5 ms·

A small part of the solution: Let's block ads! Proof: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.wowhead.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.wowhead.com

the_pwner224 7y ago
That link was shockingly fast. I was quite surprised by how quickly it loaded - you don't notice any loading time unless you specifically look for it. If only everything would be like that...
- egdod 7y ago
  Disable JavaScript. Everything becomes fast (or doesn’t work at all).
  - jgalt212 7y ago
    I'm tired of this comment. 1. Pretty much every website needs JS to function as intended. 2. Delivering fully marked up HTML to the client is a waste of server resources and an under-utilization of 4 GHz client resources.
    - egdod 7y ago
      1. Actually no, most websites work just fine. I have YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook (I know) whitelisted. Pretty much everything else I use regularly is fantastic. 2. The server doesn’t have to run on a battery small enough to put in my pocket.
    - RussianCow 7y ago
      Mostly agree with #1, but I don't understand #2. You're saying delivering plain, pre-rendered HTML is too fast for the client, so we shouldn't use it (especially in a thread about energy use on mobile)?
      - organsnyder 7y ago
        Using JS for partial page updates (whether that's a full single-page app or something smaller) has the potential to consume fewer network resources across multiple interactions.
        ploxiln 7y ago
        Has the potential to ... but in practice, no. Websites which do this overwhelmingly use "best practices" frameworks, libraries, packers, minifiers, and up with an extremely dense 1 MiB javascript bundle, while the meaningful html/text of the page is less than 10 KiB. Images are bigger but the need to load / ability to cache is the same in either situation. And be careful that your api responses are not huge json blobs with more information than the page needs ... Modern webpages use all the latest best techniques, and lose the performance race by miles, over and over again. Nobody is interested or enabled to clean up the mess, just to try to add more big-bang optimizations on top, after we get a few more features which users hate crammed on top ... The truth is we had the technology for extremely efficient computation 10 years ago. New technology is nice, I like it, but we don't need it. But also, it doesn't matter. Simple gluttony and sloth will overwhelm any efficiency improvements.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      I'm not going to jump on the JS hate-train. I develop for the web, I use JS every day. I like JS, I think it's reasonable for websites to use JS. I think most of the people who hate JS are either misinformed or just angry that the web has made programming accessible to a new generation of non-programmers. Fight me. But all that said, seriously, a lot of current websites don't require JS to function, and if you use an extension like uMatrix, it's trivial to re-enable it on the sites that do. I have Javascript disabled by default on my personal computer at home. It's not, like, trivial to use -- you will find a lot of broken websites. I wouldn't turn off JS for my parents. But if you're technically inclined, turning JS off is really, honestly not a problem. You just enable it whenever a page doesn't load. Most news sites I visit work without JS, it will speed up a number of sites dramatically, and (when combined with a few other settings) it can be a huge privacy increase too. It's worth considering, particularly for portable devices like laptops.
      - firethief 7y ago
        Yeah, I use uBlock along with a pi-hole-style dnsmasq blacklist. When I have to use crude unfiltered internet somewhere I'm rudely shocked by how slow it is to render--and horrible, once it does.
    - layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
      > Pretty much every website needs JS to function as intended. Demonstrably untrue.
    - kps 7y ago
      > Pretty much every website needs JS to function as intended. True, but I prefer them to function better than intended.
    - 3xblah 7y ago
      "... as intended." There's the catch. The web developer's intent does not necessarily align with the user's. The developer wants to use Javascript. What does the user want? The simple example is a website that just delivers information. The user just wants the information as quickly and easily as possible. She does not care whether Javascript is used to deliver it. She does care however if the delivery is more resource-intensive and slower.
      - RussianCow 7y ago
        But if the website requires JS to even load the content, then it doesn't matter what the user's intent is. And it's easy to say "just close the tab" until you really need that content.
        egdod 7y ago
        It’s also easy to enable it for that one interaction.
        RussianCow 7y ago
        This sounds great in theory, but I tried this for a while and got really frustrated at just how often I had to enable JS for a specific site/page because it was broken, sometimes in non-obvious ways (e.g. some interactions work but others rely on JS). For me at least, it wasn't worth it, but YMMV depending on how you use the web and your tolerance for this kind of thing.
