10 ms·

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I

by gok 6y ago

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front page has about 500 words of content. It also covered 100% of the content with ads, twice. This is unsustainable. Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and then covered their grossly inefficient work with impossibly annoying, privacy-invading advertising. Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up. They've already stolen untold amounts of time and energy from us all.

johnspiral666 6y ago
Downloads of this size will also have a extremely large power footprint if you add up all the hops across the Internet.
icemelt8 6y ago
please don't curse Web Developers, its a business decision.
boraoztunc 6y ago
Ironic read from Wired. Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...
prayDeeGayAwe 6y ago
I stopped visiting wired.com years ago, when, instinctively, I could just sense the bloat by the spike in CPU, and lag in pageload, for what was ostensibly plain text, plus a serif font and one header image. As if I wouldn't notice that casual reading material was causing my cooling fans to spin up. As if I were multi-tasking so hard, that it couldn't be discernible which dog in the room could take the blame for who just farted. The wired.com website first showed hints of becoming unusable when their audience participation widget provided by Disqus, for reader/user comments, became this opaque blob of compressed/minified JavaScript. Then they started piling on video. This was back around 2009 or 2010. By 2013, I had mostly washed my hands Conde Nast publications. Whoops.
101008 6y ago
I agree, but somehow when I google for something, Wired and all these websites are the ones that appear on the first result, so what's the deal? Google don't care if your website is heavy as long as that domain provides a lot of ads income? I've made a website pure HTML with just a small CSS and no JS; with real great content. Google doesn't take it into account. So I don't know if they are really pushing for a light network, or maybe, I don't know, because it is easier to convert these website into AMP?
- nicbou 6y ago
  Google also considers page and domain authority, which your website likely doesn't have.
- Rerarom 6y ago
  https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
  - Veen 6y ago
    You're being downvoted but this is actually a useful suggestion. I use millionshort.com all the time when I want to strip out the low-value SEO crap that dominates search results.
    - Rerarom 6y ago
      Thanks for the appreciation
- Sephr 6y ago
  High network utilization doesn't have to mean an unresponsive website. Google cares more about responsiveness. A site is responsive if you can start reading it quickly, regardless of how much network traffic is being used by ads, as long as the ads are loaded asynchronously after the primary content. Penalizing for high total network traffic is short-sighted and would prevent most video hosts from ranking well in Google Search.
jariel 6y ago
" Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains" It depends on how you measure efficiency. Edit: I should add what I would thought would be obvious, and that it is that bloat is related to advertising which drives their bottom line, and I'm doubtful of any existing material alternatives to 'wired.com's already problematic ability to exist. Ergo, the bandwidth is set to optimise for things developers perceive to be inefficient, but not other members of the team.
- glaberficken 6y ago
  Web-designers and web-developers design and build the things that the people with the money ask them to. It's that simple.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    You should build what they need - though a lot of the problem is that those specifying websites have very little idea about how the web works and what is needed. Unfortunately this isn't the 60's at Sterling Cooper where you can brain storm an idea like go to "work on an egg" or a "a mars a day helps you work rest and play"
    - glaberficken 6y ago
      In my experience, even if you start by "building what they need". When you present your V1 "they" come back and say something along the lines of "can't you make it look nicer/cooler? You know add some wow factor!" What they mean is: "I just took a pile of money from the client for this and you didn't make it look expensive enough"
  - jariel 6y ago
    The people that 'ask them to' are bound by an inexorable set of rules appear in the system, for the most part. That system is observable and a little bit predictable, it's just more economic than it is technical, so it's worthwhile for devs to take one step out of their zone sometimes to see how that math works. I don't really think anyone at wired actually wants a slow site or tons of crap ads.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Indeed. Ads are just noise that should be filtered out. To visit a website and be served 100 megabyes of noise along with less than 1 megabyte of actual information... It's an absurdly low signal-to-noise ratio, such an incredible waste. We need to fix the web by blocking these things. No compromises. If a website can't exist without advertising, it should disappear. Eventually, only good websites will remain. Websites made by people who actually have something to say rather than websites made purely to attract audiences for advertisers.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  There are two types of noise being served here The advertising The tracking The tracking is being used to: tell advertisers how well their advertising is working tell the site how well articles are working give unscrupulous sites the possibility of selling that data to others, which are probably advertisers but maybe other companies. As far as the ratio of advertisement to content this https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/higher-ad-to-edit-ratio-not-a-good-thing/ https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/higher-ad-to-edit-ra... regarding that ratio in newspapers assumes 60 / 40 where I believe the 40 is supposed to be content (although I find the wording not 100% clear)
