous tabs. My iPad3 can pretty much handle only one tab open. If I switch tabs to another website, then switch back, the whole page loads again. A less bloated web would help this issue. And then there's accessibility for low-speed areas. Did you even read the article?
- tracker1 10y ago
  Most static servers enable If-Modified-Since header, as well as other detections... Cache sizes, specifically on mobile are very small, and ineffective... it's more often than not, a very small http request to recheck if a cached file is still valid. Optimizing images is a pretty huge thing, as is enabling gz compression on the streams... these two alone add up to far more saving than setting cache headers, not that they can't or shouldn't be set.

emodendroket 10y ago

Not to mention... I remember the dial-up days. We were all worrying about pages being too big and taking too long to load then, although "too big" was obviously a different size and had more to do with images than scripts. It's not surprising that people are going to use the resources available to them.

vanderZwan 10y ago

This edit:following medium.com article clocks in at over 100mb in total, due to unoptimised gifs (so don't open it on mobile): https://medium.com/@tubikstudio/ui-animation-microinteraction-for-macroresult-668cd9e71101#.cvux0ueyh https://medium.com/@tubikstudio/ui-animation-microinteractio... http://imgur.com/SsurT3W http://imgur.com/SsurT3W Aside from the fact that it's impressive to make flat-styled animations that big in gif form, I think the people behind medium.com are just as much to blame for not giving feedback to the uploader about the size of the attached images, nor offering a non-destructive optimising pass or serving the gifs reencoded as .WebM for browsers that support it.

jklinger410 10y ago
Certainly a type of juicy irony that the article author writing about a "crisis" should include his own post in that crisis. Not to mention that their sentiment is unoriginal by a factor of possibly a decade.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  I wasn't talking about the posted article, I was talking about the article that I linked myself.

PavlovsCat 10y ago

> True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a look at your favourite websites on the waybackmachine and see how god awful most of them looked just 6-7 years ago, compare the functionality they provided vs what we have now. Well, the article disagrees that this is always what is going on, for example: > Here's the PayPal website as it looks today. The biggest element on the page is an icon chastising me that I haven't told PayPal what I look like. Next to that is a useless offer to 'download the app', and then an offer for a credit card. I can no longer control the sort order, there are no filter tools, and you see there are far fewer entries visible without scrolling. and > It's like we woke up one morning in 2008 to find that our Lego had all turned to Duplo. Sites that used to show useful data now look like cartoons. Interface elements are big and chunky. Any hint of complexity has been pushed deep into some sub-hamburger. Of course many things improved, today you can make more with less, a lot more. But all of that can easily be undone by just piling on a bunch of hires stock photographs or even video, 20 ad networks and 5 tracking scripts. And one might also to consider the memory footprint and CPU usage of multiple open tabs, and how leet efficient pages and bloated crap alike get put into the browser cache which is of finite size and flushes out older things to make room. Then multiply that by number of visitors. Crisis or not, it's a LOT of waste if you really think it through.

Lagged2Death 10y ago

True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality... What functionality do you have in mind when you're talking about the average read-only news-article type of web page?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]