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The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all fo

The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
The problem is that a lot of people DO have their own websites for which they have some control over. So it's not like a million people optimizing their own websites will have any control over what Google does with YouTube for instance...
- jychang 1y ago
  A million people is a very strong political force. A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient. I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms. - Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse. - Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off. - Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    I sort of agree...but not really, because you'll never get a situation where a million people can vote on a specific law about making YT more efficient. One needs to muster some sort of general political will to even get that to be an issue, and that takes a lot more than a million people. Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.
atoav 1y ago
Yes but drops in the bucket count. If I take anything away from your statement, it is that people should be selective where to use videos for communications and where not.
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
> but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters. Is it? My front end engineer spending 90 minutes cutting dependencies out of the site isn’t going to deny YouTube the opportunity to improve their streaming algorithms.
- josephg 1y ago
  It might do the opposite. We need to teach engineers of all stripes how to analyse and fix performance problems if we’re going to do anything about them.
- molszanski 1y ago
  If you turn this into open problem, without hypothetical limits of what an frontend engineer ca do it would become more interesting and more impactful in real life. That said engineer is human being who could use that time in myriad other ways that would be more productive to helping the environment
- simgt 1y ago
  That's exactly it, but I fully expected whataboutism under my comment. If I had mentioned video streaming as a disclaimer, I'd probably have gotten crypto or Shein as counter "arguments". Everyone needs to be aware that we are part of an environment that has limited resources beyond "money" and act accordingly, whatever the scale.
schiffern 1y ago
In that spirit I have a userscript, ironically called Youtube HD[0], that with one edit sets the resolution to 'medium' ie 360p. On a laptop it's plenty for talking head content (the softening is nice actually), and I only find myself switching to 480p if there's small text on screen. It's a small thing, but as you say internet video is relatively heavy. To reduce my AI footprint I use the udm=14 trick[1] to kill AI in Google search. It generally gives better results too. For general web browsing the best single tip is running uBlock Origin. If you can master medium[2] or hard mode (which will require un-breaking/whitelisting sites) it saves more bandwidth and has better privacy.[3] To go all-out on bandwidth conservation, LocalCDN[4] and CleanURLs[5] are good. "Set it and forget it," improves privacy and load times, and saves a bit of energy. Sorry this got long. Cheers [0] https://greasyfork.org/whichen/scripts/23661-youtube-hd https://greasyfork.org/whichen/scripts/23661-youtube-hd [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1j5tktg/ublock_origin_medium_mode_is_incredible/ https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1j5tktg/ubloc... [3] https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Blocking-mode https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Blocking-mode [4] https://www.localcdn.org/ https://www.localcdn.org/ [5] https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- andrepd 1y ago
  I've been using uBlock in advanced mode with 3rd party frames and scripts blocked. I recommend it, but it is indeed a pain to find the minimum set of things you need to unblock to make a website work, involving lots of refreshing. Once you find it for a website you can just save it though so you don't need to go through it again. LocalCDN is indeed a nobrainer for privacy! Set and forget.
oriolid 1y ago
> The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. Is it really? I was surprised to see that surfing newspaper websites or Facebook produces more traffic per time than Netflix or Youtube. Of course there's a lot of embedded video in ads and it could maybe count as streaming video.
- danielbln 1y ago
  Cate to share that article, I find that hard to believe.
  - oriolid 1y ago
    No article sorry, it's just what the bandwidth display on my home router shows. I could post some screenshots but I don't care for answering to everyone who tries to debunk them. Mobile version of Facebook is by the way much better optimized than the full webpage. I guess desktop browser users are a small minority.
    - Capricorn2481 1y ago
      Well Facebook has video on it. Highly unlikely that a static site is going to even approach watching a video.
      - hxorr 1y ago
        It may surprise you how heavy Facebook is these days
      - oriolid 1y ago
        Did you actually look? Typical websites are not static and include a huge amount of JavaScript and other stuff from different ad networks, analysis tools, etc. It looks like most of it isn't cached. Video delivery on the other hand is incredibly well optimized because everyone knows it's data intensive.
pyman 1y ago
Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise how many years web developers have spent obsessing over this document-based legacy system and how to improve its performance? Not just years, their whole careers! How many cool technologies were created in the last 35 years? I lost count. Honestly, why are big tech companies still building on top of a legacy system, forcing web developers to waste their time on things like performance tweaks instead of focusing on what actually matters: the product.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  That’s already how it works. The binary is a compressed artefact and the stream is a TLS pipe. But the principle is the same. In fact videos streams over the web are actually based on how HTTP documents are chunked and retrieved, rather than the other way around.
  - pyman 1y ago
    I see, I didn't know this
  - pyman 1y ago
    Thanks for clarifying that. My goal was to question the way we do things. Game streaming, for example, works differently. The game runs entirely on a remote server. The server has a GPU/CPU combo that renders the game in real time and user input is sent back to the server via UDP/WebRTC or a TCP tunnel. Also, native mobile apps work quite differently from both video and game streaming. Bottom line: we've seen some great innovations over the last 35 years, and I'm hoping to see plenty more. The most important thing is to question everything we do, to have that "yes, but why?" mindset.
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
hnlmorg 1y ago
It matters at web scale though. Like how industrial manufacturing are the biggest carbon consumers and compared to them, I’m just a drop in the ocean. But that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a responsibility to recycle because culminate effect of everyone like me recycling quickly becomes massive. Similarly, if every web host did their bit with static content, you’d still see a big reduction at a global scale. And you’re right it shouldn’t the end of the story. However that doesn’t mean it’s a wasted effort / irrelevant optimisation
zero_shift 1y ago
I feel this way sometimes about recycling. I am very diligent about it, washing out my cans and jars, separating my plastics. And then I watch my neighbour fill our bin with plastic bottles, last-season clothes and uneaten food.
- extra88 1y ago
  At least you and your neighbor are operating on the same scale. Don't stop those individual choices but more members of the populace making those choices is not how the problem gets fixed, businesses and whole industries are the real culprits.
- yawaramin 1y ago
  Recycling is mostly a scam. Most municipalities don't bother separating out the plastics and papers that would be recyclable, decontaminating them, etc. because it would be too expensive. They just trash them.
ofalkaed 1y ago
I feel better about limiting the size of my drop in the bucket than I would feel about just saying my drop doesn't matter even if it doesn't matter. I get my internet through my phone's hotspot with its 15gig a month plan, I generally don't use the entire 15gigs. My phone and and laptop are pretty much the only high tech I have, audio interface is probably third in line and my oven is probably fourth (self cleaning). Furnace stays at 50 all winter long even when it is -40 out and if it is above freezing the furnace is turned off. Never had a car, walk and bike everywhere including groceries and laundry, have only used motorized transport maybe a dozen times in the past decade. A nice side effect of these choices is that I only spend a small part of my pay. Never had a credit card, never had debt, just saved my money until I had enough that the purchase was no big deal. I don't really have an issue with people who say that their drop does not matter so why should they worry, but I don't understand it, seems like they just needlessly complicate their life. Not too long ago my neighbor was bragging about how effective all the money he spent on energy efficient windows, insulation, etc, was, he saved loads of money that winter; his heating bill was still nearly three times what mine was despite using a wood stove to offset his heating bill, my house being almost the same size, barely insulated and having 70 year old windows. I just put on a sweater instead of turning up the heat. Edit: Sorry about that sentence, not quite awake yet and doubt I will be awake enough to fix it before editing window closes.

