65 ms·

The Bullshit Web

• modzu 8y ago
  i duno, if a site is taking more than a second to load, goodbye! then again surely most of the hn crowd uses something akin to ublock. what of those other poor souls
• edhelas 8y ago
  It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.
  • pseudocook 8y ago
    Desktop Slack runs on Electron, no? Which essentially lets web developers develop a "native-ish" cross-platform app, without learning a whole new platform. There is a long, long history of attempts to make good, cross-platform, native apps. In the late 1990s there was a company called Visix that had such a library that worked on Windows and Unix. There have been Windows implementations of Motif/XWindows. There was of course Java/JWT. These days there is Qt. None of these seem to have really caught fire. edit: I wrote Mac but I meant Unix
    • peterwwillis 8y ago
      Yeah, because cross-platform is a PITA. The reason web apps are popular is they're thin-terminals. You write your business logic on your mainframe/terminal server (linux vps) and the web app just handles the user interface. You maintain less portable code, deployment and upgrade is easier, and it simplifies the user experience a bit. The downside being network issues and supporting the server.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I wish that was the case. Web developers nowadays try to push as much code as they can out into the browser, to be run client-side.
    • user5994461 8y ago
      Qt and Java can do cross platform software, however it's not possible to make a UI that's usable on desktop, tablet and mobile. You will end up creating separate apps. Qt is actually really impressive in my opinion, it's possible to recompile a desktop software for mobile, sometimes without any code change at all.
  • moolcool 8y ago
    I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory
    • pavel_lishin 8y ago
      > I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab. (I realize that for some people, "hiding" Slack in a pinned tab may be a feature.)
      • nrhk 8y ago
        Just open in a separate chrome window?
        • pavel_lishin 8y ago
          In OS X, if I alt-tab over to Chrome, it will focus on whatever window I had in focus last; I'd still have to Command-Tilde to find the Slack one. I know, it's a minor kvetch. But it's a minor kvetch I can solve with a gig of RAM.
          • jciochon 8y ago
            You may be interested in an app called HyperSwitch. It lets you tab between individual windows of each app! There’s also opt-tab which will cycle through individual app windows.
          • klondike_ 8y ago
            Try Chrome web app mode: https://superuser.com/questions/33548/starting-google-chrome-in-application-mode https://superuser.com/questions/33548/starting-google-chrome...
      • jerf 8y ago
  • slowmovintarget 8y ago
    I'd be saying "Yeah!" along with you, but that client is also a video chat and audio calling app, not just text and images. There's bloatware out there, and this may even qualify, but it isn't just text chat. (Why would you use the desktop client for text chat anyway?)
    • fermuch 8y ago
      Skype also has audio and video, with custom codecs even, and p2p, yet it wasn't even close to using the very real 1gb of ram slack consumes (I'm talking about the old desktop client, not the new electron based one)
    • lstodd 8y ago
      audio/video work fine in chromium.
  • jstewartmobile 8y ago
    My GMail tab runs between 225MB and 400MB+. And I used to think Java's memory usage was bad...
    • cozzyd 8y ago
      If I leave gmail open too long, it starts eating 100% of CPU for some reason (Firefox on Linux).
      • jstewartmobile 8y ago
        I'm using Opera on both Linux & Windows 10. It's pretty light on the CPU, but I get the "Out of Memory" screens regularly (on 16GB machines!).
  • ilaksh 8y ago
    It contains Chromium in it's entirety, which is a contemporary full featured browser, which is actually in a way a complete operating system.
• petermcneeley 8y ago
  Everyone demands that the services of the internet have zero explicit cost. This means that all the cost is borne implicitly.
• cheezymoogle 8y ago
  I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long, but the page was 5.9mb. That's about 4kb per word without including the gateway (which is required if you're not using social media). Including the gateway, that's about 8kb per word, which is actually about the size of the actual content of the article itself. So all told, to read just one article from the New York Times, I had to download the equivalent of ten copies of Moby Dick. That's about 4,600 pages. That's approaching the entirety of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, without appendices. If I check the NY Times just 4 times a day and read three articles each time, I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext. Even ignoring first-principles ecological conservatism, that's just insanely inefficient and wasteful, regardless of how inexpensive bandwidth and computing power are in the west. EDIT: I wrote a longer write-up on this a while ago on a personal blog, but don't want it to be hugged to death: http://txti.es/theneedforplaintext http://txti.es/theneedforplaintext
  • soared 8y ago
    I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two. Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.
    • zajd 8y ago
      > They need data to produce the product [citation needed] There's no reason they need to use Javascript to track user behavior down to "how long have they read this article".
• cascom 8y ago
  you only need to use a wifi connection on an airplane to see how painful things are - it's like a time warp
  • pseudocook 8y ago
    I've done Remote Desktop from an airplane and that was actually quite snappy
  • olyjohn 8y ago
    The sad thing is that it's not a time warp. It's how a millions of people still browse the web today. I know people who are still on 1.5Mb DSL, who are only a couple miles from the city center. Not only is the line limited to 1.5Mb, but they are so deteriorated, that you can't get speeds over 768Kb. It's extremely common any time you get just a little tiny bit outside of the city.
  • cozzyd 8y ago
    Or go to Antarctica. A lot of "normal" web pages don't load.
  • tannhaeuser 8y ago
    It's already painful on less-than-ideal hotel WiFi where, worse, people tend to go to new/uncached content such as maps, weather sites, and regional stuff.
• pmarreck 8y ago
  I am increasingly encountering news sites that detect ad blocking software and (understandably) refuse to show me their content as a result but the problem is that I enabled ad-blocking on those sites to begin with because they were loading nasty javascript ads on the fly which pegged my CPU! As a web dev, I feel extremely conscious about what I'd call "javascript library hygiene", and I feel that whoever's in charge of many of the news sites out there, just does not give a shit. Respect my computer's resources and you'll get your ads re-enabled.
  • simmons 8y ago
    I've noticed that a lot of sites will end up using 100% CPU usage on their Chrome tab. I haven't investigated, but I do wonder what sort of faulty design leads to this. You occasionally hear talk of sites using your CPU to mine cryptocurrency, but I'm more inclined to suspect lousy programming. I sometimes wish I had an easy way in Chrome to restrict a tab to, say, 5% CPU, for the cases where the CPU usage is clearly not adding any value. Just so I can get through an article without the fan ramping up.
    • lainga 8y ago
      renice 19 ?
      • simmons 8y ago
        It's my understanding that renice doesn't limit CPU usage, but rather adjusts the process's priority in the scheduler relative to other processes. So I don't think it would stop a process from eating up all available idle cycles, draining the battery, and ramping up the fan.
        • TeMPOraL 8y ago
          Also, I don't think there's a trivial way to get the PID of the process handling a particular tab.
• moolcool 8y ago
  Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vcwVnjhHivMJ:https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vcwVnj...
• deleted 8y ago
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• deleted 8y ago
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• nostromo 8y ago
  It's not just publishers. My current org uses SalesForce and it's frustratingly slow. Opening a single record takes several seconds as every single interface element is generated dynamically and then populated, seemingly one at a time. When it's finally done loading, you click on a dropdown, and then the dropdown just shows you a loading spinner, as your client asks the server what should be populated in the dropdown menu. And of course it takes another second. Clicking virtually anything, including back (which should be instantaneous on a proper webapp), will present you with yet another loading spinner and a multi-second delay. I understand the benefits of building webapps this way, but the benefits primarily accrue to the developers of the app and not to the customer.