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  I hate capitalism. I'm fully an anti-capitalist. But I'm also a realist. We live in a capitalist society and free content has come out of advertising since before the web. It's an annoying part of the present world but not the most annoying part imo. I don't know how people denouncing just advertising expect the publication of free information to work. This society has created a vast plenty. I don't see why advertisers, the public and publishers couldn't reach a truce where a moderate amount of semi-relevant text ads get shown the reader in excahnge. But everyone wants to total control, wants to club to death all competitors and that seems to be the way this world of plenty is ending.
  - manquer 6y ago
    It is hard to believe that 100mb of payload is needed to show me same amounts of ads on a page. Merely optimising that without even changing your ad volume /model would go miles in establishing the trust that had been lost.
bberenberg 6y ago
What if my audience is people in the US on desktop devices? Does it make sense for me to build for data capped networks which aren't a thing for 99% of US desktop devices? Does it make sense that I now have to spend time and money optimizing my company site for an audience that I don't care about so we don't get down-ranked?
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  FYI for a huge consumer brand we see over 60% on mobile
  - bberenberg 6y ago
    100% understand. I am not suggesting that this is true for everyone, and I agree that this is a good goal for many. My point was that my site targets an audience (corporate employees on their work computers). These policies ask us to spend a lot of time and money building out a site for an audience we don't have.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
25 years ago I used to read Texas Monthly magazine (on paper) because it was some of the best journalism around. I finally unsubscribed when I had to flip through 16 pages of ads to get to the table of contents, and several ads per issue contained scratch-n-sniff perfume samples which meant that reading an article required you to smell like a bordello afterwards. Wired is the digital equivalent of that now. There's some great journalism in there, but no journalism is good enough to put up with a hostile attack on one's sensibilities just to read it.
- freediver 6y ago
  Similar to https://www.google.com/search?q=mattress https://www.google.com/search?q=mattress where 100% of all the content you see there is an ad (turn off your ad-blocker just to witness the monstrosity). Isn't this a direct insult to intelligence? And where and when do you draw the line?
  - mehdix 6y ago
    You're right, by turning off my ad-blocker, my mobile screen was fully covered with ads. What constantly worries me however, is what happens when most visitors use ad-blockers? My guess is, a war would be declared against current web standards, where users can still modify DOM and remove unwanted content. Edit: reword for clarity.
  - esperent 6y ago
    There isn't much difference with adblock on or off for this page for me (using Chrome on Windows). With adblock off, there are three obvious ads on the top right of the page, search results on the left. With adblock on, these are gone. In both cases, the top of the search results is a map with a few shops listed, and under this are normal search results. Repeating this on mobile, the ads are moved inline above the map. They take up about 50% of the screen. That is a bit intrusive. However, I have muscle memory that automatically scrolls down a bit after searching and to be honest, I would not have even noticed them if I wasn't looking. I don't know where the the 100% of content being ads claim is coming from. Perhaps it's different in different regions? I'm not trying to be an apologist for Google here, by the way. However, when it comes to intrusive ads there are far worse offenders (although perhaps not when it comes to behind the scenes data collection, which is a bigger issue).
quickthrower2 6y ago
I just opened it and it downloaded 9Mb with DuckDuckGo privacy essentials ON, and 26.3Mb without. 589 Requests. :-( A smaller download would be: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/100 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/100 Also FIFY: s/Web developers/Suits/
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
"Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up." As the browser author with the dominant market share, Google could start by not enabling these "wasteful developers". These ridiculously huge web pages can lock up a user's computer when the user's browser is a "modern" and "supported" one but not when the user agent is something simpler. I can read wired.com really fast using various tcp clients to make the http requests and links to view the html. If user A reads the articles with Chrome and user B reads them using something simpler, how is user A advantaged over user B? All things being equal, if we quiz them on the readings, would user A score higher than user B? The difference is the advertising, which almost always requires graphics - the more dazzling the better, and detailed tracking, which requires Javascript and the presence of other "modern" browser "features". There is a strong argument to be made that Google's browser caters more to the online ad industry (who wants to show ads and do tracking) than to users (who want to read wired.com quickly and efficiently). Software developers have long been squandering user's resources beginning with Microsoft Windows. Hardware manufacturers were Microsoft's first customers and there was an incentive to get users to keep "upgrading" their hardware. - buying new computers. Web developers are simply following the tradition. A user can get those 500 words of content in an instant with zero ads, using the right user agent, even on an "obsolete" device. However there are zero incentives for online ad industry-supported companies/organisations maintaining "modern" browsers, web developers writing code to run on them nor hardware manufacturers to help the user do that. The easiest way to change the "UX" for the web user is to change the user agent. Trying to get web developers to change what they design to only use a small fraction of what Chrome and the user's computer can do is far more difficult, if not outright impossible.
- userbinator 6y ago
  I find it ironic that you bring up Windows as an example, when the amount of data the parent comment mentioned - ~100MB -- is enough for a full install of Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3... and will yield many times more enjoyment than the front page of Wired.
