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Pages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels

by Joeri 9y ago

Pages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels slower despite my phone and connection being much faster. It seems web developers have stopped caring at all about performance. If you look at where the bloat went, it's mostly three things: - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests) Most likely culprits are retina class graphics and "hero graphic" designs. - Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. - video Now that flash has disappeared, it got replaced by auto-playing video, which is even worse as far as page bloat is concerned. [1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/ https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/

nerdponx 9y ago
- Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. You are blithely ignoring the reason for all this bloat: unwanted adtech surveillance.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  No, most of it is a move away from serverside page rendering to single page app memes. Its why the first meaningful page draw on most webpages takes 3x as long to happen as it did a decade ago.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Certainly adtech is evil, but even surfing with it aggressively disabled has gotten worse. Crank everything you can down to zero, and you'll still find bizarre multiple-source loads that won't draw anything useful until the entire page is loaded.
ashark 9y ago
> - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests) For some reason, around the time "digital native" design and designers got big, it suddenly became OK to include giant design-only images (not content, not a logo, not even a fancy button, just because the designer wanted a giant image) in web pages, which before was one of those things you Just Didn't Do in proper web design. It's gotten so bad that now it's done with videos. Web old-timers find this to be in shockingly poor taste, but that's where we are. Bring back the "bad" print-background designers, I say.
- jonas21 9y ago
  This didn't just happen by accident. It happened because the market demanded it. At a previous company I was at, we A/B tested this, and an image-heavy design did better on every relevant metric we could think of (and I assume many others have done the same).
  - sageikosa 9y ago
    Like a peacock, it signals the health of the organization that produced it because of the resources brought to bear on otherwise frivolous things.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  A particular hatred of mine are "load-under" images. You know, the ones designed to look like a cutaway into the page, so you load 1000 pixels of height, but see a sliding 400 pixels of the image as you scroll. It's like a microcosm of everything wrong with modern web design. It's wasteful on data, wasteful on memory, obscures useful information (like the actual picture), and actively distracts from the surrounding text. But it looks fancy, so it's not going anywhere.

by Joeri 9y ago

nerdponx 9y ago

- Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. You are blithely ignoring the reason for all this bloat: unwanted adtech surveillance.

amiga-workbench 9y ago
No, most of it is a move away from serverside page rendering to single page app memes. Its why the first meaningful page draw on most webpages takes 3x as long to happen as it did a decade ago.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Certainly adtech is evil, but even surfing with it aggressively disabled has gotten worse. Crank everything you can down to zero, and you'll still find bizarre multiple-source loads that won't draw anything useful until the entire page is loaded.

ashark 9y ago

> - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests) For some reason, around the time "digital native" design and designers got big, it suddenly became OK to include giant design-only images (not content, not a logo, not even a fancy button, just because the designer wanted a giant image) in web pages, which before was one of those things you Just Didn't Do in proper web design. It's gotten so bad that now it's done with videos. Web old-timers find this to be in shockingly poor taste, but that's where we are. Bring back the "bad" print-background designers, I say.

jonas21 9y ago
This didn't just happen by accident. It happened because the market demanded it. At a previous company I was at, we A/B tested this, and an image-heavy design did better on every relevant metric we could think of (and I assume many others have done the same).
- sageikosa 9y ago
  Like a peacock, it signals the health of the organization that produced it because of the resources brought to bear on otherwise frivolous things.
Bartweiss 9y ago
A particular hatred of mine are "load-under" images. You know, the ones designed to look like a cutaway into the page, so you load 1000 pixels of height, but see a sliding 400 pixels of the image as you scroll. It's like a microcosm of everything wrong with modern web design. It's wasteful on data, wasteful on memory, obscures useful information (like the actual picture), and actively distracts from the surrounding text. But it looks fancy, so it's not going anywhere.