  • stupidcar 8y ago
    Saleforce's problem is that its presentation layer is a giant pile of legacy code, which can be fundamentally changed, because there's a gazillion extensions and customisations that rely on it working the way it currently does. Having worked a bit with it, there's absolutely nothing about it that "benefits" developers, anymore than having to maintain a VB6 app "benefits" developers. Done right, a modern web app should be better for both developers and users. The one benefit of the crazy shit described in the article is that if you don't weigh down your page with a multiple MB of ad-network and analytics scripts, then it can be incredibly fast.
    • goatlover 8y ago
      > Done right, a modern web app should be better for both developers and users. Right, and you also don't need to make a text-based site an SPA or use any frontend framework. The web was made for documents, so no need for those kinds of sites to be apps.
  • _louisr_ 8y ago
    SalesForce slowness does not equate to "all customers of web apps are getting a bad deal". Go look at reelgood.com. Imagine if Salesforce worked like that. It should be clear as day that this is a SalesForce problem, not a modern-web problem.
  • 8y ago
• tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  I agree with the spirit of the article, in that we should be striving for a leaner web. But last year I had to build an iOS SDK. As an SDK, we wanted it to be as small as humanly possible. It came out to around 12mb, which is obviously too large. So I tried removing literally everything but one file, and it came out to 10mb. So an iOS package, compiled, with only one class, comes out to 10 megabytes. Yes, the web can improve, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it's as dire as some make it out to be.
  • jlg23 8y ago
    I dare to disagree: 10MB for a single-class-app is "as dire as some make it out to be". For comparison: Doom 2 came on 4 1.44MB floppy disks, Duke Nukem 3D on 13. Full games, including all assets.... going into a quiet corner for some weeping
    • slx26 8y ago
      yeah. and if it was only the mbs, well, ok. everyone prefers hd to sd video. but the real problem is that the extra mbs we see are mostly things that we don't need, that don't add anything, that we would be better without, and that in many cases are completely unjustified and do not only hinder the user, but also the very own developers (who sometimes are so lost that don't even realize themselves).
    • erik_seaberg 8y ago
      1 MB RAM was enough to run the Space Shuttle.
• mikeabraham 8y ago
  Amen to every word except this sentence. "Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place." No developer I know, web or otherwise, wants to do any of this, and all of them are religious in their use of ad blockers and autoplay stoppers. This is the kind of stuff developers are forced to do with guns to their heads by the PMs and marketing teams that actually determine the user experience.
  • hsljekskfh 8y ago
    yeah, this is a common thing i see among woke webdevs. maybe because their salaries are high for an entry level job, or maybe because they’re bored with how simple webdev is, they feel like if they do their job without questioning things they’re basically nazis “just following orders.” it’s just a job! no gas station attendant will refuse to sell cigarettes because of their moral compass. the actual solution should be a government that protects its citizens with things like gdpr.
  • wildrhythms 8y ago
    I agree with all of this and just want to add that, for every developer who will speak out and crusade against "webpage pollution", there are about a dozen who will not and are viciously seeking employment. I'm often terrified of this.
• zerb 8y ago
  Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.
• waivek 8y ago
  This static website seems to be down. Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/...
  • nickheer 8y ago
    Thank you. This is so embarrassing.
    • pmlnr 8y ago
      There's nothing embarrassing about it; I'm yet to see a WordPress based site which was able to withstand the Hug of ackerNews, though SuperCache should have helped. For a WordPress site, yours is slim and very fast.
  • tarr11 8y ago
    Not only that, but it also has 2 trackers on it (google analytics and carbonads). Hard to take this argument seriously.
    • nickheer 8y ago
      I don't use Google Analytics, and Carbon's script is restricted by my CSP to showing the display ad. They also have a reasonable privacy policy where they're not tracking users or generating libraries of behavioural data, as far as I know.
      • tarr11 8y ago
        Ah, you are right it is piwik. It was blocked by uBlock though and serves the same purpose (user tracking).
        • nickheer 8y ago
          Fair. I take what I think is a reasonable and respectful approach, though: it takes only a partial IP address (which I don't look at), it respects Do Not Track, it anonymizes as much as possible, and it's basically a glorified hit counter. It's pretty lightweight, it's the only analytics script I use, and it's localized rather than sending users' data to a giant company. This article should not be seen as an all-or-nothing approach. It's more the amount and type that concerns me.
• ryanianian 8y ago
  Sorry but this piece comes across as entitled and whiny. It's easy to point out how bloated and terrible most modern large sites are and guffaw in disgust at the counts of xhttp requests and scripts that are loaded in order to provide no user benefit. But just moaning about it probably won't make the problem go away. Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable. Look: I hate the modern web as much as anyone and I always browse with ad-blocking on. But I turn it off for sites that I get real value from, and I pay monthly membership fees to news sites that I believe respect me as a visitor. My way of working isn't super great for me or for publishers (and I doubt most users turn off adblock for sites they value). I was hoping this article would show some empathy for publishers and why they would start down the road of such user-hostile behavior. A complete piece would paint a vision for how to end the madness with a solution that is acceptable both to publishers and viewers. I don't know what that solution is, but I strongly doubt that just moaning and counting xhttp requests is part of it.
  • iforgotpassword 8y ago
    But you're just defending the ad/tracking part; even without all that pages are still relatively huge and slow. And I sadly don't know either what else apart from whining and moaning the average user could do.
    • ryanianian 8y ago
      I strongly suspect that 80-90% of the bloat and slowness is due to the ad/tracking parts. Yes, there's bloat with modern web/js tooling but even React and Angular (I think the heaviest of the modern bunch) are on the order of hundreds of kbs gzipped over the wire, and the benefit they give is better ux. "Old web" was fast/bare-html but not great for nontrivial ux.
  • krapp 8y ago
    >Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable. If they can't come with a business model that works on the web then they're welcome to leave the web and go back to the printing press. The web wasn't made to provide a stable platform for monetizing content, they have literally every other media paradigm ever created for that.
• soared 8y ago
  Have you ever seen this discussed outside of HN or dev-centric subreddits? Your average user doesn't care about this 'issue' at all, and thats why it won't ever change. Proof the author doesn't relate to any typical user: > I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web Nobody besides devs would open a website and think "Oh this a text-based document opened in a web browser". Its a website, not a word doc.
  • agumonkey 8y ago
    Indirectly yes, they will ask why their computer is slow. Then they'll buy a new one and accept the salespitch for fiber gbps link. ps: you all must understand that the average user believe in tech, if the web is slow, it can't be google's fault; if the salesman spread that 'of course you need a machine that is web capable' all they'll care is that it's not too expensive and they'll buy the damn machine, and maybe throw the old one out. source: my recycling bin.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Wish this would be pinned on top of all such discussions. This is precisely what's happening. In the mind of regular user, the web looks like it's supposed to, because they don't have enough technical knowledge to correctly understand what's happening. Users accept what they get, because they don't understand it. And as you said here, the complaints get targeted at the wrong thing. "Why is my computer so slow? Did I get a virus?". No, it's just that Google just deployed even more bloated iteration of their GMail UI, CNN just added 20 more tracking scripts, and YouTube is now eating half of your RAM for no good reason. I get through this dance with many of my non-technical family members and acquaintances. I can extend the life of their machines only so much with ad-blockers and cleaning out adware. Ultimately, they'll buy a new, faster machine, just to return to the status quo. And maybe I'll inherit one of their "slow" laptops and pull out 2+ more years of professional, productive use from it.
