According to Firebug this article page made 298 requests, totaling 2.1 MB, taking my poor computer 52.79s (onload: 50.11s) to process everything. Is this really

According to Firebug this article page made 298 requests, totaling 2.1 MB, taking my poor computer 52.79s (onload: 50.11s) to process everything. Is this really necessary?