vouaobrasil 1y ago

The problem is that a lot of people DO have their own websites for which they have some control over. So it's not like a million people optimizing their own websites will have any control over what Google does with YouTube for instance...

jychang 1y ago
A million people is a very strong political force. A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient. I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms. - Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse. - Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off. - Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  I sort of agree...but not really, because you'll never get a situation where a million people can vote on a specific law about making YT more efficient. One needs to muster some sort of general political will to even get that to be an issue, and that takes a lot more than a million people. Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.

atoav 1y ago

Yes but drops in the bucket count. If I take anything away from your statement, it is that people should be selective where to use videos for communications and where not.

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

> but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters. Is it? My front end engineer spending 90 minutes cutting dependencies out of the site isn’t going to deny YouTube the opportunity to improve their streaming algorithms.

josephg 1y ago
It might do the opposite. We need to teach engineers of all stripes how to analyse and fix performance problems if we’re going to do anything about them.
molszanski 1y ago
If you turn this into open problem, without hypothetical limits of what an frontend engineer ca do it would become more interesting and more impactful in real life. That said engineer is human being who could use that time in myriad other ways that would be more productive to helping the environment
simgt 1y ago
That's exactly it, but I fully expected whataboutism under my comment. If I had mentioned video streaming as a disclaimer, I'd probably have gotten crypto or Shein as counter "arguments". Everyone needs to be aware that we are part of an environment that has limited resources beyond "money" and act accordingly, whatever the scale.

schiffern 1y ago

In that spirit I have a userscript, ironically called Youtube HD[0], that with one edit sets the resolution to 'medium' ie 360p. On a laptop it's plenty for talking head content (the softening is nice actually), and I only find myself switching to 480p if there's small text on screen. It's a small thing, but as you say internet video is relatively heavy. To reduce my AI footprint I use the udm=14 trick[1] to kill AI in Google search. It generally gives better results too. For general web browsing the best single tip is running uBlock Origin. If you can master medium[2] or hard mode (which will require un-breaking/whitelisting sites) it saves more bandwidth and has better privacy.[3] To go all-out on bandwidth conservation, LocalCDN[4] and CleanURLs[5] are good. "Set it and forget it," improves privacy and load times, and saves a bit of energy. Sorry this got long. Cheers [0] https://greasyfork.org/whichen/scripts/23661-youtube-hd https://greasyfork.org/whichen/scripts/23661-youtube-hd [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1j5tktg/ublock_origin_medium_mode_is_incredible/ https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1j5tktg/ubloc... [3] https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Blocking-mode https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Blocking-mode [4] https://www.localcdn.org/ https://www.localcdn.org/ [5] https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
andrepd 1y ago
I've been using uBlock in advanced mode with 3rd party frames and scripts blocked. I recommend it, but it is indeed a pain to find the minimum set of things you need to unblock to make a website work, involving lots of refreshing. Once you find it for a website you can just save it though so you don't need to go through it again. LocalCDN is indeed a nobrainer for privacy! Set and forget.