      • agumonkey 8y ago
        It's hard to educate people too. You have to go hard and deep to convince them enough not to spend money on their next mall trip.
• NKCSS 8y ago
  The reason this website currently crumbles under the load is probably because the content is stored in a database, re-queried for every request, even though the content wil hardly ever change. Might be something else to look at ;)
  • nickheer 8y ago
    It's cached and, I promise, hasn't crumbled under heavy load for years. I don't know what's going on but I've asked for more resources. It does make me sad and embarrassed, though, so that's something.
• pasta 8y ago
  What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience. The client wants this, the designer wants this, the marketeer wants this and even most users want this. So that's how huge headers with high res photo's are born. After that the site must be online asap and the developer doesn't have or take the time to load images responsive. Combine this with a framework that takes 200ms to init and we are where we are now. (And then ofcourse there is the marketeer telling you to include a script from x,y and z.) With the right tools you can build a fast web, but I think most developers are not experienced, lazy or just don't care. (You don't need to include 0.5MB of FontAwesome when you only use 2 icons...) And yeah: AMP is a joke.
  • SilasX 8y ago
    Which designer wants an unmovable header that takes 1/3rd of the screen and makes me feel like I'm looking at it through blinds, as I typically see on mobile?
  • eterm 8y ago
    > framework that takes 200ms to init Which framework(s) take 200ms to init?
  • lightswitch05 8y ago
    AMP is terrible. I flat out block it in my hosts file and haven't missed it yet. Its pretty much just used for advertising anyway. Or for 'news' articles that are thinly disguised ads
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience. People on the delivering end. Not the users. The users just want to get the content they came in for, and to continue with their lives. This "website is experience" is a combination of vanity and trying to monetize users better by playing on their emotions.
    • eadmund 8y ago
      I wish that were true, but is it really? I think of Idiocracy, and how prophetic it was. I fear that most users do want 'Ow, My Balls' and brightly-coloured, moving objects to distract them from the ennui of life.
• GuiA 8y ago
  You know how building wider roads doesn’t improve commute times, as it simply encourages people to drive more? It’s that, but with bytes and bandwidth instead of cars and lanes. That's the core insight. Higher availability of resources leads people to consume more of said resources - in tech, typically for more and more abstraction layers to deal with hardware of ever growing complexity to make the lives of developers easier, but at the cost of stagnation or regression for some metrics. See also: "Why Modern Computers Struggle to Match the Input Latency of an Apple IIe" https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers-struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer...
  • GuiA 8y ago
    (Can't edit anymore, but finally found the relevant Wikipedia link for the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)
• ukulele 8y ago
  Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization is costly in large organizations. Maybe other people making these decisions aren't idiots, and maybe, just maybe, they're even thornier and tech-savvier than you.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    They're not idiots, they just don't give a crap about waste until it affects their bottom line. (Most humans seem to operate on this principle) A lot of the business-related bullshit is a response to advertising and sales. But a lot is also lazy tech people slapping pieces together until it does a thing, and they don't care that it loads 100x more data than it needs to, because again, doesn't affect their bottom line. Traffic costs must be pretty low, or nobody's watching that line on the AWS budget, or the CDN is eating the cost.
    • techbio 8y ago
      In a world where video over IP exists, market rate traffic expenses have got to be among the least of the concerns of print journalism.
    • nrhk 8y ago
      Why would they care, they have to do the work of 5 in the time of one because there's now off the shelf solutions for everything. Too bad if those solutions often come bloated and incorrectly configured, maybe they should hire more engineers. Some business prioritize loading speeds but big ones with brand reputation won't care, they have little to lose.
      • komali2 8y ago
        Well then, shall we kick up more of a shit storm about it to give them a little more motivation? If the argument is "nobody will do anything about it because nobody cares," isn't the best response"then start caring!" I'll see if I can find some old articles I used to love about how something called something along the lines of "concerned Christians of America" basically determined what could be on television for ages because they maintained a letter-writing force of a mere five thousand people. Nobody else was kicking up that level of shit storm, so the networks listened to them.
• deleted 8y ago
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• duxup 8y ago
  Things are different now. When I was on a modem... pictures, almost any, were bullshit as far as being big and annoying to download. A lot of the time I hated them. Nobody thinks about pictures that way anymore. I suspect that goes for a lot of the bullshit listed in that article. I'm no fan of tracking or auto play videos, but web applications are a thing now and the people visiting sites, building them, and paying for them want more than just a page... they want a whole application. All three of those (viewer, builder, dude who pays / host) aren't on the same page, but they also are largely happy to go down the road of bigger pages. I'm all for efficiency and kicking some stuff to the curb, but as for size, it is not on the mind of most people. I'd be all for a class of retro / minimal sites or something, but it is clear for a lot of things web apps is where we're going.
  • megaman22 8y ago
    Pictures are still a huge pain in the ass on mobile connections. Try looking at Facebook or Instagram or Twitter on a flaky 2G connection. Although you don't get to see them stream in line by line like you used to in the good old days - they just take forever to download a muddy blurred version of the actual image first as a placeholder.
    • duxup 8y ago
      I hear ya. Even better when you see what seems like a high rez picture that is sized small and you click to see it better ... oh crap it is starting over downloading again ... and I'm 99% sure the pic was already there before. (granted it may not have been high res but damn it it was close enough)
  • superkuh 8y ago
    The problem with pictures and modern websites is that they aren't there. Instead the pictures are only potential pictures which will only be loaded if you load the JS loaders that load the loaders that load the pictures (and all the tracking stuff). With JS disabled you have no pictures or a super low resolution placeholder at best. Or a blank page showing nothing at worst (ie, nasa.gov).
• Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  I think I heard this on Hacker News, but I don't recall who from. Whenever I see a popup begging me to sign up for a spam list, I put in postmaster@that-domain.com now.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    ceo@$DOMAIN is my preference. Or down the c-stack.
  • user5994461 8y ago
    What's the postmaster supposed to be? Is it set in practice?
    • Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      It's meant to be the operator of the mail server, and is generally used for contacting the operator about problems with their mail setup. It's required to be available per RFC822. https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/ https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/ How much that works out in practice is inconsistent. Most sysadmins will set it up in my experience, but it's not out of the question that it wouldn't exist. Some domains will just set up a catchall and it'll be directed to someone anyway. It varies.
  • realusername 8y ago
    I do that for spam newsletters which added me without my consent. Most of them you can edit your email, and I edit it to contact@[their domain] or postmaster@[their domain]
• Alex3917 8y ago
  Yes, we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda. /s In all seriousness, most of the problem with bloat is on the mobile side. But in another ~1.25 years iPhones will have enough advanced LTE functionality that they will be basically the same speed as desktop computers. To whatever extent this is a real problem, it's not going to be nearly as big of an issue after another two or three years.
  • pdonis 8y ago
    > we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda. How does bogging down pages with ads and tracking scripts and other bloat help the visually impaired? If anything, it should make things even worse for them than for sighted users, since it's easier (not easy, but easier) to navigate by eye to the part of the page you actually want to read than it is to skip over all the cruft using an accessibility add-on.
  • wuliwong 8y ago
    What do you mean by "bloat is on the mobile side"?.
