44 ms·

Is the web getting slower?

269 points by oedmarap 6y ago

Aperocky 6y ago
Going to certain webpage is like cold starting jvm.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  You'd be able to boot an x86 emulator in JavaScript to a Groovy prompt in just a few seconds, so probably faster than you can load any major news site except text.npr.org ;)
  - jandrese 6y ago
    news.ycombinator.com loads pretty fast too.
nikanj 6y ago
Yes. Fortunately hardware is getting faster, which mostly compensates. But the web has definitely turned into a bloated whale
- SigmundA 6y ago
  "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"
- li4ick 6y ago
  Which should tell you something. The vast majority of tech advancements are because of hardware, not software. I think that software people should feel a bit of shame at this point in time.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    No one feels any shame because the reason is obvious. Normal users are constantly demanding more features and not more speed. The average person just buys a new phone when things are slow. Companies don't have infinite time so when faced with the option between adding a new feature and speeding up an old one they always pick the new feature because thats worth more.
    - li4ick 6y ago
      Now imagine if the people working on the lower level stuff had the same attitude. Imagine if the codec implementations were slow because we need more features. Imagine if the graphics people never gave a damn about perf, just like the "programmers" you're talking about. Imagine if your database was the main perf hog in your system etc. etc. I'm sorry, but here's an unpopular opinion: those people are just not good engineers. The increments of software development should be abstractions, not features.
Funes- 6y ago
Yes. It's the Jevons' paradox enabled and amplified by the corporate web abusing JavaScript (bloat, ads, trackers, and other attention-grabbing shenanigans).
shaabanban 6y ago
Try to use reddit in a browser...
- jcims 6y ago
  new.reddit.com - 327 requests, 8mb, 7 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3f952400000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3f952400000 news.ycombinator.com - 7 requests, 22kb, .125 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf4a4f8400000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf4a4f8400000 The hilarous thing is that if you put in https://www.reddit.com https://www.reddit.com to pingdom's measurement tool, reddit returns the old site layout. https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3c4e3800000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3c4e3800000 edit: Just poked around a bit to find best worst examples. Unsurprisingly CNN is the worst I could find after a few mins - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf596ffc00000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf596ffc00000 543(!) requests, 9mb, 6 seconds. Just stroll through the list of bullshit it sucks into the front page...what a mess.
  - klerpi 6y ago
    Try it with awwwards websites. A spinning wheel is almost a requirement.
    - canofbars 6y ago
      For a real A+++ website you need a loading bar. Also holy shit I just clicked on the first website I saw on that site and I'm getting about 3fps scrolling it and my desktop is a Ryzen 9 3900x with 24 threads, 48gb ram and an rx5700xt. You don't even get the excuse of "It works on my machine" because this desktop is literally as good as it gets. I just tried a couple sites and not a single one could scroll smoothly, one of them was live applying css transforms to about 30 images as I scroll.
      - foxdev 6y ago
        They're nice and smooth on my Ryzen 5 4500U/Vega 6 with 8GB of RAM. Of course the 5 seconds of artsy chaos spinner each of them has on load is still absurd. But it's fine after that. Could it be the browser? I loaded them in Firefox.
chews 6y ago
Does a bear poop in the woods? Is the earth round?
- hinkley 6y ago
  So... "mostly"?
mjevans 6y ago
Hellish AutoPlay Videos... a plague.
ErikAugust 6y ago
This is one reason I created Trim [0]. I didn’t want to have to load 4-7 MB of stuff to read a stupid article. It often reduces an article page weight by 99% and uses no JavaScript. [0]: https://beta.trimread.com https://beta.trimread.com
- darepublic 6y ago
  Is this similar to outline?
  - ErikAugust 6y ago
    Similar, different in design and execution. As far as I know, Outline processes the article in browser using JavaScript. Trim uses no JavaScript but instead does the processing server-side. The response of the form post is the article.
- tcbasche 6y ago
  I immediately thought it was the document management system bought by IBM in the early 2000s https://www.ecmconnection.com/doc/tower-software-trim-context-0002 https://www.ecmconnection.com/doc/tower-software-trim-contex...
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  This is one of the main reasons why I do 90% of my web browsing in emacs-w3m, which does not support Javascript. Avoiding Javascript not only lets me avoid all that bloat and slowdown, but also avoid Javascript-based tracking, malware, and exposing myself to Javascript vulnerabilities. I also have the power of the entire Emacs ecosystem at my fingertips when I surf the web this way, which can be very helpful in many ways. Unfortunately, some sites I find essential will not work without Javascript, and for them I go back to Firefox. In Firefox, I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin to only allow through the minimal amount of stuff that'll let the web page work, and filter out ads. I have a really old, slow laptop, so web browsing is slow for me, but not nearly as slow as it would be if I consented to swallow all the crap that the modern web tries to force down my throat. I yearn for the good old days without Javascript or Webassembly. There was Flash back in those days, but fortunately not a single serious site I ever visited required it, so I could avoid every Flash-using site like the plague. But today the Javascript plague is unavoidable.
paxys 6y ago
Also see Downs–Thomson paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox) - improvements in a road network will not reduce traffic congestion, but rather can make it worse.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  Only applies "to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way" according to your link. I think that's an important qualification.
- wayne_skylar 6y ago
  I've always had a question about this. If more people are deciding to use the road afterwards surely it means that trips are being taken that weren't before? Wouldn't that be a good thing, economically speaking?
  - Funes- 6y ago
    >If more people are deciding to use the road afterwards surely it means that trips are being taken that weren't before? Sure. An increase in supply--or a change in its nature--can increase demand. >Wouldn't that be a good thing, economically speaking? Not necessarily, in my estimation.
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    > Wouldn't that be a good thing, economically speaking? Yes, because it means people can live in places they couldn't before, or could get to jobs they couldn't before. Of course, people who already used the road won't perceive these benefits; they are in the same situation as before.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  That description fits Braess's paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox more than the Downs-Thomson paradox. The latter is more about public transport being the dominating factor in congestion whereas the former is about adding roads in itself sometimes causing traffic to get worse. In either case it's often overstated, expanding the road network (especially intelligently) usually results in less congestion. It's just a poor investment compared to other means of transportation investment in large cities.
Swizec 6y ago
It’s important to make a distinction between webapps and websites here. We use the web now like we used desktop in the 90’s and 00’s. For most users, your browser is your OS. Hell even when it isn’t, most desktop apps use HTML+CSS for their UI. Hell even many user-facing “embedded” apps (like TVs) are running linux with chrome and showing a webapp as their UI. The layout engine is just that good and convenient. And downloading fresh app source on every visit solves a lot of problems. This part of the web is getting bloated and slow. On the other hand are websites. These are fat as heck thanks to CDN and broadband and advances in server compute power. They load faster than ever. Remember when downloading memes required eMule? I do. Now I go to imgur and watch 30MB high def gifs like it’s nothing. My 13 year old self would shit his pants in awe. Are ads and trackers bloating websites? Yes. Are most websites built like webapps even when there’s no need? Yes. Blame tooling. Go help. What can we as a profession do to make it easier for random developers with no skill build faster better websites? Right now we’re actively telling everyone they need to build as if they’re FAANG. Then we complain when a part time dev working for a mom&pop shop can’t wrangle all this tooling built for teams of 1000’s into a solid experience.
- sreekotay 6y ago
  This is an under rated comment - likely due to length :P TL;DR - the web has gotten WIDER since 2013. A lot.
  - qwertygnu 6y ago
    It's been three minutes, how could it already be underrated?
    - sreekotay 6y ago
      Lol - fair. I might have been too premature in antcipating its failure :P Thought it made a good point, but was too verbose in doing so.
- TiredGuy 6y ago
  >Blame tooling. Go help. This might be an opportune time to mention my attempt at helping. I made barleytea.js [1] as a light framework alternative to React that needs no webpack. I also recommend much more polished, production-ready things like µce [2] and heresy [3]. Anyway I just want people to know that there are lightweight alternatives out there, and they're worth at least checking out. [1] https://gitlab.com/andrewfulrich/barleytea https://gitlab.com/andrewfulrich/barleytea [2] https://github.com/WebReflection/uce https://github.com/WebReflection/uce [3] https://github.com/WebReflection/heresy https://github.com/WebReflection/heresy
ecmascript 6y ago
Just like most things, the answer is "it depends" since it's really not that simple. This is a great article but the answer seems obvious to me. The web today is starting to get divided into apps and sites. HN is a site for example. It is small, loads fast etc and works well for it's intended use case. When I listen to music or podcasts in a web site, I want it to act like an app and for that to happen more stuff has to happen in the client. Thus leading to a longer load time and execution time. This is something I can live with though, since I can do stuff on the web that was impossible just a few years ago. I am also developing apps that was impossible to do on the web a few years ago. I want to use both sites like looking up that store and order some stuff and apps like doing design or consuming music and video. I prefer web apps that are done well rather than native apps. I don't have to download anything and they are free from the shackles of Apple, Google and Microsoft. Also, you don't have to make them bloated and big. You don't have to use a framework. You can use web components and maybe some small router library and you have the most important stuff a front end framework gives you. Just check fastmail, their client is super fast and is a very well done SPA app. Then you can look at Reddit, which is a horrible mess. Like any app, any language you can make the experience shitty and you can make it awesome.
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
No, it's faster. Disable JS and - what continues to work, which is quite a bit - is snappy. It's also snappier than it was a decade ago, even 3 years ago, very clearly so. But while people will accept JS and general online abuse, it will get worse.
victornomad 6y ago
Yes! I have the feeling that most of modern websites use too many cpu&gpu resources. My computer is just 5 years old and each time I visit a modern website my computer really suffers. Please designers and engineers, I don't own the last macbook pro with maxed out specs and my internet connection is quite normal. Start creating for the rest of us who don't have the resources or interest in upgrading the computer every couple of years!
- dayjobpork 6y ago
  It's not just web pages, modern software engineers just make terribly unoptimised programs. Why does a recent game on a powerful pc take longer to open that old DOS games? Not just loading a level, but even getting to the start screen takes ages. Wtf takes 20+ seconds to show a menu of New - Load - Options.... (drm probably)
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    I think it is partly due to the software development industries prioritisation of “developer speed”/“developer experience” over everything else.
- shhanif 6y ago
  I do own the latest MacBook Pro and have a mesh network with 300 Mbps downloads speeds and even I have started finding it painfully slow to load my banking website, cnn, etc. In particular layout shift has become awful and I often click on the wrong link as the page is still loading and widgets are being rearranged on the page.
- arvinsim 6y ago
  Designer and engineers are not the people you should tell off. Go to the business owners and product managers who actually drive the product and more often overrule design and engineering.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Datsundere 6y ago
I’ve been thinking of creating a new browser that doesn’t have to rely on the dumpster node is and a rendering api that’s better than css.
- pkphilip 6y ago
  About time somebody did that. I am interested in doing something similar as well.
deleted 6y ago
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rhizome 6y ago
Yes, demonstrably and provably. Count the number of pageload indicators (spinners, throbbers...whatever you like to call them) in your daily browsing. They are everywhere...now. AJAX (and, I suspect, the shadown DOM model) have proliferated in recent years, and there is no site design simple enough that someone hasn't thought to put every page element behind a JS call. Don't forget to put CSS in there, too! Frontend developers are at fault for all this. There, I said it.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  It's a culture problem in the web dev world. There is an obsession with new and shiny and building something "cool". It's all about the developer experience and not the product. That's why there's such insane churn in the tooling and ecosystem. People rewrite and redesign constantly in order to work with the new cool framework.
  - namuol 6y ago
    Insane churn? Wordpress powers over 1/3 of the web. JQuery is still doing most heavy JS lifting on most blogs/CMS-driven sites. React has dominated "real" frontend webapp development for a solid 5 years. These things don't make headlines or get retweeted. The web produces a lot of variety because it has the widest distribution and the lowest barriers to entry.
    - kulig 6y ago
      5 years is not a lot of time.
      - namuol 6y ago
        I think we can count on it to be around for awhile: https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      I can do very well without some of that variety. Sometimes barriers to entry are a good thing.
didip 6y ago
Software is like running water. It will fill up whatever container (hardware) it's on.
- xdavidliu 6y ago
  who would be the Bruce Lee of software?
chungalunga 6y ago
I’ve been using w3m as my primary browser for the past few weeks. Pages load faster, but the real awesome part has been recapturing attention from image based ads I didn’t even realize I was losing.
deleted 6y ago
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bobloblaw45 6y ago
Give almost any local news website a shot. Those things are so bad I think long and hard before clicking.
godot 6y ago