    - bsder 7y ago
      > 2. Delivering fully marked up HTML to the client is a waste of server resources and an under-utilization of 4 GHz client resources. And this kind of entitlement is why everybody hates the web noawadays and is running adblock on everything. What executes on MY resources is up to ME--not somebody else. If what you're doing isn't directly helping ME, burn your own resources.
      - jgalt212 7y ago
        I don't think it's entitlement. Many free/ad-supported websites are running on very thin margins and sharing the computational burden with the client is not an unreasonable ask.
        egdod 7y ago
        It is indeed unreasonable to expect me to waste my battery life to run your tracking scripts so you can stalk me against my wishes and without my consent.
egdod 7y ago
That actually might be the largest part of the solution.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Cool, let's do this!
halflings 7y ago
That's a pretty extreme example. Here are the results for NY times: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/ https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/ Barely drops page size or power usage.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > How is energy consumption measured? > For now this test only displays the estimated Watt Hour for transferring the bytes of the web page (source). Data transfer is not all it takes to run ads, there is also data crunching happening on servers and rendering of the ads on clients. This means the estimated Wh could actually be higher, but I need more sources for that. Please email me![0] Given that the page takes an extra 3 seconds to load with ads, power usage is probably higher in reality. On the data side, if you look at the screenshot for both pages, you'll also notice that the blocker-free Chrome version has a giant white space at the top where a banner should be. My guess is that the banner hasn't loaded yet, but webtest didn't know to wait for it. In my own (very, very unscientific) test, I loaded up NYT in Firefox (which has my standard extensions installed) and in a fresh Chrome install. The Chrome install downloaded 2.9 MB for ~170 requests, and my Firefox install downloaded ~240 KB for 17 requests. I left the both browsers open for about a minute, and an extra .3 MB got downloaded on the Chrome side as part of a tracking ping, so it's not just page load either that's a concern here -- every minute you stay on the page you'll leak more data. To be clear, the NYT is great at optimizing page load with ads. If anything, I would consider them to be a positive anomaly. But even so, I'm seeing ~80% bandwidth savings over a fresh Chrome install. I suspect my extensions are more aggressive than uBlock Origin is by itself. But the page still loads and works fine for me in Firefox, nothing appears to be broken. [0]: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/#energy https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/#energy
Enginerrrd 7y ago
Wow, this website is cool and makes for a fun and very interesting (and telling) comparison between old reddit and the redesign: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.reddit.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.reddit.com vs. https://webtest.app/?url=https://old.reddit.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://old.reddit.com An order of magnitude increase in page size and energy consumed, and it takes 5 times as long to load, with 5 times the ad requests.
- MisterTea 7y ago
  Given the current environmental state, there should be a big push to shame these websites for wasting energy. Perhaps if this happened on a larger scale we'd see better designs produced that don't rely on highly wasteful and inefficient virtual machines that are mistook for web browsers.
  - aberforth123 7y ago
    Good idea. Where do we start this shaming? I don't have the resources.
- noneeeed 7y ago
  I knew that the new reddit site was terrible (and keeps getting worse), but just under 15mb for a website is insane.
kevas 7y ago
Just tried this using YouTube as the test site...w/ uBlock, makes more requests, larger page size, etc...hmm
- aberforth123 7y ago
  That's because there is more room for thumbnails in the right column because there is no ad on top. Weird right :). We have to block more!
- doppelganger27 7y ago
  Just a guess, but from the preview image the site shows, youtube w/o ublock loads 2 large banners, and one row of videos, vs 3 rows of videos w/ ublock. The larger number of video thumbnails shown may explain the larger size
mirimir 7y ago
Wow, 97% of salon.com is ads! Page size: 1.86 MB vs 0.05 MB Energy used: 0.109 Wh vs 0.003 Wh https://webtest.app/?url=https://salon.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://salon.com

the_pwner224 7y ago

That link was shockingly fast. I was quite surprised by how quickly it loaded - you don't notice any loading time unless you specifically look for it. If only everything would be like that...