    • Alex3917 8y ago
      The problem with bloat. That is, web pages are just much slower to download and render on mobile than on desktop. E.g. a page that takes less than a second to load on desktop can easily take ten seconds to load on mobile. But two or three years from now, that same page will load in less than a second also.
      • brisance 8y ago
        You may wish to re-read the article, right from the beginning. Mobile phones are already faster and better than the author's computer attached to his 56K modem way back then.
• deleted 8y ago
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• nawitus 8y ago
  Most websites are not optimized well because optimization costs money and software engineers are expensive. There probably is not a market failure here.
  • pdonis 8y ago
    Most web sites send a lot of data that is not for me, the user; it's for the website, to serve ads or track me or do other things that I either don't care about or would much rather they didn't do. The website had to make a conscious choice to include all that stuff; it's not as though it was already there and would have to be optimized out. In other words, the problem is the most websites are optimized, but not for their users.
    • nawitus 8y ago
      Agree, some bloat is due to ads and trackers, some are other things (like lack of optimization).
• eterm 8y ago
  I've been thinking about building either a local proxy or firefox addon that puts everything into "first-party only" mode unless whitelisted. It would probably break the web (at least the genuine parts) less than disabling javascript wholesale which is just too awkward, but it would vastly cut down on the "bullshit" as this article calls it. It would need some care, for example it would probably have to work from root domains rather than subdomains for matching origin to prevent too much breakage but the improvement in download times would be astronomical, it's almost always the case that "bloat" is third-party bloat. Obviously it would need to support a whitelist too so payment processors for example could continue to work, but in general the blacklist approach of ad-blockers just isn't working for me. I think some kind of "auto-whitelist" so I'd need to actively request a domain before requests could be made to them would be the sweet spot for user experience but that itself would require substantial browser integration which I don't think could work through a plugin. Perhaps a proxy approach would be the best from a UX perspective then. It could inspect headers to figure out if they're primary requests (using similar heuristics to CORS). Primary requests would (or could) be added to an auto-whitelist for future requests.
  • StavrosK 8y ago
    Nah, this breaks too many CDNs and most pages stop working, just as if you had disabled JS.
  • slig 8y ago
    uMatrix / uBlock seems to do what you want.
    • eterm 8y ago
      uMatrix looks like the kind of tool I was thinking of, thanks. I just wish I didn't have to give an addon permission to: Access your data for all websites Clear recent browsing history, cookies, and related data Read and modify privacy settings Access browser tabs Access browser activity during navigation But that's just the very broken permissions model that addons currently have so thank you.
    • btrettel 8y ago
• cocoa19 8y ago
  Another point for the bullshit web: The GDPR cookie consent notification. I really hate clicking on those notifications to make them go away. Designers, can you please just add a non-obtrusive link, instead of a pop up that covers half my browser screen?
  • sincerely 8y ago
    Or maybe 90% of websites that currently give you cookies have no good reason to do so and shouldn't?
  • degenerate 8y ago
    "This site uses cookies." is the new "Hot singles in your area!"
    • user5994461 8y ago
      On the bright side, these popups are safe for work and have no attached images.
  • snarf21 8y ago
    Not a design problem, ".... only that you conspicuously provide the option for obtaining informed consent ...." The intention is that it must be obtrusive. The company has a choice between annoying you and mitigating risk.
  • Rjevski 8y ago
    Or just you know, not do anything that would require consent in the first place. If you have to ask for consent you’re already doing some of the bullshit outlined in the above article.
  • vitaflo 8y ago
    Sure, but first let me have you talk to my PM who got this request for an obtrusive popup from our lawyers. Designers don't want stupid popups all over the screen. Designers don't want half the bullshit that's put into sites these days. Our hands are tied. It's rarely our decision.
• scarygliders 8y ago
  > People really hate autoplaying video Yes, this a billion-fold! Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video. The experience goes like this: Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing. Most annoying. However it gets more egregious... The video player floats when you scroll down the page, until you reach the part of the page where it usually resides - and warps over into its little area - until you scroll past - whereupon it pops back up on the lower right hand side of your browser again. Aaaaaargh! Just as egregious : after viewing a video you might even have been interested inviewing, another video is automatically loaded onto that same player, 99.9% of the time on some completely unrelated subject. Y'know, someone, somewhere, woke up one morning and thought "Great idea! Let's do <what is described above>!" - why can't the message that "People really hate autoplaying video" get back to whoever makes the decisions on user experiences, so that they just quit doing the above bullshit?
  • amelius 8y ago
    The video is not actually the problem (for me). It's the audio. Why can't my browser (Chrome) still not give me appropriate control over audio?
    • StyloBill 8y ago
      It should be better in the near future: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17251104/google-chrome-66-autoplay-sound-videos-mute https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17251104/google-chrome-66-...
      • stan_rogers 8y ago
        That's already in place. There's nothing in the way of actual user control other than muting the tab. The browser decides, pretty much, and you can't argue with it if it's decided to list a site as something that can autoplay audio based on your interaction level (which doesn't necessarily mean you've ever deliberately enabled audio on the site).
• marataziat 8y ago
  Is it a degradation of the web? Or it's just revolution of our hardware and internet speed?
• auct 8y ago
  Have you tried to turn off JavaScript?
• makecheck 8y ago
  We have a ridiculously-backwards model on the web where you essentially pay for what you use (via your data plan, and via forced ads prior to promised content) without having any way to know in advance what it will end up costing you to display content. Heck, you don’t even know if the content will display correctly after all that loading. Worse, there are many ways to trigger loads accidentally, meaning you may want none of the content but you end up paying for it through your data plan. We desperately need absolute maximums enforceable in the browser, reversing the firehose. I want to opt your site in to more data use, after I trust your site. And I expect sites to work within my limit or not receive visits.
  • amiga-workbench 8y ago
    Browsers should start offering the option to deny all cross origin resources too.
    • jazoom 8y ago
      It would be easy to make an extension to do that but I suspect most websites would no longer work correctly. Many websites have their own API server on a different domain, many host images on another domain, most use a CDN of some kind which hosts CSS, JS and sometimes HTML on another domain, etc.
      • makecheck 8y ago
        Even a simple limit would probably help a lot, e.g. “at most one alternate domain” (your main CDN, and not sketchy-analytics.com or unnecessary-ad-malware.net).
        • jazoom 8y ago
          Just use one of the many ad/tracking blockers. Websites will still work. Blocks sketchy-analytics.com. Why make this more complex than it needs to be?
          • 8y ago
• RileyJames 8y ago
  I use the “clean reader mode” (in safari, the small three stripe button next to the https lock in the address bar) very often to remove the clutter. But this still means I downloaded all the unnecessary crap. Which is primarily annoying because of the delay in loading (crappy reception is the norm outside of Canadian cities). Where as hacker news loads nearly instantly. Is there a good alternative browser for iOS that avoids downloading JS, video, bloat?
• nabla9 8y ago
  Here is non-bullshit cnn: http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en
• CIPHERSTONE 8y ago
  This is one of the reasons I like Jekyll. No PHP, no bullshit. It's fast, pre compiled pages. You can use web fonts if you like, or keep it all local. Speed usually takes a hit with websites when people try to monetize or add fancy features..
  • narrowtux 8y ago
    You can still add all that bullshit with Jekyll. Having sites dynamically generated has nothing to do with bandwidth waste.