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
plerpin 6y ago
A lot of sites even download new content continuously even after the page has been fully rendered! They swap out silent media ads one after another, in hopes that you minimized and ignored the page.
beambot 6y ago
> Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up. So you want Google to use their dominant position to force webmasters into a new paradigm that probably(?) benefits Google more than today's status quo? And when people start yelling for antitrust provisions, will you still back Google?
lokedhs 6y ago
Even with adblocking it downloads 30 MB almost instantly, and while typing this reply it's now up to 48 MB. Oh wait, it's at 50 now. It keeps going up. Looking at the requests it seems to be downloading a video from Cloudfront. And yes, in the middle of the page there is a video playing. I'm sure people with metered connections will love that. That said, with adblocking at least the design looks clean enough. I'm willing to bet that this is what their designers see, and then another team adds all ad overlays on top of the existing design.
ricree 6y ago
>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and Loading Wired.com with uBlock and no javascript the page comes in below 1.5MB for me, with most functionality seemingly intact (in that the front page looks mostly normal and I can load articles that appear to have their text completely intact). The bulk of that seems to be fonts and images, which are probably unavoidable for a media site. Some reasonable noscript whitelisting for Wired.com and a few others (out of 12 total that noscript shows me) gives a page size that's still under 5MB. Looking at the full page with everything loaded and unblocked, the biggest offender here seems to be not web design, but an aggressively downloading autoplay video on the front page. Without that the page itself is - while not necessarily great - at least reasonably bearable. Truth be told, I'd started this post intending to blame advertisers, and there is still some merit to that since even before the video kicks in the various third party scripts balloon the page size several times over from the minimal functional one that loads with everything blocked. But in this case, it does simply seem to be a wasteful media stream playing without regard to whether anyone wants it to or not.
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  With uBlockO it was 1.5MB for me, without it was 3.8MB, on Firefox, coming from Germany. Which is still pretty ridiculous on both numbers for what's actually visible on the page. Once you scroll, however, things get messy no matter what, because of their "Scott Adkins Answers Martial Arts Training Questions From Twitter" auto-play video they have right now. That ate way another 30MB quickly and the video wasn't even visible (I had scrolled past it).
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    I browse without 3rd-party and 1st-party scripts [0]. I wanted to praise my setup but it does not work well with Wired: 1.37 MB / 722.93 KB transferred, Finish: 6.57 s versus uBlock default 8.62 MB / 4.49 MB transferred, Finish: 28.38 s Clean setup mostly increase load time: 11.58 MB / 5.79 MB transferred Finish: 1.13 min ^ checked with "Disable Cache". Not much content delivered for such big HTML file 660.46 / 167.60 KB transferred because it's mostly inline script: $$('script').map((s) => s.textContent).join('').length 568681 And fonts.css is inline font: 127.70 / 100.15 KB transferred [0] uBlock Origin: * * 1p-script block * * 3p block * * 3p-frame block * * 3p-script block * * inline-script block or uMatrix: * * * block * * frame block * 1st-party css allow * 1st-party frame allow * 1st-party image allow
entha_saava 6y ago
My browsing these days looks like - JS off by default - Web fonts off by default - Media elements larger than 100KiB not loaded by default uBlock origin is the god of internet. Edit(s): formatting
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years It's true, whenever a company has pleaded with me to bring a site in with better performance, I have adamantly refused to do so. When companies say guess what, Bryan, we are going to focus a sprint on just making sure everything download as fast as possible and we get rid of anything getting in the way of the best possible user experience, I have spent that sprint watching quirky animation, and sometimes turned that animation into a base64 encoded gif and put it in a div that was set with a z-index low enough that it would be not seen by people but would still have to be downloaded by the browser! I do all these things of course, because it was decided by the Secret League of Obnoxious Web Developers (SLOWD) that we should do the utmost in our power to make the web slower for everyone. OR - it could be that I have in fact asked project management at sites repeatedly to focus on performance (and accessibility, another thing that always gets ignored) and been told that nobody care about that stuff. I guess it's up to you to determine where the fault lies.
- stonogo 6y ago
  I don't think anyone is under the impression that web developers can't make excuses; we have plenty of evidence of that. I think discussions like this are capable of serving as valuable reference material when we are engaged with project managers on this topic.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I don't think there is a paucity of research that shows that higher performing sites get more users and are generally more valuable for the site owners. The problem is not lack of reference material, the problem is that nobody considers the problem that important (generally) when presented with that reference material. Now the thread is quite big so I have not read everything but I have skimmed through it all, and have not seen anything that would be a really useful argument for getting someone to consider maybe we should try to improve site performance. A bunch of people complaining about Google, Wired, and a few other things that they complain about is not as impressive as just the hits you get if you search "effects of site performance on user retention" (replace user retention with other useful metrics to get sources for the argument being written up)