I know most of the comments right now are an anecdotal resounding "Yes" from most folks (which I also agree anecdotally), I'd like to respond to the conclusion of the article (which is that as internet speed increased over the years, page loading times have roughly stayed constant). This makes sense in retrospect because product development tends to consider what the baseline acceptable speed/time to load is and then utilize that allowance fully and load whatever is possible (or optimize down until that point during the development process). I only wish this wasn't the case, and that the internet speed gains over the years actually meant the browsing experince for the consumers actually improved.
- divbzero 6y ago
  Contrast this with chip development, where baseline acceptable metrics were for decades set by an exponentially decreasing curve. If only we could proclaim a Moore’s law for web development that would be self-fulfilling for years to come…
- gerdesj 6y ago
  Page load times, indexed for available bandwidth, appear to follow a sort of inverse Moore's law. We could call it Gerdes's random stab in the dark. My first home internet connection ran at 9600 bps except when it clocked itself down to rather slower. At work at the time I had a synchronous pair of modems running at less than that for an IBM System/36 site to site link. Later on oooh V.FAST - 56Kbps except it wasn't really. More like 48Kbps plus a bit on a good day and a decent marketing department. I am now using a 1Gbps connection. My PC on the end of the 9600 bps system was a 80486 based beast running at 25Mhz. It cost me £1600 (thanks Granddad for the unexpected bequethement that was a major factor in getting me where I am today) I now use a 8 core + H/T Corei7 beastie running at 1.8GHz laptop - its getting on a bit now but it can still churn out packets at quite a rate and crunch my CAD efforts. Page sizes back in the day were rather small, say 10Kb. Nowadays 10Mb is pretty common (dodgy assertion with no proof) Web pages do different things than they used to as well. I don't think it is quite as simple as you suggest, wrt page load speeds. What page, on what, with what and why!
api 6y ago
For a web site similar to one from 10 years ago? No, it's getting a lot faster. The problem is that web sites are getting more and more bloated and doing so faster than CPU or bandwidth is increasing.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
The last time I did a test like this was on the Blekko web crawler, and page load time was proportional to number of advertisements on the page.
mrjin 6y ago
Not only web is getting slower, it is actually everything. I've read a similar article but talking about input latency(from key stroke to displaying on screen), which is also steadily growing. The reason behind might be the same: we have far more computing power than ever, so we start to abusing it by spending lots of it on visual elements which is good to have but not essential.
- canofbars 6y ago
  Part of it is that modern screens have a much bigger latency than CRTs did. Largely I don't think it really matters. My desktop and phone feel very very responsive, Its only websites that are visibly slow to me. And most of that is waiting on the server. I click a link or submit a form and I have to wait seconds for the page to load where as with a local program its instant.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    I keep hearing this come up. Do you have a modern citation for this with modern monitors, say made within the last 5 years? It seems to be a constantly repeated myth or something of no consequence. (one article I read said LCDs have 2 ms higher latency than CRTs, which I would count as of no consequence)
    - archi42 6y ago
      The 3y old 4k Samsung TV in the living room can't be pushed below 50 to 60ms of latency, even with processing minimized, and compared to an audio signal NOT routed through it (the TV's line out obviously compensates for that, but is only stereo). Back in 2011/2012, when I got Rock Smith, I used a dslr camera to determine the latency of my LCD compared to my old CRT. Just took a snap of a ms counter racing up on both screens (mirrored). Can't recall the exact difference, but definitely much more than 2ms. I measured because I noticed it during gameplay; I'm pretty sensitive to delayed video/audio, but not 2ms sensitive - that's one beat off at 30.000bpm. You can use that technique to check for yourself with a more modern display.
yalogin 6y ago
I don’t have numbers for it but I am sure the size of the web pages have increased by many multiples over the years and only getting worse. There aren’t any simple pages anymore, every page includes a bunch of JavaScript libraries embedded, tons of ad network code, tons of performance and tracking code, lots of images replaced text. I am not even talking about web assembly, web sockets and client side rendering etc.
elorant 6y ago
It's definitely slower and the easiest way to realize it is to use plugins like uBlock Origin combined with uMatrix and compare load times with them enabled, and then disabled. For me it's at least 50% faster when they're on.
anw 6y ago
From the article > Mobile page weight increased by 337% between 2013 and 2020 that is a huge span of time, with the birth and death of stars in-between in the Web Development cosmos. So much has changed in Web Dev, especially for mobile. The issue is not the Web getting slower. It's with the developers and their companies focusing on the time to iterate. We have traded consumer convenience for speed to develop and using shiny new tech/methodologies. We have traded doing things server-side to having most things in an SPA; using tracking pixels and Google Analytics to now also incorporating New Relic, Optimizely, a host of CDNs, bot protection scripts, social media scripts for "better personalisation", CAPTCHAs. I feel we are moving backwards. Back to when developers used ActiveX plugins because it was more convenient for them. Only ActiveX is now a combination of "Javascript in the browser, and a powerful enough laptop to handle it without choking".
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  7 years isn't even close to a "huge span of time".
  - anw 6y ago
    In relation to Web development, a lot can (and has) happened within 7 years. If you were a Web developer in 2013, you could find plenty of jobs if you knew Django (Python), Rails (Ruby), Zend, CakePHP, Symfony (PHP), or Spring (Java). Those were the frameworks used by either companies (Zend, Spring, etc.), or loved by devs (especially Rails and Django). Node was starting to come into its own for Web development, but nowhere close to the others. Fast forward to 2020. Rails and Django are on the decline from their fame peak. Most of those frameworks are still being used for legacy reasons. Web dev work I see is primarily related to Javascript (React, Vue, Typescript) or the JVM (Scala, Kotlin, Java). The other interpreted languages are nowhere close to their 2013 status. Between 2013 and 2020, we also have a huge ecosystem of Golang and Rust coming out, let alone Docker. All of these helped influence or play a crucial role in developing web sites and applications. While a lot of these technologies were around in 2013, they definitely weren't as pervasive or mature as now, and developing in 2013 was a whole different animal than doing so in 2020.
luu 6y ago
This article makes the reasonable point that the web is likely getting faster for people with cutting edge devices. For example, at one point they say > Someone who used a Galaxy S4 in 2013 and now uses a Galaxy S10 will have seen their CPU processing power go up by a factor of 5. Let's assume that browsers have become 4x more efficient since then. If we naively multiply these numbers we get an overall 20x improvement. > Since 2013, JavaScript page weight has increased 3.7x from 107KB to 392KB. Maybe minification and compression have improved a bit as well, so more JavaScript code now fits into fewer bytes. Let's round the multiple up to 6x. Let's pretend that JavaScript page weight is proportional to JavaScript execution time. > We'd still end up with a 3.3x performance improvement. But then the author concludes > he web is slowly getting faster Which ignores a pretty large fraction of users. A part of the article acknowledges that this all depends on the device, etc., but this is ignored in the conclusion! Let's say that, as a first approximation, the first set of quotes is correct. I think most developers who look at user experience with respect to latency or performance today (or even ten years ago) would agree that we should not only consider the average and that we should also look at the tail. If we do so, we see that device age is increasing at the median and the tail, quite drastically in the tail even if we "only" look at p75 device age: https://danluu.com/android-updates/ https://danluu.com/android-updates/. If we consider a user who's still using a 2013 Galaxy S4 and ask "does your phone feel 5 times faster than it did in 2013?", based on some js benchmarks improving by 5x, I think they'll laugh in our face. I've used a couple of Android devices that I tried to keep up to date (to the extent that's possible on Android) and each one became unbearably slow after taking some big Android update. Those updates probably included improvements in the Android Runtime as well as V8, and yet, the net effect was not positive. I don't think I'm alone in this -- if you read any forum where people discuss taking updates for the phones, one of the most common complaints is that their previously usable phone became unusable due to performance degradations caused by the update. Sure, my personal user experience on my daily-driver phone is ok on my phone because I have very fast phone and I'm often using it from fast wifi. But it's terrible if I take a road trip across the U.S. and the experience is terrible anywhere in the U.S. with an old phone. I don't think we should just write off the experiences of people with old phones or who live in places where they can't get high-speed internet even if life is good for people like me when I'm at home on my 1Gb connection. When I looked at this with respect to bandwidth and latency (inspired by a road trip where I found every website from a major tech company to be unusable, excluding a few Google properties), I found that, on a slow connection like you get in many places in the U.S., websites can easily take more than 1 minute to load in a controlled benchmark: https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/. My experience in real life (where I probably had higher variance in both latency, packet loss, and effective bandwidth) was that many websites simply wouldn't load. One thing this post looks at is the 75%-ile onLoad time. When I travel through the U.S. on the interstate (major throughfares which will, in general, have better connectivity than analogous places off of major throughfares) most pages are so slow that they don't even load at all, so those attempts aren't counted in the statistics! I don't dispute that things are getting faster for the median user or even the 75%-ile slow user if you measure that in a specific way, but there are plenty of users whose experiences are getting worse who won't even be counted in this stat that's in the post because their experience is too slow to even get counted in the stats.
rcheu 6y ago
What is going on here? Why have none of the commenters read the article? Perhaps because it's phrased as a question and people didn't realize it's a link? Anyways, this matches my expectations--people tend to be overly negative and only remember the good part. The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster due to network speeds+cpu improvements. It is worth noting that pages are doing more after loading now than they used to be though. This won't show up in onload or first meaningful paint, etc. So the first paint is fast, but then if you try to scroll immediately afterwards you'll probably hit some jankyness while the rest of the page loads asynchronously (but only kind of asynchronously since there's a single main thread). Some other things that could cause the regression are that more people own a budget Android phone now than before. People may not realize how slow these phones are. The single core performance of the top budget phone, the Samsung A50, is comparable to an iPhone 6 which came out in 2015.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  > The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster due to network speeds+cpu improvements Making something faster by throwing more hardware at it doesn't meaningfully count as making something faster IMO, you can make the most inefficient piece of software "fast" by throwing the biggest CPU and network you can find at it. The real issue is why should an otherwise capable CPU from 5 years ago struggle to render the average website today, when it really shouldn't be that hard. Scrolling through someone's marketing website _should_ be a painless experience on even a low-end budget phone.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    I don't know the direct answer, but I have a deduction in my head to work with...? I'll just put it out there: I think speed is deeply impacted by high-level frameworks that parse or compile at runtime. React Native is a framework on Android, which is a framework on Java, which compiles at runtime. IDK if anything in that chain compiles down to Assembly or machine code before you open an app made in React Native. That tied with the bloat of JIC background services sitting idle eats bandwidth. Garbage collection checks operate in a loop, checking again and again if all these unused but loaded processes still exist at their addresses. And when you pile those on each other, it seems relatively easy to see how modern CPUs don't seem much faster than chipsets from 5-6 years ago. I stopped programming around 8 years ago because I hate the current MVC model most software is created and maintained with. What got me interested recently in dipping back in was a video on branchless programming. I love the idea of unit testing at the machine code level for efficiency, and then figuring out how to trick the compiler or runtime and the chipset into making quick, predictive outputs to reduce idling on branches or making 15 steps for something doable in as little as 4. That feels like a completely opposing direction to take given the current priorities of engineers across almost all industries, even oldtime ones like Gaming.
coronadisaster 6y ago
gmail is really low for a company that deranks slow websites...
graiz 6y ago
Conclusion > I don't think the mobile web – as experienced by users – has become slower overall. Even as a subjective result this seems really bad. Most web-pages are text & images, outside of apps like maps/email, most content is static and while CPU's and bandwidth has skyrocketed the UX has stayed about the same... we think.
dave_sid 6y ago
It’s that time again when we need to swing from fat clients to thin clients, and think about what went wrong. It swings back every 20 years or so, so don’t worry.
wldlyinaccurate 6y ago
I've been working in the web performance monitoring space (https://speedcurve.com/ https://speedcurve.com/) for 3 years now, and the 3 years prior to that I was doing a lot of performance work at the BBC. I can't share the data for obvious reasons but I can confidently say that the web is getting measurably slower every year, despite connection speeds increasing drastically over the last few years. We like to over-simplify and try to attribute it to things like JS frameworks, advertising, media-heavy pages, etc. The truth is that it is all of these things, and so much more. Yes, devices are more powerful, but we are also asking our devices to do more. Yes, connections are faster, but bandwidth doesn't help with things like TCP slow start or browser concurrency limits. On top of all of this, our perception of speed is changing, so things can _feel_ slower than they really are.
austincheney 6y ago
The article never mentioned DNS as a factor. I can remember when my house internet went from 20mbps to 1gbps. There was no perceived difference in web speed. 20mbps was fast enough and the conventions in place forced a low ceiling of performance. As far as JavaScript goes any mention of performance improvements often results in hostility from JavaScript developers. Try taking away their 300mb framework or eliminating DOM navigation by use of clunky query selectors. The result is hostility even though you can prove performance increases of 500x in chrome or 20000x in Firefox.
