web analytics is a significant factor. The easiest way to see this is to open the Activity window in an old version of Safari. A real old version. You could

web analytics is a significant factor. The easiest way to see this is to open the Activity window in an old version of Safari. A real old version. You could also look at proxy logs, or maybe dump the history from firefox into a text file. If you visit a slow site, actually your typical commercial website, you will commonly find that it is serves at least one single-pixel gif that is either transparent or that matches its background. Sometimes I see one-pixel javascript, uh, "sources". That wouldn't be so bad but their URIs are huge, long and full of query parameters. For reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, quite commonly I find dozens of these web bugs. Back when they were called web bugs, the public was outraged. But now that we call them "analytics", everyone thinks they are the cats meow. Put these in your /etc/hosts file; if you use windows it has a hosts file to but I don't recall the path: 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com most disturbing to me is that many sites offer free documents, such as adobe web fonts, emoji, graphic buttons and the like. It costs adobe a lot of money to give its entire font catalog away absolutely free of charge. But a few years back, adobe acquired an analytics service. Those analytics servers occupy entire data centers. They are expensive to outfit, to operate, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, but to use their SDK, and to get an analytics report on your site is typically free of charge. Someone is paying a lot of money to serve those one-byte whitespace javascripts. I don't want those mother fuckers following me around. Thanks for letting me clear all that up.