by gok 6y ago

johnspiral666 6y ago

Downloads of this size will also have a extremely large power footprint if you add up all the hops across the Internet.

icemelt8 6y ago

please don't curse Web Developers, its a business decision.

boraoztunc 6y ago

Ironic read from Wired. Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...

prayDeeGayAwe 6y ago

I stopped visiting wired.com years ago, when, instinctively, I could just sense the bloat by the spike in CPU, and lag in pageload, for what was ostensibly plain text, plus a serif font and one header image. As if I wouldn't notice that casual reading material was causing my cooling fans to spin up. As if I were multi-tasking so hard, that it couldn't be discernible which dog in the room could take the blame for who just farted. The wired.com website first showed hints of becoming unusable when their audience participation widget provided by Disqus, for reader/user comments, became this opaque blob of compressed/minified JavaScript. Then they started piling on video. This was back around 2009 or 2010. By 2013, I had mostly washed my hands Conde Nast publications. Whoops.

101008 6y ago

I agree, but somehow when I google for something, Wired and all these websites are the ones that appear on the first result, so what's the deal? Google don't care if your website is heavy as long as that domain provides a lot of ads income? I've made a website pure HTML with just a small CSS and no JS; with real great content. Google doesn't take it into account. So I don't know if they are really pushing for a light network, or maybe, I don't know, because it is easier to convert these website into AMP?

nicbou 6y ago
Google also considers page and domain authority, which your website likely doesn't have.
Rerarom 6y ago
https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
- Veen 6y ago
  You're being downvoted but this is actually a useful suggestion. I use millionshort.com all the time when I want to strip out the low-value SEO crap that dominates search results.
  - Rerarom 6y ago
    Thanks for the appreciation
Sephr 6y ago
High network utilization doesn't have to mean an unresponsive website. Google cares more about responsiveness. A site is responsive if you can start reading it quickly, regardless of how much network traffic is being used by ads, as long as the ads are loaded asynchronously after the primary content. Penalizing for high total network traffic is short-sighted and would prevent most video hosts from ranking well in Google Search.