TeeMassive 6y ago
> Mobile page weight increased by 337% between 2013 and 2020. This is primarily driven by an increase in images and JavaScript code. Not surprising. Most webpages are over-engineered blogs. If you're not organizing data other than text and a few multimedia elements then you probably don't need millions of lines of code of JS libraries. Not only do they slow transfer, they take time to execute and make most web pages do quirky things for 1 to 10 seconds before the page finishes loading.
hevelvarik 6y ago
since we’re blaming here, I blame the dominance of web by multi billion dollar tech companies. This requires any site/app that wishes to be taken seriously to have a look and feel comparable to the big guys and the only way you do that on a budget is with a hefty heap of framework abstraction.
lokimedes 6y ago
The article is a nice attempt at deconvoluting the various factors that may have changed. From my personal experience the subjective sluggishness cones from the unbelievable number of third party connections on every webpage visit. Setting up a Pi-hole has done wonders for the responsiveness of most websites.
firefoxd 6y ago
Sometimes it's not because of the marketing team and all their tracking pixels. Here the dev team, in the name of innovation, slowed their own process to keep up with Jetsons [1]. Also, if you know any angular developers... [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/hiring-angular-experts-not https://idiallo.com/blog/hiring-angular-experts-not
dirtyid 6y ago
I'm interested if there's a break down on whether the web slows down by different regions. I imagine uptake of new web technologies and hardware differ according the GDP and baseline mobile or network capabilities.
ImAlreadyTracer 6y ago
I've been noticing this lately.
jeroenhd 6y ago
> However, the 1.6Mbps 3G connection emulated by HTTP Archive is very slow, so we should expect significant performance improvements as bandwidth improves. The average website downloads 1.7MB of data in 2020, which will take at least 9s to download on the HTTP Archive connection. I have family in an African country where the only reasonably priced home internet connection is about 56kbps over DSL (yes, dialup speeds over DSL, very confusing). Web pages have gone from very slow to unusable very quick. I believe and appreciate that the users most people target have faster devices now, especially in the core hubs of Web development like Silicon Valley. However, this trend of "we can fit more data in because devices are faster" is horrible for anyone already behind in available technology or even on a limited data plan. My father uses my old smartphone, a Oneplus One with the latest release of LineageOS. This device runs a Qualcom 801, a chip that was considered to have flagship speeds t the time of its release. WiFi speeds are over 100mbps, but websites and applications are still getting slow somehow. Even a mid-range or cheap smartphone has a better GPU than older devices, and there are many of those out there. The advice to test on budget smartphones is solid, but people often go out and buy a new cheap phone instead of using something that was popular a few years ago. People who can't afford or don't see the value in getting a new S20 don't necessarily have cheap smartphones, they often have second hand phones or hand-me-downs as well. Frameworks like Flutter and browser engines using canvas are very noticeably slow on those older devices because of the advancements GPU tech has made, as CPU tech improvements in smartphones have begun to slow down over the years. Is the web slower? No, not for the people you want to sell your product to. The question is, why should we accept this bloat? Web applications can be as slow as you want to make them with festures and pretty designs for all I care, but the web in general doesn't need two megabytes of javascript to render a manual or a forum post. The metrics discussed here are wrong in the context they were originally used in, so the article does have a point. However, I don't think we should say the web hasn't gotten slower because computers have increased speeds to compensate with the load. Every byte you save, every script you ignore, every image you compress can have significant impact on hundreds of millions of not billions. If you can't justify that to your team lead, use the argument that the less resources you use, the better the users' battery lives are and the more responsive a site feels. The impact is about the same.
zwaps 6y ago
For me, the author of this article is wrong. On my system, Firefox on Windows, these constant delayed loadings of JavaScript garbage make every website laggy. Yes, the web has become slower. The author then himself posts that page weights have increased by over 300 percent. Clearly, usability of todays web is generally worse. Web development has changed from a field where competent people cared about user experience given simple and limited tech, to a field where people care about ads and using the latest fad in terrible JavaScript framework tool blah.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
This article isn't very good, so I'm just gonna skip commenting on it. Yes, the web is slower, but not in a the pure measurement of "is this js bigger, and does it take longer to execute" sort of way. It's more in the, now you have 39 js's trying to run on a page that's just some text and a few pictures, whereas that used to be 0-3 js's. For those of you who use ublock origin but not matrix, matrix will really open your eyes to this proliferation. It's mostly management decisions that get shoved down the throats of devs, but I would say it's also devs who love to throw a thousand frameworks in-between content and delivery. Simplification of stack is a market advantage I think eventually more and more companies will start to realize... at some point in the future.
- flippinburgers 6y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. Throwing layers between content and delivery seems to be pretty popular among developers that I work with. Particularly younger ones.
- dbeley 6y ago
  > For those of you who use ublock origin but not matrix, matrix will really open your eyes to this proliferation. You can enable advanced mode in uBlock Origin to have an UI similar to uMatrix.
  - lucasverra 6y ago
    Could you throw a print screen for a default config ? I've tried Umatrix twice and do not understand how to handle all the knots
anonyfox 6y ago
I recently did my part to speed up my site: https://anonyfox.com/blog/need-for-speed/ https://anonyfox.com/blog/need-for-speed/ So i‘d assume that it‘s possible to make „the Web“ really fast, especially when factoring in the improvements of network/cpu over the years.
thdrdt 6y ago
I have seen a lot of front-end developers who have no clue about the technical aspects of their work. They just use multi-megapixel images because 'they will look sharper'. When they need an icon from Font Awesome they just include the whole library. And because Bootstrap told them to do so, they nest as much DOM as possible. I have seen websites where the homepage's HTML alone was over 1MB! in size. The only thing that got exited was my CPU. Let me tell you: if you want a header with a background image where the text is aligned at the bottom you can just write: <h1>My header</h1> There is no need to write it as: <div id="mainHeader"><div class="align-text-bottom"><h1>My header</h1></div></div> And if you want to stick the header to the top you can use `position: sticky` in CSS instead of including a huge Javascript file that can do all kinds of fancy stuff you don't need. But I am not sure I can blame those front-end developers. Deadlines are tight and it takes effort to learn about the technical aspects of front-end development. My personal standard is that a page should be ready in 1 second. For huge sites 3 seconds max. I've been creating small and huge websites for over 20 years now and never had a problem with these goals. This includes webapps built with Javascript.
- laurentb 6y ago
  I'm no expert, but I hope someone at quora has some sort of light-bulb moment reading this.... Looked at the source for one answer because of their login wall and couldn't be bothered to re-create my account and to get to the actual answer is about 30!! nested divs and then each line of text (provided you've returned to the next line in the visual text editor to write your answer)is in its own <p> which is fine on its own, but each <p> is styled with a boatload of classes for no apparent reason.... I'm fully with you as far as loading times, but even a simple wordpress install these days add incredible useless stuff that makes it non trivial for the average blogger to simplify...
- dewey 6y ago
  > But I am not sure I can blame those front-end developers. Also in a lot of cases you can build the fastest website with minimal markup and only the necessary CSS/JS libraries for the base functionality but if then for "business reasons" you need ad networks, google tag manager, analytics scripts, third party support popups there's only so much you can do as a front end developer to keep the site fast.
nindalf 6y ago
There’s a disconnect between the author and the comments section here. The author claims that yes, websites are getting heavier but improvements in bandwidth, CPUs, protocols (like http2) and browsers offsets this to make the web as fast or faster for the median web user. Comments here express frustration with those increased bundle sizes, especially in cases where we aren’t getting any features in return. Both sets of folks are talking past each other because there is disagreement over the metric. The author wants to use load times as seen by users in wealthy countries. The comments folks want to use KB or features per KB (subjective). There’s no right or wrong here, just different metrics.
731d2fe149f6957 6y ago
It's not only getting slower, but shit. Animations everywhere. Unecessary spaces everywhere. Infinite scroll bullshit everywhere. Still can't find shit on webpages without ctrl+f Why do current webdevs think this is a good idea? Well yes, 'mobile first', but even on mobile it usually looks like absolute bullshit and animations are even more annoying on mobile. Why can't we have plain webpages that actually work? If you want an example: I recently tried to find an appartment using airbnb. Since the last time I used it they changed their design and it's super slow, the animations don't even make sense, but rounded corners everywhere. Fuck. This. Shit.
deleted 6y ago
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achairapart 6y ago
From a point of view of someone who makes websites since the 90s, two major catastrophes have hit front-end in its history: 1. Art directors from the print world in the '00s. And luckily this is over. 2. Engineers over-engineering things, since the '10s. And they won't stop...
tomxor 6y ago
The network improvements are not only slower but also increasingly non-uniform as the limits of long copper are reached. It's the problem with averages again, which are significantly inflated by a minority with ever increasing broadband speeds. It's easy to improve a select few areas to extreme; but hard to improve for the majority. I suspect pointing at figures of increasing averages to justify larger assets is part of the problem.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
A rare counterexample for Betteridge's law of headlines.
juststeve 6y ago
The web is like the third matrix movie
Yetanfou 6y ago
Well, in a way, yes, especially when using older hardware like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now. Go to the Wayback machine or Internet Archive, find a page from when the machine was made (2004) and compare its loading time to the current version. Now take a recent piece of hardware and load the current page and marvel at the fact that the old page on the old machine loads about as fast as the new page on the new machine. The old page looks dated, of course, but that is more a matter of the layout than it is of the lack of 'modern' technology. It would be possible to make the page look close to the way the modern version looks without incurring all that extra load time. Yes, this would probably entail server side rendering and some judicious use of older but still useful tricks like server side includes but it is certainly doable. It isn't being done because modern pages load fast enough on modern hardware and developers are incentivised to track the latest technologies to keep their market value up.
nottorp 6y ago
No need to RTFA. The answer is yes. And dont find them excuses.
ShradhaSingh 6y ago
Average internet speeds all over the world have slowed. Some broadband providers are feeling crushed by the heavy traffic.
idoubtit 6y ago
The article explains what there is no way to really measure the page load of modern sites for a user point of view. Then it analyses the biased data, using the various flawed metrics that do not match the modern web experience. Consequently, its overall conclusion that networks speed gains have made the average web faster is not conclusive at all. Here is an example where these metrics make no sense. I've been using the website of the national weather forecast (meteofrance) for years. It used to load the DOM in less than a second. Since the the content was in the HTML, the user perception was the same as DOM-loaded. Now, with the same DSL connection, it loads in 2.2s (DOM). On a mobile, since the network is many times faster than a few years ago, the DOM is probably loaded faster. But the real content is not in the initial HTML anymore. It is loaded through XHR among the 80+ HTTP queries sent. The forecast is now displayed 5 to 6 seconds after the initial request for the web page. I've seen quite a few sites that went slower over time because their content was no more static but wrapped into some JS framework. It is not only slower, but less robust, and harder to monitor — I've seen a few blank or broken pages, and I'm pretty sure this was not logged on the server. This does not imply about the average web, and I'm not sure any comparison would make sense, but it does show that some areas of the web have regressed over the last decade.
known 6y ago
I think torrents should be vividly created/used;
dognotdog 6y ago
I've recently tried to get a simple webpage snappier replacing hi-res images with appropriate sizes and including heights -- not only widths -- to prevent re-layouts was easy enough, but then… The single biggest offender in both download and render time that I can do nothing about is youtube loading in over 400kb of Javascript for an embedded video, taking ages to first render, making everything feel glacially slow.
intelliot 6y ago
It's not only about stats/data, but also the user experience. Many web pages have many more ads, videos, gifs, and clutter than they did before. There's also more spam and more low-quality content. That makes finding the info that you want harder than before. I've noticed this especially when searching for cooking recipes online.
bfrog 6y ago
Yes. The answer to the question is yes.
kahlonel 6y ago
Why can't we have a direct statement like "The web isn't getting slower", instead of click-baity question titles?
fomine3 6y ago
TCP slow start (or QUIC equivalent) should be considered. Usually speedtest is downloading large files so TCP window size is well increased, but small websites are sometimes not enough big to increase window size.
unixsheikh 6y ago
From a hardware perspective, everything is many times faster that it was just ten years ago. From a user of the web perspective, then I cannot even find the right words to describe the madness that front-end developers are causing with their utter clueless usage of absolutely ridicules JavaScript on top of frameworks on top whatever other useless crap they throw into the mix just to display basic static HTML! The web is not getting slower, it's getting faster, but even amazing technology cannot compensate for front-end developer stupidity!