• htor 8y ago
  the web was born, and everyone was happy for this new thing. then advertisement came along and poisoned that too, just like tv, just like radio. we just can't have nice things because someone somewhere wants to squeeze all the pennies out of your pockets in whatever medium you use. obligatory links for website obesity and bullshit web: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
• agumonkey 8y ago
  I've read others comment on the lack of empathy for publishers. 10$ that the author doesn't blame them. That said, this is a weird situation, to which I became allergic. To the point I started r/vanillahtml to stack websites that gave me that feeling of fat-free moment. One thing you should do, is install dillo, and enjoy the web. It's usually faster than elinks, chrome whatever. Sure you'll get horrendous css rendering, no javascript. Still, it's worth seeing in person how instant a click / request / render can be. Also 10 tabs in dillo is probably 2MB. # tech momentum There were logical reasons to what we're in today. I was in there too at first. I wanted hyper dynamic webpages, more capable css, more live scriptability. But along the way I started to feel the unintended consequences. long loading, idiotic user interactions, regression in basic ergonomics, huge resource consumption, and worst of all, the twist it put on webpage producers. Open a 2000 webpage you'll see 20% chrome, 80% content. Now on average it's the opposite, not really 80/20, more like 50/20 with a bonus 30% popups (gdpr, cookies, newsletters, ads). Tech didn't provide value, it's root for pollution. # societal re-rooting old web was a side game, people got into it for the thrill of it, it gave a lot of interesting subtle and dense content. Now it's all business trying to live in the web era, it's a competition thing, with all that it entails. The web today looks like main street. Neon signs, noise, .. ugh. also with real-time social platforms you see how most websites are low value, and reactive. It's changed a bit, people noticed that there was a need for less shallow, but it seems rare. Although to be honest I stopped monitoring if there was more of them today. I agree with people comparing a website today with other kinds of texts. I feel super void when I read most of the web, and usually, a .txt file is a high guarantee that I'll find something more personal or technical than anything on the web. And it's near free. If the web was caring about communicating, we'd just have to extend SMS to 640kB with a streaming protocol in case you're reading wikipedia. ps: oh and I love these https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en (was trying to make a repository of them), so much love to those who push that kind of idea
  • carapace 8y ago
    Dillo! https://www.dillo.org/ https://www.dillo.org/ I mentally partition the web into Dillo-compatible and -incompatible subsets. :-)
• thecombjelly 8y ago
  I do all my browsing with uMatrix with everything blocked by default but first party CSS. It really makes the internet a more enjoyable place to be. Pages load much, much faster and it's often easier to find and read the content. On mobile it saves a boatload in bandwidth costs. For example, loading a NYTimes article takes 90KB and DOMContentLoaded is in 69ms. Truly much of the other stuff loaded is bullshit because a significant amount of the web is more usable without all the crap.
• mpax 8y ago
  It’s not just the web, software in general is getting increasingly bloated. Not in features, but in more and more layers of abstractions.
• mxuribe 8y ago
  This is so monstrously correct! Kudos!
• titzer 8y ago
  The Web is the quintessential human artifact. This is what happens when large groups of people crap and eat from the same pile, the fast, the slow, the brilliant and the stupid, the refined, mundane, bloodthirsty and curious, the intricate and obscure. I think of the web in layers. Not discrete, divisible layers, but more like the layers of any ancient city that's seen habitation for centuries. At the lowest level is the oldest stuff: mud huts, stone tools, open fireplaces, graves even. This is like the earliest layers of the web: the webrings, the no-css, no-script HTML bulleted lists, tables of blue links. Even garish black backgrounds. That old web was full of great things; so many enthusiastics and fanatics! So much information and content, written by real people. Short stories, poems, hackers, phreakers, crackers, IRC, that whole great era. That old stone age is mostly buried now, preserved here and there in museum quality, crumbling here and there, broken links, missing images. A mute reminder, hard to find even, of what it was like back then. BACK THEN, before the next layer of the web evolved on top. BACK THEN people on the internet were mostly curious but not nosy or malicious. BACK THEN people put effort into their sites, had to pay money to host their domains, didn't need CDNs and VMs and Cloud Computing. But a layer evolved on top of that old web. It came with CSS in my estimation. Pages started getting fancy, using new fonts. Ads started popping up. Ads always started popping up. Search engines popped up. Then people started making money. Little trickles at first, then a gush, then a torrent. Online businesses, the FIRST BUBBLE, and everyone was rushing to pets.com and eBay and online pharmacies...you know, companies selling actual stuff. Amazon. Online publishing, news sites. That bubble blew up. It grew too fast, people went into far too much debt to puff up their businesses. But quietly chugging along, always increasing, the little banners and annoying popups gave way to a more insidious form of advertising...the watching eye behind it all. The internet started watching us. First it was search history, then cookies and then fingerprinting, then whole underground economies of trackers. And all the while the SEO battles and trollers came along, so fast paced... And something...else...grew on top of the web. You can see it now, maybe just the tip, when you go to one of the news sites that the OP talked about. The massive, heavy sites. Those are just the most polished of this massive avalanche of click-baity slide shows and fake news and crap that is heavy, laden with strewn together junk parts and oriented to only one purpose: making money, by hook or crook. Now you can't hardly see through this layer anymore. It's like a fog. Go to any search engine and search for anything! What do you get? Aggregated, evolved--I won't say optimized--evolved content that is designed to keep you away from the older layers. I say evolved because that is exactly the right metaphor--the crap that survived by natural selection and crowded out the other, more carefully crafted, humble and matter-of-fact content. This new crap evolved to get straight to the top of the search ranking and grab those clicks. It doesn't matter what the original content was. The more commercial it is, the crappier it is for real content, and the more driven it is towards getting you to click through and BAM make a sale. For god sakes, try to find some neutral information about insurance. Try to find that one guy's website that as part of a trip report to the southwest to go hiking with his kids, talks about how the rental agency wouldn't reimburse him for a flat tire. Or some basic, old-web archaeology like that. You cannot find that stuff anymore. It's hidden by a huge layer of commercial bullshit that is designed to lure you in, sell you crap, get you to sign up for newsletters, take surveys, or at the very least track your ass at the slightest sign you might be interesting. And don't think for a minute that it's all an accident, or some unforeseen consequence or poor search ranking function. The whole system is set up to, and rewarded by, and fed by, their ability to serve themselves, not you. Make no mistake. If the algorithm makes more money, it's gonna get shipped. People might wring their hands about it, but the slippery slope is still slippery, and no one can hold the line forever. Least of all when that takes mental energy and forethought...something SO much better suited to ML algorithms and scale. Just scale up to the whole web. We lost our way. The web isn't run by us anymore. It's run by them. And them...whoever they are...search engines, advertisers, publishers, people with political agendas, psychos, dictators, people with power. They don't even have control either. Look at the news sites and aggregators. They tell you want they want to tell you. You can't even set preferences anymore. It's all drive by AI. For fuck's sake nobody really knows what to tell the AI to do, except make money. AI. AI to rank what's important. To tell us what we should look at, watch. Buy. Adjusting news to either make us mad or placate us. Creating and reinforcing a bubble that absolutely always benefits someone else besides ourselves. We keep giving it subgoals, but it'll just keep going around them to what we really want, making money, because that's all we ever reward it for! The fat ass webpages is just a symptom. The disease is that everyone is shoveling shit into your face just to make a buck. Everyone is trying to automate their crap as fast as they can, throwing crap at the wall to see what will stick. And they just. don't. give. a shit.