egdod 7y ago
Disable JavaScript. Everything becomes fast (or doesn’t work at all).
- jgalt212 7y ago
  I'm tired of this comment. 1. Pretty much every website needs JS to function as intended. 2. Delivering fully marked up HTML to the client is a waste of server resources and an under-utilization of 4 GHz client resources.
  - egdod 7y ago
    1. Actually no, most websites work just fine. I have YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook (I know) whitelisted. Pretty much everything else I use regularly is fantastic. 2. The server doesn’t have to run on a battery small enough to put in my pocket.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    Mostly agree with #1, but I don't understand #2. You're saying delivering plain, pre-rendered HTML is too fast for the client, so we shouldn't use it (especially in a thread about energy use on mobile)?
    - organsnyder 7y ago
      Using JS for partial page updates (whether that's a full single-page app or something smaller) has the potential to consume fewer network resources across multiple interactions.
      - ploxiln 7y ago
        Has the potential to ... but in practice, no. Websites which do this overwhelmingly use "best practices" frameworks, libraries, packers, minifiers, and up with an extremely dense 1 MiB javascript bundle, while the meaningful html/text of the page is less than 10 KiB. Images are bigger but the need to load / ability to cache is the same in either situation. And be careful that your api responses are not huge json blobs with more information than the page needs ... Modern webpages use all the latest best techniques, and lose the performance race by miles, over and over again. Nobody is interested or enabled to clean up the mess, just to try to add more big-bang optimizations on top, after we get a few more features which users hate crammed on top ... The truth is we had the technology for extremely efficient computation 10 years ago. New technology is nice, I like it, but we don't need it. But also, it doesn't matter. Simple gluttony and sloth will overwhelm any efficiency improvements.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    I'm not going to jump on the JS hate-train. I develop for the web, I use JS every day. I like JS, I think it's reasonable for websites to use JS. I think most of the people who hate JS are either misinformed or just angry that the web has made programming accessible to a new generation of non-programmers. Fight me. But all that said, seriously, a lot of current websites don't require JS to function, and if you use an extension like uMatrix, it's trivial to re-enable it on the sites that do. I have Javascript disabled by default on my personal computer at home. It's not, like, trivial to use -- you will find a lot of broken websites. I wouldn't turn off JS for my parents. But if you're technically inclined, turning JS off is really, honestly not a problem. You just enable it whenever a page doesn't load. Most news sites I visit work without JS, it will speed up a number of sites dramatically, and (when combined with a few other settings) it can be a huge privacy increase too. It's worth considering, particularly for portable devices like laptops.
    - firethief 7y ago
      Yeah, I use uBlock along with a pi-hole-style dnsmasq blacklist. When I have to use crude unfiltered internet somewhere I'm rudely shocked by how slow it is to render--and horrible, once it does.
  - layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
    > Pretty much every website needs JS to function as intended. Demonstrably untrue.
  - kps 7y ago
    > Pretty much every website needs JS to function as intended. True, but I prefer them to function better than intended.
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    "... as intended." There's the catch. The web developer's intent does not necessarily align with the user's. The developer wants to use Javascript. What does the user want? The simple example is a website that just delivers information. The user just wants the information as quickly and easily as possible. She does not care whether Javascript is used to deliver it. She does care however if the delivery is more resource-intensive and slower.
    - RussianCow 7y ago
      But if the website requires JS to even load the content, then it doesn't matter what the user's intent is. And it's easy to say "just close the tab" until you really need that content.
      - egdod 7y ago
        It’s also easy to enable it for that one interaction.
        RussianCow 7y ago
        This sounds great in theory, but I tried this for a while and got really frustrated at just how often I had to enable JS for a specific site/page because it was broken, sometimes in non-obvious ways (e.g. some interactions work but others rely on JS). For me at least, it wasn't worth it, but YMMV depending on how you use the web and your tolerance for this kind of thing.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > 2. Delivering fully marked up HTML to the client is a waste of server resources and an under-utilization of 4 GHz client resources. And this kind of entitlement is why everybody hates the web noawadays and is running adblock on everything. What executes on MY resources is up to ME--not somebody else. If what you're doing isn't directly helping ME, burn your own resources.
    - jgalt212 7y ago
      I don't think it's entitlement. Many free/ad-supported websites are running on very thin margins and sharing the computational burden with the client is not an unreasonable ask.
      - egdod 7y ago
        It is indeed unreasonable to expect me to waste my battery life to run your tracking scripts so you can stalk me against my wishes and without my consent.