oriolid 1y ago

> The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. Is it really? I was surprised to see that surfing newspaper websites or Facebook produces more traffic per time than Netflix or Youtube. Of course there's a lot of embedded video in ads and it could maybe count as streaming video.

danielbln 1y ago
Cate to share that article, I find that hard to believe.
- oriolid 1y ago
  No article sorry, it's just what the bandwidth display on my home router shows. I could post some screenshots but I don't care for answering to everyone who tries to debunk them. Mobile version of Facebook is by the way much better optimized than the full webpage. I guess desktop browser users are a small minority.
  - Capricorn2481 1y ago
    Well Facebook has video on it. Highly unlikely that a static site is going to even approach watching a video.
    - hxorr 1y ago
      It may surprise you how heavy Facebook is these days
    - oriolid 1y ago
      Did you actually look? Typical websites are not static and include a huge amount of JavaScript and other stuff from different ad networks, analysis tools, etc. It looks like most of it isn't cached. Video delivery on the other hand is incredibly well optimized because everyone knows it's data intensive.

pyman 1y ago

Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise how many years web developers have spent obsessing over this document-based legacy system and how to improve its performance? Not just years, their whole careers! How many cool technologies were created in the last 35 years? I lost count. Honestly, why are big tech companies still building on top of a legacy system, forcing web developers to waste their time on things like performance tweaks instead of focusing on what actually matters: the product.

hnlmorg 1y ago
That’s already how it works. The binary is a compressed artefact and the stream is a TLS pipe. But the principle is the same. In fact videos streams over the web are actually based on how HTTP documents are chunked and retrieved, rather than the other way around.
- pyman 1y ago
  I see, I didn't know this
- pyman 1y ago
  Thanks for clarifying that. My goal was to question the way we do things. Game streaming, for example, works differently. The game runs entirely on a remote server. The server has a GPU/CPU combo that renders the game in real time and user input is sent back to the server via UDP/WebRTC or a TCP tunnel. Also, native mobile apps work quite differently from both video and game streaming. Bottom line: we've seen some great innovations over the last 35 years, and I'm hoping to see plenty more. The most important thing is to question everything we do, to have that "yes, but why?" mindset.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago

hnlmorg 1y ago

It matters at web scale though. Like how industrial manufacturing are the biggest carbon consumers and compared to them, I’m just a drop in the ocean. But that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a responsibility to recycle because culminate effect of everyone like me recycling quickly becomes massive. Similarly, if every web host did their bit with static content, you’d still see a big reduction at a global scale. And you’re right it shouldn’t the end of the story. However that doesn’t mean it’s a wasted effort / irrelevant optimisation

zero_shift 1y ago

I feel this way sometimes about recycling. I am very diligent about it, washing out my cans and jars, separating my plastics. And then I watch my neighbour fill our bin with plastic bottles, last-season clothes and uneaten food.

extra88 1y ago
At least you and your neighbor are operating on the same scale. Don't stop those individual choices but more members of the populace making those choices is not how the problem gets fixed, businesses and whole industries are the real culprits.
yawaramin 1y ago
Recycling is mostly a scam. Most municipalities don't bother separating out the plastics and papers that would be recyclable, decontaminating them, etc. because it would be too expensive. They just trash them.

ofalkaed 1y ago

I feel better about limiting the size of my drop in the bucket than I would feel about just saying my drop doesn't matter even if it doesn't matter. I get my internet through my phone's hotspot with its 15gig a month plan, I generally don't use the entire 15gigs. My phone and and laptop are pretty much the only high tech I have, audio interface is probably third in line and my oven is probably fourth (self cleaning). Furnace stays at 50 all winter long even when it is -40 out and if it is above freezing the furnace is turned off. Never had a car, walk and bike everywhere including groceries and laundry, have only used motorized transport maybe a dozen times in the past decade. A nice side effect of these choices is that I only spend a small part of my pay. Never had a credit card, never had debt, just saved my money until I had enough that the purchase was no big deal. I don't really have an issue with people who say that their drop does not matter so why should they worry, but I don't understand it, seems like they just needlessly complicate their life. Not too long ago my neighbor was bragging about how effective all the money he spent on energy efficient windows, insulation, etc, was, he saved loads of money that winter; his heating bill was still nearly three times what mine was despite using a wood stove to offset his heating bill, my house being almost the same size, barely insulated and having 70 year old windows. I just put on a sweater instead of turning up the heat. Edit: Sorry about that sentence, not quite awake yet and doubt I will be awake enough to fix it before editing window closes.