269 points by oedmarap 6y ago

Aperocky 6y ago

Going to certain webpage is like cold starting jvm.

iso8859-1 6y ago
You'd be able to boot an x86 emulator in JavaScript to a Groovy prompt in just a few seconds, so probably faster than you can load any major news site except text.npr.org ;)
- jandrese 6y ago
  news.ycombinator.com loads pretty fast too.

nikanj 6y ago

Yes. Fortunately hardware is getting faster, which mostly compensates. But the web has definitely turned into a bloated whale

SigmundA 6y ago
"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"
li4ick 6y ago
Which should tell you something. The vast majority of tech advancements are because of hardware, not software. I think that software people should feel a bit of shame at this point in time.
- canofbars 6y ago
  No one feels any shame because the reason is obvious. Normal users are constantly demanding more features and not more speed. The average person just buys a new phone when things are slow. Companies don't have infinite time so when faced with the option between adding a new feature and speeding up an old one they always pick the new feature because thats worth more.
  - li4ick 6y ago
    Now imagine if the people working on the lower level stuff had the same attitude. Imagine if the codec implementations were slow because we need more features. Imagine if the graphics people never gave a damn about perf, just like the "programmers" you're talking about. Imagine if your database was the main perf hog in your system etc. etc. I'm sorry, but here's an unpopular opinion: those people are just not good engineers. The increments of software development should be abstractions, not features.