• mxuribe 8y ago
  Oh, wait a minute...what if we twist the existing non-net neutrality for our consumer purposes? What if we had easier mechanisms to slow down the more annoying aspects of websites we visit - such as those extraneous scripts on CNN, etc.? And, as we visit personal blogs that we value, we don't slow those down. (And, yes, if you're thinking to ask me about netflix, yes i would NOT slow that down. ;-) Anyway, if we had the "ease" with which to de-incentivize these web platforms, perhaps they'll be pushed to slim down their content delivery? Now, before anyone replies with something like, "but you can implement ad blockers, etc."...yes, i know there are mechanisms...but i mean "easy" mechanisms...that is, something my grandma could implement with ease. i think this would serve to give true power to the consumer both on the net neutrality front as well as the content consumption front.
• jjuhl 8y ago
  One reason why I subscribe to https://lwn.net/ https://lwn.net/ is that it is a fast no bullshit web site. Another is the great content.
• kaitari 8y ago
  This phenomenon is not limited to BS web. Back when virtualization was the new wave, everyone raved at the money/space/energy savings from running multiple virtual machines on a single server. It was great. Then what happened? Many folks went nuts, spinning up VMs for any and everything, and suddenly needed to spend more money on more physical servers to run more VMs, and an infinite loop. Bloat from convenience.
  • machiavelli1024 8y ago
    In other words: horror vacui
• wuliwong 8y ago
  Lately I've been noticing this with Facebook. It is interesting that in its early stages, my perception of Facebook was that it was a very well built site. It seemed simple, clean, loaded fast, etc. It seemed particularly lean when compared to Myspace. Without really delving into the details of exactly what is happening today, I definitely perceive the web app as being slower. Obviously it is delivering a ton more images and video but nonetheless the experience seems slow. The ios app on the other hand still feels very performant to me. I think their handling of video is really impressive.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    I'd long griped about Google+ page size. Happened to poke around FB for a bit (couple of years back). Immensely worse. Google's somewhat criticised redesign about 18 months ago actually hugely improved memory usage. Site's still on a declining tragectory....
• dkoston 8y ago
  I disagree that the AMP cache is the main benefit of AMP. There are plenty of CDNs that give performance similar to, or better than the AMP cache. The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results. Back to the main topic of the article, the same could be said for the desktop and the mobile phone. Developers and framework builders are constantly adding bloat as cpu/memory increase. Since most people aren't writing their own frameworks and many are importing large parts of their apps from npm/gems/etc, everyone gets hit with the bloat. It's a vicious cycle for sure. It's a shame that so many open source authors add bloat into their packages in exchange for popularity. They want all the users so you get tons of code that's never used in 90% of projects. The big example of the above is express. It's a terrible cycle as the vast majority of people learning JavaScript have hopped on the express bandwagon and are now creating APIs with mediocre performance by importing a massive webserver they often do not need. Overall though, it seems to show that most people prefer convenience over accuracy and performance (passive aggressive stab at mongo?)
  • superkuh 8y ago
    >The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results. Not just promoted in the results but actually pre-loaded in the background when you're using google search. It's double the monopoly fun.
    • dkoston 8y ago
      True. Hopefully anti-competitive stuff like this will be challenged in court so we don’t have to play the game.
      • Avamander 8y ago
        Yandex does it too with their own tech, just mentioning. I think if it actually were standardized properly without a monopoly it could become a good thing.
        • dkoston 8y ago
• jstewartmobile 8y ago
  One bright-side to the end of Moore's law is that--until some new computational breakthrough comes along--we are at a web bullshit plateau. Just think of the stuff they could pull off with ten more years of speed-doublings...
• stickfigure 8y ago
  Try these sites without javascript. It's AMAZING. The chrome extension I'm using ("Quick Javascript Switcher") disables JS on a domain-by-domain basis, so it doesn't break the whole web. Every news site I've tried is massively more usable with Javascript disabled - loads in a snap, scrolls without jerky motion, zero popups or autoplay videos. Usually you get all the text and most of the images. Some news websites have javascript-driven photo collages, but it's just one buttonclick to enable JS for that session, and I can decide to do so after reading the text and judging the wait worthwhile. I feel like I've stumbled on a secret life hack. Try it.
  • liquidwax 8y ago
    I can vouch for this. Although I've been doing this with regular chrome (disabled javascript by default) and I whitelist sites with the click of on icon in the location bar.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• techbio 8y ago
  UX density is reduced by icons and images. Utility used to be thorough link quality (ie. the portal) but has been reduced to ranking on search endpoints to collect nickels. Here's a very useful site that uses Javascript without going near megabytes: https://www.freeformatter.com/ https://www.freeformatter.com/
• mirimir 8y ago
  I entirely agree with the author's points. However, that CNN page[0] took just ~5 seconds to load. In fully readable form, with images. Through a three-VPN nested chain, with ~240 msec total latency. But then, I block ads, most scripts, and fonts. 0) https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/michael-cohen-donald-trump-tape/ https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/michael-cohen-donald...
• splittingTimes 8y ago
  It's the _website obesity crisis_ in full swing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• hackeraccount 8y ago
  the site would have been nicer with a few images. Also the text layout was tedious - different fonts should've been used to convey metadata about the information in it.
• toss1 8y ago
  >>"... pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video, a tactic which has allowed them to brag about having the highest number of video starts in their category. ... People really hate autoplaying video." The result is that, even though I used to watch CNN often, it has been years since I've intentionally opened one of their web pages, and when I accidentally do so, I almost frantically close it to shut off the damn, auto-play -- and that's even if I was interested in the video content. I'll get it somewhere else, thx.
• MrStonedOne 8y ago
  I have a policy of disabling javascript on any article based website. Its worked out well, most news sites load lightning fast, better viewing experience, no videos, the only downside is companies like the new york times that embed low res images then load full res in the background using javascript. Here's a funny concept, if disabling javascript makes your website better, you failed.
  • quickthrower2 8y ago
    Or just prefix the url with https://outline.com/ https://outline.com/
• antuneza 8y ago
  A good example of the Jevons Paradox
• tabtab 8y ago
  Humans are inefficient, illogical, and wasteful. "Dilbert" is not actually a comic strip, but a catalog. The only way to stop all this is to Kill All Humans. We await your confirmation__ - Bot #72504
• BLKNSLVR 8y ago
  Whilst this is true, and it already references another analogy in 'bullshit' jobs, it's just another piece of the 'bullshit' magnetism of human nature. Church, TV, Music, Movies, Conversation, Food, Meetings, Politics, Watching sport The 'bullshit' to 'worthwhile' ratio is 95:1 at best. I've just depressed myself. Maybe it's a pattern that humans are programmed to follow subconsciously. Our brains cannot handle consuming / participating in anything less than 95% bullshit. Maybe it's the bullshit time that allows us to cope with the 5% of the 'real'? Things such as the 'bullshit' web are just a differently-contexted manifestation of that pattern of behaviour.
• icedchai 8y ago
  That CNN article he mentions does take 30 seconds to finish loading... However, you can start reading the article in less than a second. Actual perceived load time is nearly instant. For the actual end-user perspective, this article is mostly bullshit.