egdod 7y ago

That actually might be the largest part of the solution.

aberforth123 7y ago
Cool, let's do this!

halflings 7y ago

That's a pretty extreme example. Here are the results for NY times: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/ https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/ Barely drops page size or power usage.

danShumway 7y ago
> How is energy consumption measured? > For now this test only displays the estimated Watt Hour for transferring the bytes of the web page (source). Data transfer is not all it takes to run ads, there is also data crunching happening on servers and rendering of the ads on clients. This means the estimated Wh could actually be higher, but I need more sources for that. Please email me![0] Given that the page takes an extra 3 seconds to load with ads, power usage is probably higher in reality. On the data side, if you look at the screenshot for both pages, you'll also notice that the blocker-free Chrome version has a giant white space at the top where a banner should be. My guess is that the banner hasn't loaded yet, but webtest didn't know to wait for it. In my own (very, very unscientific) test, I loaded up NYT in Firefox (which has my standard extensions installed) and in a fresh Chrome install. The Chrome install downloaded 2.9 MB for ~170 requests, and my Firefox install downloaded ~240 KB for 17 requests. I left the both browsers open for about a minute, and an extra .3 MB got downloaded on the Chrome side as part of a tracking ping, so it's not just page load either that's a concern here -- every minute you stay on the page you'll leak more data. To be clear, the NYT is great at optimizing page load with ads. If anything, I would consider them to be a positive anomaly. But even so, I'm seeing ~80% bandwidth savings over a fresh Chrome install. I suspect my extensions are more aggressive than uBlock Origin is by itself. But the page still loads and works fine for me in Firefox, nothing appears to be broken. [0]: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/#energy https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.nytimes.com/#energy

Enginerrrd 7y ago

Wow, this website is cool and makes for a fun and very interesting (and telling) comparison between old reddit and the redesign: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.reddit.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.reddit.com vs. https://webtest.app/?url=https://old.reddit.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://old.reddit.com An order of magnitude increase in page size and energy consumed, and it takes 5 times as long to load, with 5 times the ad requests.

MisterTea 7y ago
Given the current environmental state, there should be a big push to shame these websites for wasting energy. Perhaps if this happened on a larger scale we'd see better designs produced that don't rely on highly wasteful and inefficient virtual machines that are mistook for web browsers.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Good idea. Where do we start this shaming? I don't have the resources.
noneeeed 7y ago
I knew that the new reddit site was terrible (and keeps getting worse), but just under 15mb for a website is insane.

kevas 7y ago

Just tried this using YouTube as the test site...w/ uBlock, makes more requests, larger page size, etc...hmm

aberforth123 7y ago
That's because there is more room for thumbnails in the right column because there is no ad on top. Weird right :). We have to block more!
doppelganger27 7y ago
Just a guess, but from the preview image the site shows, youtube w/o ublock loads 2 large banners, and one row of videos, vs 3 rows of videos w/ ublock. The larger number of video thumbnails shown may explain the larger size

mirimir 7y ago

Wow, 97% of salon.com is ads! Page size: 1.86 MB vs 0.05 MB Energy used: 0.109 Wh vs 0.003 Wh https://webtest.app/?url=https://salon.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://salon.com