Funes- 6y ago

Yes. It's the Jevons' paradox enabled and amplified by the corporate web abusing JavaScript (bloat, ads, trackers, and other attention-grabbing shenanigans).

shaabanban 6y ago

Try to use reddit in a browser...

jcims 6y ago
new.reddit.com - 327 requests, 8mb, 7 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3f952400000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3f952400000 news.ycombinator.com - 7 requests, 22kb, .125 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf4a4f8400000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf4a4f8400000 The hilarous thing is that if you put in https://www.reddit.com https://www.reddit.com to pingdom's measurement tool, reddit returns the old site layout. https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3c4e3800000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3c4e3800000 edit: Just poked around a bit to find best worst examples. Unsurprisingly CNN is the worst I could find after a few mins - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf596ffc00000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf596ffc00000 543(!) requests, 9mb, 6 seconds. Just stroll through the list of bullshit it sucks into the front page...what a mess.
- klerpi 6y ago
  Try it with awwwards websites. A spinning wheel is almost a requirement.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    For a real A+++ website you need a loading bar. Also holy shit I just clicked on the first website I saw on that site and I'm getting about 3fps scrolling it and my desktop is a Ryzen 9 3900x with 24 threads, 48gb ram and an rx5700xt. You don't even get the excuse of "It works on my machine" because this desktop is literally as good as it gets. I just tried a couple sites and not a single one could scroll smoothly, one of them was live applying css transforms to about 30 images as I scroll.
    - foxdev 6y ago
      They're nice and smooth on my Ryzen 5 4500U/Vega 6 with 8GB of RAM. Of course the 5 seconds of artsy chaos spinner each of them has on load is still absurd. But it's fine after that. Could it be the browser? I loaded them in Firefox.

chews 6y ago

Does a bear poop in the woods? Is the earth round?

hinkley 6y ago
So... "mostly"?

mjevans 6y ago

Hellish AutoPlay Videos... a plague.

ErikAugust 6y ago

This is one reason I created Trim [0]. I didn’t want to have to load 4-7 MB of stuff to read a stupid article. It often reduces an article page weight by 99% and uses no JavaScript. [0]: https://beta.trimread.com https://beta.trimread.com

darepublic 6y ago
Is this similar to outline?
- ErikAugust 6y ago
  Similar, different in design and execution. As far as I know, Outline processes the article in browser using JavaScript. Trim uses no JavaScript but instead does the processing server-side. The response of the form post is the article.
tcbasche 6y ago
I immediately thought it was the document management system bought by IBM in the early 2000s https://www.ecmconnection.com/doc/tower-software-trim-context-0002 https://www.ecmconnection.com/doc/tower-software-trim-contex...
pmoriarty 6y ago
This is one of the main reasons why I do 90% of my web browsing in emacs-w3m, which does not support Javascript. Avoiding Javascript not only lets me avoid all that bloat and slowdown, but also avoid Javascript-based tracking, malware, and exposing myself to Javascript vulnerabilities. I also have the power of the entire Emacs ecosystem at my fingertips when I surf the web this way, which can be very helpful in many ways. Unfortunately, some sites I find essential will not work without Javascript, and for them I go back to Firefox. In Firefox, I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin to only allow through the minimal amount of stuff that'll let the web page work, and filter out ads. I have a really old, slow laptop, so web browsing is slow for me, but not nearly as slow as it would be if I consented to swallow all the crap that the modern web tries to force down my throat. I yearn for the good old days without Javascript or Webassembly. There was Flash back in those days, but fortunately not a single serious site I ever visited required it, so I could avoid every Flash-using site like the plague. But today the Javascript plague is unavoidable.

paxys 6y ago

Also see Downs–Thomson paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox) - improvements in a road network will not reduce traffic congestion, but rather can make it worse.

iso8859-1 6y ago
Only applies "to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way" according to your link. I think that's an important qualification.
wayne_skylar 6y ago
I've always had a question about this. If more people are deciding to use the road afterwards surely it means that trips are being taken that weren't before? Wouldn't that be a good thing, economically speaking?
- Funes- 6y ago
  >If more people are deciding to use the road afterwards surely it means that trips are being taken that weren't before? Sure. An increase in supply--or a change in its nature--can increase demand. >Wouldn't that be a good thing, economically speaking? Not necessarily, in my estimation.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  > Wouldn't that be a good thing, economically speaking? Yes, because it means people can live in places they couldn't before, or could get to jobs they couldn't before. Of course, people who already used the road won't perceive these benefits; they are in the same situation as before.
zamadatix 6y ago
That description fits Braess's paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox more than the Downs-Thomson paradox. The latter is more about public transport being the dominating factor in congestion whereas the former is about adding roads in itself sometimes causing traffic to get worse. In either case it's often overstated, expanding the road network (especially intelligently) usually results in less congestion. It's just a poor investment compared to other means of transportation investment in large cities.

Swizec 6y ago

It’s important to make a distinction between webapps and websites here. We use the web now like we used desktop in the 90’s and 00’s. For most users, your browser is your OS. Hell even when it isn’t, most desktop apps use HTML+CSS for their UI. Hell even many user-facing “embedded” apps (like TVs) are running linux with chrome and showing a webapp as their UI. The layout engine is just that good and convenient. And downloading fresh app source on every visit solves a lot of problems. This part of the web is getting bloated and slow. On the other hand are websites. These are fat as heck thanks to CDN and broadband and advances in server compute power. They load faster than ever. Remember when downloading memes required eMule? I do. Now I go to imgur and watch 30MB high def gifs like it’s nothing. My 13 year old self would shit his pants in awe. Are ads and trackers bloating websites? Yes. Are most websites built like webapps even when there’s no need? Yes. Blame tooling. Go help. What can we as a profession do to make it easier for random developers with no skill build faster better websites? Right now we’re actively telling everyone they need to build as if they’re FAANG. Then we complain when a part time dev working for a mom&pop shop can’t wrangle all this tooling built for teams of 1000’s into a solid experience.

sreekotay 6y ago
This is an under rated comment - likely due to length :P TL;DR - the web has gotten WIDER since 2013. A lot.
- qwertygnu 6y ago
  It's been three minutes, how could it already be underrated?
  - sreekotay 6y ago
    Lol - fair. I might have been too premature in antcipating its failure :P Thought it made a good point, but was too verbose in doing so.
TiredGuy 6y ago
>Blame tooling. Go help. This might be an opportune time to mention my attempt at helping. I made barleytea.js [1] as a light framework alternative to React that needs no webpack. I also recommend much more polished, production-ready things like µce [2] and heresy [3]. Anyway I just want people to know that there are lightweight alternatives out there, and they're worth at least checking out. [1] https://gitlab.com/andrewfulrich/barleytea https://gitlab.com/andrewfulrich/barleytea [2] https://github.com/WebReflection/uce https://github.com/WebReflection/uce [3] https://github.com/WebReflection/heresy https://github.com/WebReflection/heresy

ecmascript 6y ago

Just like most things, the answer is "it depends" since it's really not that simple. This is a great article but the answer seems obvious to me. The web today is starting to get divided into apps and sites. HN is a site for example. It is small, loads fast etc and works well for it's intended use case. When I listen to music or podcasts in a web site, I want it to act like an app and for that to happen more stuff has to happen in the client. Thus leading to a longer load time and execution time. This is something I can live with though, since I can do stuff on the web that was impossible just a few years ago. I am also developing apps that was impossible to do on the web a few years ago. I want to use both sites like looking up that store and order some stuff and apps like doing design or consuming music and video. I prefer web apps that are done well rather than native apps. I don't have to download anything and they are free from the shackles of Apple, Google and Microsoft. Also, you don't have to make them bloated and big. You don't have to use a framework. You can use web components and maybe some small router library and you have the most important stuff a front end framework gives you. Just check fastmail, their client is super fast and is a very well done SPA app. Then you can look at Reddit, which is a horrible mess. Like any app, any language you can make the experience shitty and you can make it awesome.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

No, it's faster. Disable JS and - what continues to work, which is quite a bit - is snappy. It's also snappier than it was a decade ago, even 3 years ago, very clearly so. But while people will accept JS and general online abuse, it will get worse.