• tombh 8y ago
  This is in part why I'm developing https://html.brow.sh https://html.brow.sh - a purely text-based web, rendered by a fast remote modern browser.
• lsiebert 8y ago
  It strikes me that, if people want web developers to load less stuff, there have to be ways to reduce redundancy. It might also make privacy easier. For example, some sort of self hosted standard based framework for tracking common things like scrolling or ad clicks or page visits that supports multiple consumers, both internal to the site publishers for detailed analytics and logging and ad view tracking, and less granular access for external companies that can add value can get information from. Your user's data stays on your self hosted user data server, and analytics can make server to server requests for aggregate data with GraphQL or a standardized api at least, improving user privacy. If you really needed additional functionality, there could be standardized add-on modules, or updates to the spec.
• notatoad 8y ago
  Oh yay, another article complaining about all the bullshit modern websites want to load, and then also complaining about the best solution so far. Yes, it sucks that amp requires loading a chunk of js from Google. But you know what? It actually makes things better. It solves a real problem, better than anything else is solving any similar problem. Nobody else is successfully convincing publishers to slim down their pages. If you have a better plan, let's hear it. But bitchy blog posts aren't going to convince your local paper to improve their page speed.
• awinder 8y ago
  Web developers often don’t have a choice whether to ship bullshit or not. Hell, engineering managers and directors often probably don’t have this choice. The single greatest feature of AMP (which I dislike with great passion, don’t get me wrong) is that it forces broken org structures to make better engineering choices. There is no negotiation. There is no “marketing director is higher on the pecking order”. There is just design constraints placed from outside of the organization that must be followed.
• JoshMnem 8y ago
  The Web was becoming unbearable until I started browsing with all CSS and JS off by default (using umatrix and 50,000 lines in my hosts file). It's an amazing improvement. If I can't read something, I enable some CSS and change the defaults for that site. Firefox reader mode helps. I also disable all CSS animation with Stylus.
• S_A_P 8y ago
  Ive long been thinking that the way to "fix" journalism in the US(and possibly rest of the world) is to have apple music/spotify like channels that the major publishers broadcast through. It solves the problem of having 50 different 1 dollar per month subscriptions, and aggregates content in a way that I would never have trouble paying for if it were done correctly. This model is already in place for things like Satellite Radio, Cable TV, the aforementioned apple music spotify, netflix, etc. Am I the person that needs to build this??!!
• crasshopper 8y ago
  browse in w3m. problem solved.
• tylerjwilk00 8y ago
  While we're on the topic of web performance regression can we please talk about all these damn loading spinners. JS and ajax we're supposed to save us. Now instead of one slow page load. I get one slow page with a loading spinner, a login component with a loading spinner, a carousel with a loading spinner, latest news component with loading spinner. Content divs shifting and bouncing every which way as content loads. It looks like some spilled a bucket of ajax-load.gif all over the damn page! I'd prefer a blank page and the sudden appearance of the entire page.
• basicplus2 8y ago
  Modern televisions and combined recorder-tuners are the same.. My old black & white and clolour valve television sets and VHS video recorder are up and running well before their modern equivalents!
• giardini 8y ago
  Useful might be a browser that extracts most of the information content from web pages and discards most of the formatting information? The text-only browser Lynx comes to mind but I think its obsolete now and doesn't show graphics, which sometimes are useful/necessary.
  • cshenton 8y ago
    Reading mode on safari does this.
• nojvek 8y ago
  Haha, I think the web is a lot like markets. Buyers will pay up to what they can afford, i.e the best price is the one that the buyer feels very uncomfortable but still pays because they want something and they can’t it anywhere else at a better price. Sometimes this is abused (see US healthcare) but that’s the rule of markets. Demand and Supply. I guess the internet is the same. The media companies will try to use every analytics and ad company under the hood to maximize every little ad click they can get. They will fill the pipes to the brim and implement every dark pattern as long as they make that extra revenue. (See taboola - the scum of clickbait advertising) At the end of the day if you don’t like something. Don’t use it. I rarely visit cnn. I install adblockers and tracking blockers. We fight it with what we have. It’s supply and demand laws. We as consumers install stuff to block annoying things, they as sellers will keep on annoying you as long as you keep on visiting them because a mild annoyance of ads and auto-play videos is how they keep the lights on. The case of Google however is they are on a mission to have a monopoly of search on their browser and ads on their platforms. That’s how they make 90%-ish of their revenue. Google could say whatever the hell they want to say their mission is, their actions and financials clearly say what they value.
• buchanae 8y ago
  Amen! And this article doesn't even touch on the bullshit content – I don't want 10 websites that all say generally the same thing with different layouts (and 10 times more total bullshit consumed). I can't stand the internet today. The experience on mobile is even more unbearable. I want simplicity. Can we all just band together right here and now and create a subnet with a better set of principles? - minimize page weight - minimize duplicate content - minimize UI variation - what else?
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > - minimize page weight - minimize duplicate content - minimize UI variation - what else? - allow for (or even encourage) automated processing of content
    • buchanae 8y ago
      Yes! That's a good one. I'd also say, probably minimize the use of javascript and dynamic content.
• jwhiz22 8y ago
  I should go work for a company that cares about this stuff. Time to go back to adding Adobe Launch on a dozen sites.
• ankurdhama 8y ago
  Every web site (or app) wants to look "cool" and wants to differentiate themselves from others based on the look. This quest to look cool leads to all the animations and images etc which leads to the increase in download size. For the most part the reason for this quest to look cool is to grab user attention as much as possible so that they can do their actual business i.e ads.
• dm33tri 8y ago
  It's even harder to understand this width advance of modern web technologies. In 90th you had single channel to download unoptimized GIFs and websites used to be built from these images. Now you bundle, minify and gzip all these stylesheets and scripts which are capable of 1000x what you did back then, and then load (usually precached) analytics script from CDN while fetching mp4's in parallel and streaming them on the fly. It's just bad developers. Facebook takes about 100ms to load everything (but still has shitty ui). And they build tools so everyone can do this too. And developers now brag how complicated web is.
• tlrobinson 8y ago
  Heh, if you look at the JS console while loading cnn.com you'll see the following: .d8888b. 888b 888 888b 888 d88P Y88b 8888b 888 8888b 888 888 888 88888b 888 88888b 888 We are trying to make CNN.com faster. 888 888Y88b 888 888Y88b 888 Think you can help? 888 888 Y88b888 888 Y88b888 888 888 888 Y88888 888 Y88888 Send your ideas to: bounty AT cnnlabs DOT com Y88b d88P 888 Y8888 888 Y8888 "Y8888P" 888 Y888 888 Y888
• z3phyr 8y ago
  I am using a 4GB RAM HP Probook for the last 5 years (Student Artifact). You have to be very disciplined to use it though. I never open more than 10 tabs on the browser. While programming and testing, I generally close the browser. Use only lightweight WM. Avoid using JS based UI. My stack is vim/emacs (sorry) + a compiler (clang/rustc/sbcl) or perl/python + zsh/bash (userspace) + a terminal emulator + occasional firefox + wget/curl and weechat I read pdfs with emacs. My computer's pretty fast wrt my peer's higher spec machine (16GB) with VS Code, Slack, Chrome and whatnot.. But he does play games better!
