7 ms·

Contrast the load times between those 1996 pages from the current site. Keep in mind there is probably no advertising spyware in the 96 site and it may account

Contrast the load times between those 1996 pages from the current site. Keep in mind there is probably no advertising spyware in the 96 site and it may account for most of the HTTP requests on the current site.

drewg123 9y ago
And there are also no annoying autoplay videos. That has to help load times too. I wish companies would understand that if I'm reading something on the web, I want to read it, not be distracted by a video that contains the same or less information and takes longer to watch than the article does to read. I like the 1996 version better.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  As far as I can ascertain, that isn't typical behavior and video gets more engagement.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > video gets more engagement. I keep reading this, so I assume it must be true, but I wonder what that says about our society. There must be huge numbers of illiterates out their pointing and grunting (like something in Idioctracy) to outweigh all the folks I know, who don't watch videos and don't understand why people would.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      It doesn't exactly flatter our education system to look into this stuff: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_... > According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.
- c3534l 9y ago
  There used to be a lot of sites that auto-played music in the 90s.
eli 9y ago
What was the load time of the page on Netscape Navigator and a Pentium processor over 1996 era dialup?
- rangibaby 9y ago
  Slow
  - eli 9y ago
    In fact, I'd guess slower than the modern cnn.com homepage on modern hardware and software.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Network latency has always been significantly more than rendering time by the browser.
- dordoka 9y ago
  I was curious as well. Set up a custom network profile in chrome dev tools (28.8kbps and 150ms latency), no cache: 3.9mins to load!
rhblake 9y ago
In 1996, with a typical 28.8k modem, that page would've taken more than 20 seconds to load. I'm quite sentimental and nostalgic about the web of yore but let's not pretend everything wasn't a lot slower for most people back then.
- michrassena 9y ago
  Absolutely, I do recall a lot of griping around that time about images and how much they slowed down the web. Look how image-heavy the old CNN pages are. There's over 50KB of images there and only 3K of text. Fortunately, web browsers of the era let you turn off loading of images or you could use a text-only browser like Lynx.
  - compsciphd 9y ago
    all the images also include width/height attributes so it would have rendered without needing to load the images and just lazy loaded them.

drewg123 9y ago

And there are also no annoying autoplay videos. That has to help load times too. I wish companies would understand that if I'm reading something on the web, I want to read it, not be distracted by a video that contains the same or less information and takes longer to watch than the article does to read. I like the 1996 version better.

emodendroket 9y ago
As far as I can ascertain, that isn't typical behavior and video gets more engagement.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > video gets more engagement. I keep reading this, so I assume it must be true, but I wonder what that says about our society. There must be huge numbers of illiterates out their pointing and grunting (like something in Idioctracy) to outweigh all the folks I know, who don't watch videos and don't understand why people would.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    It doesn't exactly flatter our education system to look into this stuff: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_... > According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.
c3534l 9y ago
There used to be a lot of sites that auto-played music in the 90s.

eli 9y ago

What was the load time of the page on Netscape Navigator and a Pentium processor over 1996 era dialup?

rangibaby 9y ago
Slow
- eli 9y ago
  In fact, I'd guess slower than the modern cnn.com homepage on modern hardware and software.
Santosh83 9y ago
Network latency has always been significantly more than rendering time by the browser.
dordoka 9y ago
I was curious as well. Set up a custom network profile in chrome dev tools (28.8kbps and 150ms latency), no cache: 3.9mins to load!

rhblake 9y ago

In 1996, with a typical 28.8k modem, that page would've taken more than 20 seconds to load. I'm quite sentimental and nostalgic about the web of yore but let's not pretend everything wasn't a lot slower for most people back then.

michrassena 9y ago
Absolutely, I do recall a lot of griping around that time about images and how much they slowed down the web. Look how image-heavy the old CNN pages are. There's over 50KB of images there and only 3K of text. Fortunately, web browsers of the era let you turn off loading of images or you could use a text-only browser like Lynx.
- compsciphd 9y ago
  all the images also include width/height attributes so it would have rendered without needing to load the images and just lazy loaded them.