victornomad 6y ago

Yes! I have the feeling that most of modern websites use too many cpu&gpu resources. My computer is just 5 years old and each time I visit a modern website my computer really suffers. Please designers and engineers, I don't own the last macbook pro with maxed out specs and my internet connection is quite normal. Start creating for the rest of us who don't have the resources or interest in upgrading the computer every couple of years!

dayjobpork 6y ago
It's not just web pages, modern software engineers just make terribly unoptimised programs. Why does a recent game on a powerful pc take longer to open that old DOS games? Not just loading a level, but even getting to the start screen takes ages. Wtf takes 20+ seconds to show a menu of New - Load - Options.... (drm probably)
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  I think it is partly due to the software development industries prioritisation of “developer speed”/“developer experience” over everything else.
shhanif 6y ago
I do own the latest MacBook Pro and have a mesh network with 300 Mbps downloads speeds and even I have started finding it painfully slow to load my banking website, cnn, etc. In particular layout shift has become awful and I often click on the wrong link as the page is still loading and widgets are being rearranged on the page.
arvinsim 6y ago
Designer and engineers are not the people you should tell off. Go to the business owners and product managers who actually drive the product and more often overrule design and engineering.
deleted 6y ago
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Datsundere 6y ago

I’ve been thinking of creating a new browser that doesn’t have to rely on the dumpster node is and a rendering api that’s better than css.

pkphilip 6y ago
About time somebody did that. I am interested in doing something similar as well.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rhizome 6y ago

Yes, demonstrably and provably. Count the number of pageload indicators (spinners, throbbers...whatever you like to call them) in your daily browsing. They are everywhere...now. AJAX (and, I suspect, the shadown DOM model) have proliferated in recent years, and there is no site design simple enough that someone hasn't thought to put every page element behind a JS call. Don't forget to put CSS in there, too! Frontend developers are at fault for all this. There, I said it.

dahfizz 6y ago
It's a culture problem in the web dev world. There is an obsession with new and shiny and building something "cool". It's all about the developer experience and not the product. That's why there's such insane churn in the tooling and ecosystem. People rewrite and redesign constantly in order to work with the new cool framework.
- namuol 6y ago
  Insane churn? Wordpress powers over 1/3 of the web. JQuery is still doing most heavy JS lifting on most blogs/CMS-driven sites. React has dominated "real" frontend webapp development for a solid 5 years. These things don't make headlines or get retweeted. The web produces a lot of variety because it has the widest distribution and the lowest barriers to entry.
  - kulig 6y ago
    5 years is not a lot of time.
    - namuol 6y ago
      I think we can count on it to be around for awhile: https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    I can do very well without some of that variety. Sometimes barriers to entry are a good thing.

didip 6y ago

Software is like running water. It will fill up whatever container (hardware) it's on.

xdavidliu 6y ago
who would be the Bruce Lee of software?

chungalunga 6y ago

I’ve been using w3m as my primary browser for the past few weeks. Pages load faster, but the real awesome part has been recapturing attention from image based ads I didn’t even realize I was losing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bobloblaw45 6y ago

Give almost any local news website a shot. Those things are so bad I think long and hard before clicking.

godot 6y ago

I know most of the comments right now are an anecdotal resounding "Yes" from most folks (which I also agree anecdotally), I'd like to respond to the conclusion of the article (which is that as internet speed increased over the years, page loading times have roughly stayed constant). This makes sense in retrospect because product development tends to consider what the baseline acceptable speed/time to load is and then utilize that allowance fully and load whatever is possible (or optimize down until that point during the development process). I only wish this wasn't the case, and that the internet speed gains over the years actually meant the browsing experince for the consumers actually improved.

divbzero 6y ago
Contrast this with chip development, where baseline acceptable metrics were for decades set by an exponentially decreasing curve. If only we could proclaim a Moore’s law for web development that would be self-fulfilling for years to come…
gerdesj 6y ago
Page load times, indexed for available bandwidth, appear to follow a sort of inverse Moore's law. We could call it Gerdes's random stab in the dark. My first home internet connection ran at 9600 bps except when it clocked itself down to rather slower. At work at the time I had a synchronous pair of modems running at less than that for an IBM System/36 site to site link. Later on oooh V.FAST - 56Kbps except it wasn't really. More like 48Kbps plus a bit on a good day and a decent marketing department. I am now using a 1Gbps connection. My PC on the end of the 9600 bps system was a 80486 based beast running at 25Mhz. It cost me £1600 (thanks Granddad for the unexpected bequethement that was a major factor in getting me where I am today) I now use a 8 core + H/T Corei7 beastie running at 1.8GHz laptop - its getting on a bit now but it can still churn out packets at quite a rate and crunch my CAD efforts. Page sizes back in the day were rather small, say 10Kb. Nowadays 10Mb is pretty common (dodgy assertion with no proof) Web pages do different things than they used to as well. I don't think it is quite as simple as you suggest, wrt page load speeds. What page, on what, with what and why!

api 6y ago

For a web site similar to one from 10 years ago? No, it's getting a lot faster. The problem is that web sites are getting more and more bloated and doing so faster than CPU or bandwidth is increasing.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

The last time I did a test like this was on the Blekko web crawler, and page load time was proportional to number of advertisements on the page.

mrjin 6y ago

Not only web is getting slower, it is actually everything. I've read a similar article but talking about input latency(from key stroke to displaying on screen), which is also steadily growing. The reason behind might be the same: we have far more computing power than ever, so we start to abusing it by spending lots of it on visual elements which is good to have but not essential.

canofbars 6y ago
Part of it is that modern screens have a much bigger latency than CRTs did. Largely I don't think it really matters. My desktop and phone feel very very responsive, Its only websites that are visibly slow to me. And most of that is waiting on the server. I click a link or submit a form and I have to wait seconds for the page to load where as with a local program its instant.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- t-writescode 6y ago
  I keep hearing this come up. Do you have a modern citation for this with modern monitors, say made within the last 5 years? It seems to be a constantly repeated myth or something of no consequence. (one article I read said LCDs have 2 ms higher latency than CRTs, which I would count as of no consequence)
  - archi42 6y ago
    The 3y old 4k Samsung TV in the living room can't be pushed below 50 to 60ms of latency, even with processing minimized, and compared to an audio signal NOT routed through it (the TV's line out obviously compensates for that, but is only stereo). Back in 2011/2012, when I got Rock Smith, I used a dslr camera to determine the latency of my LCD compared to my old CRT. Just took a snap of a ms counter racing up on both screens (mirrored). Can't recall the exact difference, but definitely much more than 2ms. I measured because I noticed it during gameplay; I'm pretty sensitive to delayed video/audio, but not 2ms sensitive - that's one beat off at 30.000bpm. You can use that technique to check for yourself with a more modern display.

yalogin 6y ago

I don’t have numbers for it but I am sure the size of the web pages have increased by many multiples over the years and only getting worse. There aren’t any simple pages anymore, every page includes a bunch of JavaScript libraries embedded, tons of ad network code, tons of performance and tracking code, lots of images replaced text. I am not even talking about web assembly, web sockets and client side rendering etc.

elorant 6y ago

It's definitely slower and the easiest way to realize it is to use plugins like uBlock Origin combined with uMatrix and compare load times with them enabled, and then disabled. For me it's at least 50% faster when they're on.

anw 6y ago

From the article > Mobile page weight increased by 337% between 2013 and 2020 that is a huge span of time, with the birth and death of stars in-between in the Web Development cosmos. So much has changed in Web Dev, especially for mobile. The issue is not the Web getting slower. It's with the developers and their companies focusing on the time to iterate. We have traded consumer convenience for speed to develop and using shiny new tech/methodologies. We have traded doing things server-side to having most things in an SPA; using tracking pixels and Google Analytics to now also incorporating New Relic, Optimizely, a host of CDNs, bot protection scripts, social media scripts for "better personalisation", CAPTCHAs. I feel we are moving backwards. Back to when developers used ActiveX plugins because it was more convenient for them. Only ActiveX is now a combination of "Javascript in the browser, and a powerful enough laptop to handle it without choking".

RandoHolmes 6y ago
7 years isn't even close to a "huge span of time".
- anw 6y ago
  In relation to Web development, a lot can (and has) happened within 7 years. If you were a Web developer in 2013, you could find plenty of jobs if you knew Django (Python), Rails (Ruby), Zend, CakePHP, Symfony (PHP), or Spring (Java). Those were the frameworks used by either companies (Zend, Spring, etc.), or loved by devs (especially Rails and Django). Node was starting to come into its own for Web development, but nowhere close to the others. Fast forward to 2020. Rails and Django are on the decline from their fame peak. Most of those frameworks are still being used for legacy reasons. Web dev work I see is primarily related to Javascript (React, Vue, Typescript) or the JVM (Scala, Kotlin, Java). The other interpreted languages are nowhere close to their 2013 status. Between 2013 and 2020, we also have a huge ecosystem of Golang and Rust coming out, let alone Docker. All of these helped influence or play a crucial role in developing web sites and applications. While a lot of these technologies were around in 2013, they definitely weren't as pervasive or mature as now, and developing in 2013 was a whole different animal than doing so in 2020.

