Just thinking about this problem and the proposed solution is making me flustered. Remember those popups in IE "Do you want to continue running scripts on this

Just thinking about this problem and the proposed solution is making me flustered. Remember those popups in IE "Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?" Nobody knew what they were, where they came from, or what they were talking about. Even wose than that was the fact that nobody knew what the Yes/No button was for and if you clicked "Yes" sometimes it would just keep popping up over and over again. They got rid of that for a good reason (although its still alive and well in MSHTA.exe). It sucked and offered nothing of value to most users. On the other hand, the New York Times's website has 5 external scripts that total over 1mb of just text. They've got their CMS, 4 DIFFERENT ad agencies, analytics, and some other crap the site problably never "needed" before 2010. That's disgusting. And that's what you get from a $300m+ company that RELIES on technology to stay in business. Missing a feature? Fuck it, just have the client pull down another 400kb of js from a sixth CDN. Nevermind the actual CONTENT that attracted the user in the first place is measured in bytes. So while I think this is horribly misguided, I do agree that something needs to be done to deincentivize lazy Javascript programmers pasting all their problems away. Perhaps the lock icon in the address bar should also turn yellow or red to reflect external script resources? Or maybe whenever multiple frameworks are combined or multiple ad networks used? Almost every page of my WP website has just 8 internal resources and a page size of <310kb. There's no reason NYT can't stay in that ball park with their deep pockets. Megabytes of tracking and bullshit for basically a white page with text is disingenuous.