jariel 6y ago

" Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains" It depends on how you measure efficiency. Edit: I should add what I would thought would be obvious, and that it is that bloat is related to advertising which drives their bottom line, and I'm doubtful of any existing material alternatives to 'wired.com's already problematic ability to exist. Ergo, the bandwidth is set to optimise for things developers perceive to be inefficient, but not other members of the team.

glaberficken 6y ago
Web-designers and web-developers design and build the things that the people with the money ask them to. It's that simple.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  You should build what they need - though a lot of the problem is that those specifying websites have very little idea about how the web works and what is needed. Unfortunately this isn't the 60's at Sterling Cooper where you can brain storm an idea like go to "work on an egg" or a "a mars a day helps you work rest and play"
  - glaberficken 6y ago
    In my experience, even if you start by "building what they need". When you present your V1 "they" come back and say something along the lines of "can't you make it look nicer/cooler? You know add some wow factor!" What they mean is: "I just took a pile of money from the client for this and you didn't make it look expensive enough"
- jariel 6y ago
  The people that 'ask them to' are bound by an inexorable set of rules appear in the system, for the most part. That system is observable and a little bit predictable, it's just more economic than it is technical, so it's worthwhile for devs to take one step out of their zone sometimes to see how that math works. I don't really think anyone at wired actually wants a slow site or tons of crap ads.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Indeed. Ads are just noise that should be filtered out. To visit a website and be served 100 megabyes of noise along with less than 1 megabyte of actual information... It's an absurdly low signal-to-noise ratio, such an incredible waste. We need to fix the web by blocking these things. No compromises. If a website can't exist without advertising, it should disappear. Eventually, only good websites will remain. Websites made by people who actually have something to say rather than websites made purely to attract audiences for advertisers.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
There are two types of noise being served here The advertising The tracking The tracking is being used to: tell advertisers how well their advertising is working tell the site how well articles are working give unscrupulous sites the possibility of selling that data to others, which are probably advertisers but maybe other companies. As far as the ratio of advertisement to content this https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/higher-ad-to-edit-ratio-not-a-good-thing/ https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/higher-ad-to-edit-ra... regarding that ratio in newspapers assumes 60 / 40 where I believe the 40 is supposed to be content (although I find the wording not 100% clear)
joe_the_user 6y ago
I hate capitalism. I'm fully an anti-capitalist. But I'm also a realist. We live in a capitalist society and free content has come out of advertising since before the web. It's an annoying part of the present world but not the most annoying part imo. I don't know how people denouncing just advertising expect the publication of free information to work. This society has created a vast plenty. I don't see why advertisers, the public and publishers couldn't reach a truce where a moderate amount of semi-relevant text ads get shown the reader in excahnge. But everyone wants to total control, wants to club to death all competitors and that seems to be the way this world of plenty is ending.
- manquer 6y ago
  It is hard to believe that 100mb of payload is needed to show me same amounts of ads on a page. Merely optimising that without even changing your ad volume /model would go miles in establishing the trust that had been lost.

bberenberg 6y ago

What if my audience is people in the US on desktop devices? Does it make sense for me to build for data capped networks which aren't a thing for 99% of US desktop devices? Does it make sense that I now have to spend time and money optimizing my company site for an audience that I don't care about so we don't get down-ranked?

C1sc0cat 6y ago
FYI for a huge consumer brand we see over 60% on mobile
- bberenberg 6y ago
  100% understand. I am not suggesting that this is true for everyone, and I agree that this is a good goal for many. My point was that my site targets an audience (corporate employees on their work computers). These policies ask us to spend a lot of time and money building out a site for an audience we don't have.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

25 years ago I used to read Texas Monthly magazine (on paper) because it was some of the best journalism around. I finally unsubscribed when I had to flip through 16 pages of ads to get to the table of contents, and several ads per issue contained scratch-n-sniff perfume samples which meant that reading an article required you to smell like a bordello afterwards. Wired is the digital equivalent of that now. There's some great journalism in there, but no journalism is good enough to put up with a hostile attack on one's sensibilities just to read it.