luu 6y ago

This article makes the reasonable point that the web is likely getting faster for people with cutting edge devices. For example, at one point they say > Someone who used a Galaxy S4 in 2013 and now uses a Galaxy S10 will have seen their CPU processing power go up by a factor of 5. Let's assume that browsers have become 4x more efficient since then. If we naively multiply these numbers we get an overall 20x improvement. > Since 2013, JavaScript page weight has increased 3.7x from 107KB to 392KB. Maybe minification and compression have improved a bit as well, so more JavaScript code now fits into fewer bytes. Let's round the multiple up to 6x. Let's pretend that JavaScript page weight is proportional to JavaScript execution time. > We'd still end up with a 3.3x performance improvement. But then the author concludes > he web is slowly getting faster Which ignores a pretty large fraction of users. A part of the article acknowledges that this all depends on the device, etc., but this is ignored in the conclusion! Let's say that, as a first approximation, the first set of quotes is correct. I think most developers who look at user experience with respect to latency or performance today (or even ten years ago) would agree that we should not only consider the average and that we should also look at the tail. If we do so, we see that device age is increasing at the median and the tail, quite drastically in the tail even if we "only" look at p75 device age: https://danluu.com/android-updates/ https://danluu.com/android-updates/. If we consider a user who's still using a 2013 Galaxy S4 and ask "does your phone feel 5 times faster than it did in 2013?", based on some js benchmarks improving by 5x, I think they'll laugh in our face. I've used a couple of Android devices that I tried to keep up to date (to the extent that's possible on Android) and each one became unbearably slow after taking some big Android update. Those updates probably included improvements in the Android Runtime as well as V8, and yet, the net effect was not positive. I don't think I'm alone in this -- if you read any forum where people discuss taking updates for the phones, one of the most common complaints is that their previously usable phone became unusable due to performance degradations caused by the update. Sure, my personal user experience on my daily-driver phone is ok on my phone because I have very fast phone and I'm often using it from fast wifi. But it's terrible if I take a road trip across the U.S. and the experience is terrible anywhere in the U.S. with an old phone. I don't think we should just write off the experiences of people with old phones or who live in places where they can't get high-speed internet even if life is good for people like me when I'm at home on my 1Gb connection. When I looked at this with respect to bandwidth and latency (inspired by a road trip where I found every website from a major tech company to be unusable, excluding a few Google properties), I found that, on a slow connection like you get in many places in the U.S., websites can easily take more than 1 minute to load in a controlled benchmark: https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/. My experience in real life (where I probably had higher variance in both latency, packet loss, and effective bandwidth) was that many websites simply wouldn't load. One thing this post looks at is the 75%-ile onLoad time. When I travel through the U.S. on the interstate (major throughfares which will, in general, have better connectivity than analogous places off of major throughfares) most pages are so slow that they don't even load at all, so those attempts aren't counted in the statistics! I don't dispute that things are getting faster for the median user or even the 75%-ile slow user if you measure that in a specific way, but there are plenty of users whose experiences are getting worse who won't even be counted in this stat that's in the post because their experience is too slow to even get counted in the stats.

rcheu 6y ago

What is going on here? Why have none of the commenters read the article? Perhaps because it's phrased as a question and people didn't realize it's a link? Anyways, this matches my expectations--people tend to be overly negative and only remember the good part. The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster due to network speeds+cpu improvements. It is worth noting that pages are doing more after loading now than they used to be though. This won't show up in onload or first meaningful paint, etc. So the first paint is fast, but then if you try to scroll immediately afterwards you'll probably hit some jankyness while the rest of the page loads asynchronously (but only kind of asynchronously since there's a single main thread). Some other things that could cause the regression are that more people own a budget Android phone now than before. People may not realize how slow these phones are. The single core performance of the top budget phone, the Samsung A50, is comparable to an iPhone 6 which came out in 2015.

FridgeSeal 6y ago
> The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster due to network speeds+cpu improvements Making something faster by throwing more hardware at it doesn't meaningfully count as making something faster IMO, you can make the most inefficient piece of software "fast" by throwing the biggest CPU and network you can find at it. The real issue is why should an otherwise capable CPU from 5 years ago struggle to render the average website today, when it really shouldn't be that hard. Scrolling through someone's marketing website _should_ be a painless experience on even a low-end budget phone.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  I don't know the direct answer, but I have a deduction in my head to work with...? I'll just put it out there: I think speed is deeply impacted by high-level frameworks that parse or compile at runtime. React Native is a framework on Android, which is a framework on Java, which compiles at runtime. IDK if anything in that chain compiles down to Assembly or machine code before you open an app made in React Native. That tied with the bloat of JIC background services sitting idle eats bandwidth. Garbage collection checks operate in a loop, checking again and again if all these unused but loaded processes still exist at their addresses. And when you pile those on each other, it seems relatively easy to see how modern CPUs don't seem much faster than chipsets from 5-6 years ago. I stopped programming around 8 years ago because I hate the current MVC model most software is created and maintained with. What got me interested recently in dipping back in was a video on branchless programming. I love the idea of unit testing at the machine code level for efficiency, and then figuring out how to trick the compiler or runtime and the chipset into making quick, predictive outputs to reduce idling on branches or making 15 steps for something doable in as little as 4. That feels like a completely opposing direction to take given the current priorities of engineers across almost all industries, even oldtime ones like Gaming.

coronadisaster 6y ago

gmail is really low for a company that deranks slow websites...

graiz 6y ago

Conclusion > I don't think the mobile web – as experienced by users – has become slower overall. Even as a subjective result this seems really bad. Most web-pages are text & images, outside of apps like maps/email, most content is static and while CPU's and bandwidth has skyrocketed the UX has stayed about the same... we think.

dave_sid 6y ago

It’s that time again when we need to swing from fat clients to thin clients, and think about what went wrong. It swings back every 20 years or so, so don’t worry.

wldlyinaccurate 6y ago

I've been working in the web performance monitoring space (https://speedcurve.com/ https://speedcurve.com/) for 3 years now, and the 3 years prior to that I was doing a lot of performance work at the BBC. I can't share the data for obvious reasons but I can confidently say that the web is getting measurably slower every year, despite connection speeds increasing drastically over the last few years. We like to over-simplify and try to attribute it to things like JS frameworks, advertising, media-heavy pages, etc. The truth is that it is all of these things, and so much more. Yes, devices are more powerful, but we are also asking our devices to do more. Yes, connections are faster, but bandwidth doesn't help with things like TCP slow start or browser concurrency limits. On top of all of this, our perception of speed is changing, so things can _feel_ slower than they really are.

austincheney 6y ago

The article never mentioned DNS as a factor. I can remember when my house internet went from 20mbps to 1gbps. There was no perceived difference in web speed. 20mbps was fast enough and the conventions in place forced a low ceiling of performance. As far as JavaScript goes any mention of performance improvements often results in hostility from JavaScript developers. Try taking away their 300mb framework or eliminating DOM navigation by use of clunky query selectors. The result is hostility even though you can prove performance increases of 500x in chrome or 20000x in Firefox.

TeeMassive 6y ago

> Mobile page weight increased by 337% between 2013 and 2020. This is primarily driven by an increase in images and JavaScript code. Not surprising. Most webpages are over-engineered blogs. If you're not organizing data other than text and a few multimedia elements then you probably don't need millions of lines of code of JS libraries. Not only do they slow transfer, they take time to execute and make most web pages do quirky things for 1 to 10 seconds before the page finishes loading.

hevelvarik 6y ago

since we’re blaming here, I blame the dominance of web by multi billion dollar tech companies. This requires any site/app that wishes to be taken seriously to have a look and feel comparable to the big guys and the only way you do that on a budget is with a hefty heap of framework abstraction.

lokimedes 6y ago

The article is a nice attempt at deconvoluting the various factors that may have changed. From my personal experience the subjective sluggishness cones from the unbelievable number of third party connections on every webpage visit. Setting up a Pi-hole has done wonders for the responsiveness of most websites.

firefoxd 6y ago

Sometimes it's not because of the marketing team and all their tracking pixels. Here the dev team, in the name of innovation, slowed their own process to keep up with Jetsons [1]. Also, if you know any angular developers... [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/hiring-angular-experts-not https://idiallo.com/blog/hiring-angular-experts-not

dirtyid 6y ago

I'm interested if there's a break down on whether the web slows down by different regions. I imagine uptake of new web technologies and hardware differ according the GDP and baseline mobile or network capabilities.

ImAlreadyTracer 6y ago

I've been noticing this lately.

jeroenhd 6y ago

> However, the 1.6Mbps 3G connection emulated by HTTP Archive is very slow, so we should expect significant performance improvements as bandwidth improves. The average website downloads 1.7MB of data in 2020, which will take at least 9s to download on the HTTP Archive connection. I have family in an African country where the only reasonably priced home internet connection is about 56kbps over DSL (yes, dialup speeds over DSL, very confusing). Web pages have gone from very slow to unusable very quick. I believe and appreciate that the users most people target have faster devices now, especially in the core hubs of Web development like Silicon Valley. However, this trend of "we can fit more data in because devices are faster" is horrible for anyone already behind in available technology or even on a limited data plan. My father uses my old smartphone, a Oneplus One with the latest release of LineageOS. This device runs a Qualcom 801, a chip that was considered to have flagship speeds t the time of its release. WiFi speeds are over 100mbps, but websites and applications are still getting slow somehow. Even a mid-range or cheap smartphone has a better GPU than older devices, and there are many of those out there. The advice to test on budget smartphones is solid, but people often go out and buy a new cheap phone instead of using something that was popular a few years ago. People who can't afford or don't see the value in getting a new S20 don't necessarily have cheap smartphones, they often have second hand phones or hand-me-downs as well. Frameworks like Flutter and browser engines using canvas are very noticeably slow on those older devices because of the advancements GPU tech has made, as CPU tech improvements in smartphones have begun to slow down over the years. Is the web slower? No, not for the people you want to sell your product to. The question is, why should we accept this bloat? Web applications can be as slow as you want to make them with festures and pretty designs for all I care, but the web in general doesn't need two megabytes of javascript to render a manual or a forum post. The metrics discussed here are wrong in the context they were originally used in, so the article does have a point. However, I don't think we should say the web hasn't gotten slower because computers have increased speeds to compensate with the load. Every byte you save, every script you ignore, every image you compress can have significant impact on hundreds of millions of not billions. If you can't justify that to your team lead, use the argument that the less resources you use, the better the users' battery lives are and the more responsive a site feels. The impact is about the same.