• z3phyr 8y ago
  As an external observer, I must say we are going to fast in an unorganized fashion! Software is eating the world and swallowing more than it can chew. Businesses have monetized the web in so much unsustainable way that we have to introspect to clear our shit. What would have gone wrong if the general public still got good high quality old print media while the otherwise tech savvy worked patiently to make a better web? What would have gone wrong if the web remained just a portal to share textual information, while the other people did what they had been doing traditionally?
• TekMol 8y ago
  These days, when I visit a website I have not visited before, it feels like entering a war zone. Trying to extract some information while the enemy tries to kill me. Enabling hostname after hostname in umatrix until the content is revealed. Hoping not to trigger too much user hostile crap along the way.
• pacifika 8y ago
  For this to change websites will have to stop chasing growth
• azernik 8y ago
  I'm going to have to disagree on the hostility to AMP. Specifically with this paragraph: > It seems ridiculous to argue that AMP pages aren’t actually faster than their plain HTML counterparts because it’s so easy to see these pages are actually very fast. And there’s a good reason for that. It isn’t that there’s some sort of special sauce that is being done with the AMP format, or some brilliant piece of programmatic rearchitecting. No, it’s just because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used. That means that webpages can’t be littered with arbitrary and numerous tracking and advertiser scripts, and that, of course, leads to a dramatically faster page. > ...[supporting evidence] > So: if you have a reasonably fast host and don’t litter your page with scripts, you, too, can have AMP-like results without creating a copy of your site dependent on Google and their slow crawl to gain control over the infrastructure of the web. But you can’t get into Google’s special promoted slots for AMP websites for reasons that are almost certainly driven by self-interest. The point of AMP is exactly this restricted spec - it's so Google can statically verify that your site follows their performance guidelines. You can write a really fast website if you want, but unless you're willing to let Google make sure that you're actually doing so they're not going to take it on faith.
  • baud147258 8y ago
    But Google can measure a page weight and load time when it's indexing it and use it in its pagerank calculation, it doesn't need to take control of your page to do it.
• moviuro 8y ago
  I see no one mentioned the extraordinary "Reader mode" of Firefox. [0] It's literaly the one feature for which I stopped using Chrome at work. It's just so damn good. For instance, [1] becomes [2] [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu... [1] https://radiobruxelleslibera.com/2018/06/26/intermediated-of-the-world-unite/ https://radiobruxelleslibera.com/2018/06/26/intermediated-of... [2] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/smexxUICwLXKbzEEbLlIPQ_qGcKxqVaGtRUkArPHtnk1vcZgoRDOld8-wAwHE4_S4RqU4Fcpc7RPX8vLdxItAZIs_KsV-YgdkU5l58xP3OSpu7HDjTxm9X4QgHw1-oqrHC68AuQk-U_0uUyriv0pMedeZn9nzTxD7IvxRvSrdXDhpIARigFOuqdxJfDjEzGM10mFKV_rqO_6DWU_5z2H8gEHRoo5_p_KEJAfjRVr18dUzXcI0B-rdyuYHkXHFztHyb8l0NIHtwnbYi7Ax-IwPLh3SBT33KnCkm5fp-z4M-J0tU5XPrEx-5Hu7yivtsETyFZw7SVd1aQVhQlX3PnWMRt3tS1c1YirpbY_Z3v_YNzKoG4L15ItUyX3QaUwbKsVL7qE7jwGWs8losF1xMQV1Azs0b1ZizuqzW_Wj715ng4SRa5W1jv5l00Ce0QEs5m9jAKSfX1G7dx0T99l8RN35C6aTvJ29mTdov7nwviuxKcwZduKM52HcV3MsN4qERPxCM6suJShdGJZdYvJuSncaJD9ijFvqmDgYFpZQLbGz20qN6fLGI5r1kiGhzfaX2K29E3Wf19gPLW8UPq3P_m7wQvyGrBLma6TA5hIBlO-=w720-h823-no https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/smexxUICwLXKbzEEbLlIPQ_qGc... (that's a screenshot on photos.google.com - don't have access to imgur or similar)
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    FYI, the Google Photos link requests a login.
    • moviuro 8y ago
      Wow, that's weird. It didn't when I posted it :(
  • shthed 8y ago
    There are many chrome extensions that do the same thing
    • moviuro 8y ago
      Except that my "corporate strategy" doesn't allow installing extensions. So a built-in tool is excellent.
• hutzlibu 8y ago
  The main problem is and remains: money. Professional newswebsites or alike don't work for free. But the majority of people is not willing to pay. So ads and tracking and more ads and more ads. As this is the default buisness for "free" services. You pay with your data and attention, nothing new. I would like this to change to the way Wikipedia works for example. No ads. Voluntarily payment. No paywall, free for everyone, even though only some people pay. But micropayment services are not good enough, nor widespread and the average mindset is not there either. But it could go there slowly, once people realize the true cost of all those "free" sercices and that paywalls are not nice either. And besides, even though I agree to the sentiment of the aeticle, the comparison of plain text to an styled article with pictures ... is not really valid. I like sometimes reading plain text, but I enjoy a well done website more. With nice fonts, styles and pictures fitting to the flow of information and not as a distraction. I just don't like advertisement in general, nor ads using my cpu to analyse me.
• actionowl 8y ago
  Webfonts need to die. I'm sick of loading a page, seeing the text for a moment, then it vanishes and I'm forced to wait, possibly for multiple seconds to see the text again in some pretty font the authors thought I cared about.
• baud147258 8y ago
  I appreciate that the author is doing what he's preaching: his page is less than 10 KB, including ads and (self-hosted) analytics.
• JulianMorrison 8y ago
  This is why I need something like uMatrix to explicitly whitelist the text and leave the marketing wibble on the server.
• iamgopal 8y ago
  Appstore based browser.
• codethief 8y ago
  Very relevant: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com
• pure-awesome 8y ago
  If we have the Dweb, does that make this the Bweb?
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  My sites are fairly much plain, mostly using a bit of Bootstrap. Because of the new European data protection laws (which I mostly like) I also converted my blogger based blog to generated static resources. Like so many other people I ignore sites with too much baggage. Many news sites have text only versions if you look. I sort of have some adds on my main site that are text links to where my books are sold. Advertising does not have to be resource heavy.
• majani 8y ago
  The web is not all bullshit. It's just that certain areas of business online it are incentivized to get bloated and others aren't. I learnt this through personal experience: On one hand, I own a news site, and on the other hand, I own a price comparison website. The news website started off at a 90% rating on Pagespeed tools but as the ads came in and people complained that the news site looked ancient, that score got whittled down to 30-40% and the page weight also went up by orders of magnitude as well. The price comparison website however, has a 100% rating on Pagespeed tools and has stayed that way because it's goal is to get people to the best priced retailer as quickly as possible.
• AmIFirstToThink 8y ago
  The question is why are you even looking at CNN?
• StillBored 8y ago
  Its not just transferred content is literally minutes of CPU time on some webpages just to run the javascript. This isn't noticeable on a fast desktop, but try running some of these pages on atom class PCs or 5 year old phones (or for that matter put firefox on you phone and request the desktop site).
• agumonkey 8y ago
  https://imgur.com/MRnd81J https://imgur.com/MRnd81J
• anonu 8y ago
  I know of a few sites that have a light version. CNN for example: http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en But I find that articles are so media heavy these days that removing videos or images detracts from the meaning
• royroyroys 8y ago
  http://www.textfiles.com http://www.textfiles.com This just reminded me of this site. The site is quite old now, but it used to be a great source of information.