freediver 6y ago
Similar to https://www.google.com/search?q=mattress https://www.google.com/search?q=mattress where 100% of all the content you see there is an ad (turn off your ad-blocker just to witness the monstrosity). Isn't this a direct insult to intelligence? And where and when do you draw the line?
- mehdix 6y ago
  You're right, by turning off my ad-blocker, my mobile screen was fully covered with ads. What constantly worries me however, is what happens when most visitors use ad-blockers? My guess is, a war would be declared against current web standards, where users can still modify DOM and remove unwanted content. Edit: reword for clarity.
- esperent 6y ago
  There isn't much difference with adblock on or off for this page for me (using Chrome on Windows). With adblock off, there are three obvious ads on the top right of the page, search results on the left. With adblock on, these are gone. In both cases, the top of the search results is a map with a few shops listed, and under this are normal search results. Repeating this on mobile, the ads are moved inline above the map. They take up about 50% of the screen. That is a bit intrusive. However, I have muscle memory that automatically scrolls down a bit after searching and to be honest, I would not have even noticed them if I wasn't looking. I don't know where the the 100% of content being ads claim is coming from. Perhaps it's different in different regions? I'm not trying to be an apologist for Google here, by the way. However, when it comes to intrusive ads there are far worse offenders (although perhaps not when it comes to behind the scenes data collection, which is a bigger issue).

quickthrower2 6y ago

I just opened it and it downloaded 9Mb with DuckDuckGo privacy essentials ON, and 26.3Mb without. 589 Requests. :-( A smaller download would be: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/100 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/100 Also FIFY: s/Web developers/Suits/

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

"Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up." As the browser author with the dominant market share, Google could start by not enabling these "wasteful developers". These ridiculously huge web pages can lock up a user's computer when the user's browser is a "modern" and "supported" one but not when the user agent is something simpler. I can read wired.com really fast using various tcp clients to make the http requests and links to view the html. If user A reads the articles with Chrome and user B reads them using something simpler, how is user A advantaged over user B? All things being equal, if we quiz them on the readings, would user A score higher than user B? The difference is the advertising, which almost always requires graphics - the more dazzling the better, and detailed tracking, which requires Javascript and the presence of other "modern" browser "features". There is a strong argument to be made that Google's browser caters more to the online ad industry (who wants to show ads and do tracking) than to users (who want to read wired.com quickly and efficiently). Software developers have long been squandering user's resources beginning with Microsoft Windows. Hardware manufacturers were Microsoft's first customers and there was an incentive to get users to keep "upgrading" their hardware. - buying new computers. Web developers are simply following the tradition. A user can get those 500 words of content in an instant with zero ads, using the right user agent, even on an "obsolete" device. However there are zero incentives for online ad industry-supported companies/organisations maintaining "modern" browsers, web developers writing code to run on them nor hardware manufacturers to help the user do that. The easiest way to change the "UX" for the web user is to change the user agent. Trying to get web developers to change what they design to only use a small fraction of what Chrome and the user's computer can do is far more difficult, if not outright impossible.

userbinator 6y ago
I find it ironic that you bring up Windows as an example, when the amount of data the parent comment mentioned - ~100MB -- is enough for a full install of Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3... and will yield many times more enjoyment than the front page of Wired.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

plerpin 6y ago

A lot of sites even download new content continuously even after the page has been fully rendered! They swap out silent media ads one after another, in hopes that you minimized and ignored the page.

beambot 6y ago

> Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up. So you want Google to use their dominant position to force webmasters into a new paradigm that probably(?) benefits Google more than today's status quo? And when people start yelling for antitrust provisions, will you still back Google?

lokedhs 6y ago

Even with adblocking it downloads 30 MB almost instantly, and while typing this reply it's now up to 48 MB. Oh wait, it's at 50 now. It keeps going up. Looking at the requests it seems to be downloading a video from Cloudfront. And yes, in the middle of the page there is a video playing. I'm sure people with metered connections will love that. That said, with adblocking at least the design looks clean enough. I'm willing to bet that this is what their designers see, and then another team adds all ad overlays on top of the existing design.