zwaps 6y ago

For me, the author of this article is wrong. On my system, Firefox on Windows, these constant delayed loadings of JavaScript garbage make every website laggy. Yes, the web has become slower. The author then himself posts that page weights have increased by over 300 percent. Clearly, usability of todays web is generally worse. Web development has changed from a field where competent people cared about user experience given simple and limited tech, to a field where people care about ads and using the latest fad in terrible JavaScript framework tool blah.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

This article isn't very good, so I'm just gonna skip commenting on it. Yes, the web is slower, but not in a the pure measurement of "is this js bigger, and does it take longer to execute" sort of way. It's more in the, now you have 39 js's trying to run on a page that's just some text and a few pictures, whereas that used to be 0-3 js's. For those of you who use ublock origin but not matrix, matrix will really open your eyes to this proliferation. It's mostly management decisions that get shoved down the throats of devs, but I would say it's also devs who love to throw a thousand frameworks in-between content and delivery. Simplification of stack is a market advantage I think eventually more and more companies will start to realize... at some point in the future.

flippinburgers 6y ago
I'm not so sure about that. Throwing layers between content and delivery seems to be pretty popular among developers that I work with. Particularly younger ones.
dbeley 6y ago
> For those of you who use ublock origin but not matrix, matrix will really open your eyes to this proliferation. You can enable advanced mode in uBlock Origin to have an UI similar to uMatrix.
- lucasverra 6y ago
  Could you throw a print screen for a default config ? I've tried Umatrix twice and do not understand how to handle all the knots

anonyfox 6y ago

I recently did my part to speed up my site: https://anonyfox.com/blog/need-for-speed/ https://anonyfox.com/blog/need-for-speed/ So i‘d assume that it‘s possible to make „the Web“ really fast, especially when factoring in the improvements of network/cpu over the years.

thdrdt 6y ago

I have seen a lot of front-end developers who have no clue about the technical aspects of their work. They just use multi-megapixel images because 'they will look sharper'. When they need an icon from Font Awesome they just include the whole library. And because Bootstrap told them to do so, they nest as much DOM as possible. I have seen websites where the homepage's HTML alone was over 1MB! in size. The only thing that got exited was my CPU. Let me tell you: if you want a header with a background image where the text is aligned at the bottom you can just write: <h1>My header</h1> There is no need to write it as: <div id="mainHeader"><div class="align-text-bottom"><h1>My header</h1></div></div> And if you want to stick the header to the top you can use `position: sticky` in CSS instead of including a huge Javascript file that can do all kinds of fancy stuff you don't need. But I am not sure I can blame those front-end developers. Deadlines are tight and it takes effort to learn about the technical aspects of front-end development. My personal standard is that a page should be ready in 1 second. For huge sites 3 seconds max. I've been creating small and huge websites for over 20 years now and never had a problem with these goals. This includes webapps built with Javascript.

laurentb 6y ago
I'm no expert, but I hope someone at quora has some sort of light-bulb moment reading this.... Looked at the source for one answer because of their login wall and couldn't be bothered to re-create my account and to get to the actual answer is about 30!! nested divs and then each line of text (provided you've returned to the next line in the visual text editor to write your answer)is in its own <p> which is fine on its own, but each <p> is styled with a boatload of classes for no apparent reason.... I'm fully with you as far as loading times, but even a simple wordpress install these days add incredible useless stuff that makes it non trivial for the average blogger to simplify...
dewey 6y ago
> But I am not sure I can blame those front-end developers. Also in a lot of cases you can build the fastest website with minimal markup and only the necessary CSS/JS libraries for the base functionality but if then for "business reasons" you need ad networks, google tag manager, analytics scripts, third party support popups there's only so much you can do as a front end developer to keep the site fast.

nindalf 6y ago

There’s a disconnect between the author and the comments section here. The author claims that yes, websites are getting heavier but improvements in bandwidth, CPUs, protocols (like http2) and browsers offsets this to make the web as fast or faster for the median web user. Comments here express frustration with those increased bundle sizes, especially in cases where we aren’t getting any features in return. Both sets of folks are talking past each other because there is disagreement over the metric. The author wants to use load times as seen by users in wealthy countries. The comments folks want to use KB or features per KB (subjective). There’s no right or wrong here, just different metrics.

731d2fe149f6957 6y ago

It's not only getting slower, but shit. Animations everywhere. Unecessary spaces everywhere. Infinite scroll bullshit everywhere. Still can't find shit on webpages without ctrl+f Why do current webdevs think this is a good idea? Well yes, 'mobile first', but even on mobile it usually looks like absolute bullshit and animations are even more annoying on mobile. Why can't we have plain webpages that actually work? If you want an example: I recently tried to find an appartment using airbnb. Since the last time I used it they changed their design and it's super slow, the animations don't even make sense, but rounded corners everywhere. Fuck. This. Shit.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

achairapart 6y ago

From a point of view of someone who makes websites since the 90s, two major catastrophes have hit front-end in its history: 1. Art directors from the print world in the '00s. And luckily this is over. 2. Engineers over-engineering things, since the '10s. And they won't stop...

tomxor 6y ago

The network improvements are not only slower but also increasingly non-uniform as the limits of long copper are reached. It's the problem with averages again, which are significantly inflated by a minority with ever increasing broadband speeds. It's easy to improve a select few areas to extreme; but hard to improve for the majority. I suspect pointing at figures of increasing averages to justify larger assets is part of the problem.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

A rare counterexample for Betteridge's law of headlines.

juststeve 6y ago

The web is like the third matrix movie

Yetanfou 6y ago

Well, in a way, yes, especially when using older hardware like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now. Go to the Wayback machine or Internet Archive, find a page from when the machine was made (2004) and compare its loading time to the current version. Now take a recent piece of hardware and load the current page and marvel at the fact that the old page on the old machine loads about as fast as the new page on the new machine. The old page looks dated, of course, but that is more a matter of the layout than it is of the lack of 'modern' technology. It would be possible to make the page look close to the way the modern version looks without incurring all that extra load time. Yes, this would probably entail server side rendering and some judicious use of older but still useful tricks like server side includes but it is certainly doable. It isn't being done because modern pages load fast enough on modern hardware and developers are incentivised to track the latest technologies to keep their market value up.

nottorp 6y ago

No need to RTFA. The answer is yes. And dont find them excuses.

ShradhaSingh 6y ago

Average internet speeds all over the world have slowed. Some broadband providers are feeling crushed by the heavy traffic.

idoubtit 6y ago

The article explains what there is no way to really measure the page load of modern sites for a user point of view. Then it analyses the biased data, using the various flawed metrics that do not match the modern web experience. Consequently, its overall conclusion that networks speed gains have made the average web faster is not conclusive at all. Here is an example where these metrics make no sense. I've been using the website of the national weather forecast (meteofrance) for years. It used to load the DOM in less than a second. Since the the content was in the HTML, the user perception was the same as DOM-loaded. Now, with the same DSL connection, it loads in 2.2s (DOM). On a mobile, since the network is many times faster than a few years ago, the DOM is probably loaded faster. But the real content is not in the initial HTML anymore. It is loaded through XHR among the 80+ HTTP queries sent. The forecast is now displayed 5 to 6 seconds after the initial request for the web page. I've seen quite a few sites that went slower over time because their content was no more static but wrapped into some JS framework. It is not only slower, but less robust, and harder to monitor — I've seen a few blank or broken pages, and I'm pretty sure this was not logged on the server. This does not imply about the average web, and I'm not sure any comparison would make sense, but it does show that some areas of the web have regressed over the last decade.

known 6y ago

I think torrents should be vividly created/used;

dognotdog 6y ago

I've recently tried to get a simple webpage snappier replacing hi-res images with appropriate sizes and including heights -- not only widths -- to prevent re-layouts was easy enough, but then… The single biggest offender in both download and render time that I can do nothing about is youtube loading in over 400kb of Javascript for an embedded video, taking ages to first render, making everything feel glacially slow.

intelliot 6y ago

It's not only about stats/data, but also the user experience. Many web pages have many more ads, videos, gifs, and clutter than they did before. There's also more spam and more low-quality content. That makes finding the info that you want harder than before. I've noticed this especially when searching for cooking recipes online.

bfrog 6y ago

Yes. The answer to the question is yes.

kahlonel 6y ago

Why can't we have a direct statement like "The web isn't getting slower", instead of click-baity question titles?

fomine3 6y ago

TCP slow start (or QUIC equivalent) should be considered. Usually speedtest is downloading large files so TCP window size is well increased, but small websites are sometimes not enough big to increase window size.

unixsheikh 6y ago

From a hardware perspective, everything is many times faster that it was just ten years ago. From a user of the web perspective, then I cannot even find the right words to describe the madness that front-end developers are causing with their utter clueless usage of absolutely ridicules JavaScript on top of frameworks on top whatever other useless crap they throw into the mix just to display basic static HTML! The web is not getting slower, it's getting faster, but even amazing technology cannot compensate for front-end developer stupidity!