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>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
by 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 agoWith 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 agoI 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
- nicbou 6y agoThat's still a lot. The longest pages on my website download around 200kb of data. 1.5MB is a lot of data for text-based information. Of course, some space should be left for enhancing the text with images, but the Wired front page doesn't have that many of those.
- IndexPointer 6y agoWe all use ad blockers but most people don't.