ricree 6y ago

>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and Loading Wired.com with uBlock and no javascript the page comes in below 1.5MB for me, with most functionality seemingly intact (in that the front page looks mostly normal and I can load articles that appear to have their text completely intact). The bulk of that seems to be fonts and images, which are probably unavoidable for a media site. Some reasonable noscript whitelisting for Wired.com and a few others (out of 12 total that noscript shows me) gives a page size that's still under 5MB. Looking at the full page with everything loaded and unblocked, the biggest offender here seems to be not web design, but an aggressively downloading autoplay video on the front page. Without that the page itself is - while not necessarily great - at least reasonably bearable. Truth be told, I'd started this post intending to blame advertisers, and there is still some merit to that since even before the video kicks in the various third party scripts balloon the page size several times over from the minimal functional one that loads with everything blocked. But in this case, it does simply seem to be a wasteful media stream playing without regard to whether anyone wants it to or not.

rndgermandude 6y ago
With uBlockO it was 1.5MB for me, without it was 3.8MB, on Firefox, coming from Germany. Which is still pretty ridiculous on both numbers for what's actually visible on the page. Once you scroll, however, things get messy no matter what, because of their "Scott Adkins Answers Martial Arts Training Questions From Twitter" auto-play video they have right now. That ate way another 30MB quickly and the video wasn't even visible (I had scrolled past it).
- sergeykish 6y ago
  I browse without 3rd-party and 1st-party scripts [0]. I wanted to praise my setup but it does not work well with Wired: 1.37 MB / 722.93 KB transferred, Finish: 6.57 s versus uBlock default 8.62 MB / 4.49 MB transferred, Finish: 28.38 s Clean setup mostly increase load time: 11.58 MB / 5.79 MB transferred Finish: 1.13 min ^ checked with "Disable Cache". Not much content delivered for such big HTML file 660.46 / 167.60 KB transferred because it's mostly inline script: $$('script').map((s) => s.textContent).join('').length 568681 And fonts.css is inline font: 127.70 / 100.15 KB transferred [0] uBlock Origin: * * 1p-script block * * 3p block * * 3p-frame block * * 3p-script block * * inline-script block or uMatrix: * * * block * * frame block * 1st-party css allow * 1st-party frame allow * 1st-party image allow

entha_saava 6y ago

My browsing these days looks like - JS off by default - Web fonts off by default - Media elements larger than 100KiB not loaded by default uBlock origin is the god of internet. Edit(s): formatting

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years It's true, whenever a company has pleaded with me to bring a site in with better performance, I have adamantly refused to do so. When companies say guess what, Bryan, we are going to focus a sprint on just making sure everything download as fast as possible and we get rid of anything getting in the way of the best possible user experience, I have spent that sprint watching quirky animation, and sometimes turned that animation into a base64 encoded gif and put it in a div that was set with a z-index low enough that it would be not seen by people but would still have to be downloaded by the browser! I do all these things of course, because it was decided by the Secret League of Obnoxious Web Developers (SLOWD) that we should do the utmost in our power to make the web slower for everyone. OR - it could be that I have in fact asked project management at sites repeatedly to focus on performance (and accessibility, another thing that always gets ignored) and been told that nobody care about that stuff. I guess it's up to you to determine where the fault lies.

stonogo 6y ago
I don't think anyone is under the impression that web developers can't make excuses; we have plenty of evidence of that. I think discussions like this are capable of serving as valuable reference material when we are engaged with project managers on this topic.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I don't think there is a paucity of research that shows that higher performing sites get more users and are generally more valuable for the site owners. The problem is not lack of reference material, the problem is that nobody considers the problem that important (generally) when presented with that reference material. Now the thread is quite big so I have not read everything but I have skimmed through it all, and have not seen anything that would be a really useful argument for getting someone to consider maybe we should try to improve site performance. A bunch of people complaining about Google, Wired, and a few other things that they complain about is not as impressive as just the hits you get if you search "effects of site performance on user retention" (replace user retention with other useful metrics to get sources for the argument being written up)