14 ms·

The Web’s Cruft Problem

362 points by jsnell 11y ago

cocoflunchy 11y ago
Not sure why he took CNN as an example instead of this very article... http://i.imgur.com/4w9TxOw.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4w9TxOw.jpg > 146 requests, 1.8MB transferred.
- TheWoodsy 11y ago
  I ended up with 67 Requests and 2.8M. uBlock Origin > Flash disabled > Going through a Squid transparent proxy with SquidGuard lists from shallalist.de (adv,anonvpn,remotecontrol,spyware,tracker)
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Some parts of the web are worse than others. He must hang out at Telerik a lot.
- pp19dd 11y ago
  CNN is a fairly reputable news organization, and a pretty good example of how broadcast can have a strong digital presence. They're going to be mimicked by other news organizations without a doubt. Compare them to a local TV station's site, and what you'll see there is basically video clips dumped onto articles or section fronts. CNN takes the trouble to write news copy alongside script (or are at least pretty good at rewriting) because you can't just repurpose TV script for a news article. And in other news, http://www.cnn.com/cnn_adspaces/ http://www.cnn.com/cnn_adspaces/
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
  That's strange. I get much different figures. https://veuwer.com/i/2uys.png https://veuwer.com/i/2uys.png Perhaps they're working on it?
  - detaro 11y ago
    Did you clear the cache beforehand? (since you don't have "disable cache" checked)
- andrewstuart2 11y ago
  If you'd finished the article, you'd probably notice he says (twice) exactly why he used CNN. Not that they're one of the worst, but rather that this is pervasive. > Again, I don’t mean to call out CNN as the “bad example,” but rather use them to show a specific example of a model that has become pervasive for content on the web.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  With JS enabled TFA killed my (old) Android browser. Twice. Disabling JS I managed to read it.
markbnj 11y ago
I think "the web" in this case really means media sites and some retailers. The media sites don't have a clue how to make money, other than to include all the usual ad networks and tracking scripts and then sit back and hope. The ecommerce guys are obsessed with slicing and dicing visitor behavior and tracking conversions. Seems to me that outside these (admittedly rather vaguely defined) spaces the web is a much cleaner and snappier place.
- keyboardwarrior 11y ago
  Tend to agree with this. For instance big porn sites, where every byte count, rarely has major bloat.
williamcotton 11y ago
The cruft is because the underlying economics of how data is hosted and distributed is flawed. The incentives between advertisers, readers, publishers, hosting and distribution providers are currently misaligned. In other words, building an info-economic system based on "free" content that is supported by online advertising results in: the people who make the content don't get paid enough and the content itself is horribly mangled by advertisements and other priorities. However, we can build other kinds of info-economic systems. Perhaps we could follow the model of publishing back when we still used copyrights as an effective way to align the incentives between authors and publishers. Covering the costs of hosting and distribution are a lot easier to manage when the content itself isn't hard-coded in to an ad-selling-machine as delivery options like BitTorrent or WebTorrent are now an option. Permanent seeds could be kept alive at very little cost to publishers. Perhaps we could experiment with royalties, or selling virtual shares in media, or buying virtual goods that list you as a supporter, or allow people to invest in the creation of and share ownership in media...
- ommunist 11y ago
  I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the user, stripping out 'cruft' to make web useful again and ....m consumable after all. Good example is Safari Reader feature and Readability plugin for Chrome. Those are just the beginning.
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses. The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange. Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors. In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless. Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible. Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
And the answer: "Why does CNN show ads? To make money. Why does CNN include tracking services? To learn more about the reader, to show more targeted ads, to make more money. Why does CNN use social media buttons? To get people to share the article, to get more page views, to get more ad views, to make more money." And as ads make them less money they show more of them, or more intrusive ones. They a/b test where to put them or how to make them "appear" suddenly on the hope of stealing a click, and they try to disguise them as other news stories. But the bottom line is that the ad supported web at the ad rates people can get, is challenging at best and in cases like Dr. Dobbs Journal, well they give up.
d--b 11y ago
Strange that this is coming from telerik, a company that creates really heavy and closed javascript framework libraries, that you can probably load from their own domain. They definitely have their part of responsibility in that 'cruft'...
- paulojreis 11y ago
  I had about the same feeling. Telerik components come to mind when thinking about extra/unnecessary complexity.
- ommunist 11y ago
  Oh, telerik also has wonderful system of web components for IIS, and its CMS powers Iranian governmental sites. Which given Iranian networks are not exactly the fastest, gives very interesting experiences for those inside the max2MBit world.
- jeswin 11y ago
  We can (must) judge this article on its own merit. While not particularly informative, it is well written and explains the problem very, very clearly. The examples and analysis make sense even to people who aren't developers. It helps to raise awareness about an important issue, and is a part of the solution. Telerik's cruft is somewhat different from the cruft referred to in the article. They offer "rich" UIs, which we might hate, but is just what many companies choose when they try to replace their old Windows Forms apps with web apps. With modern browsers, they aren't really that computationally expensive. And in any case, they aren't responsible for the type of issues mentioned in TFA. Like loading from dozens of domains, interstitial ads, social media links, and 200+ requests. Telerik's products cannot be evaluated in isolation without looking at their history. They primarily cater to enterprise-y Microsoft shops, and they been in the business at least from the classic Asp.Net days (10+ years). Their components were DLLs earlier (which they probably still offer), but have now moved to somewhat leaner, modern JavaScript libraries. Their market moves very slowly, and it makes sense for them to move at a similar pace.
  - ommunist 11y ago
ommunist 11y ago
The web today does indeed look broken. But this (oh, especially CNN) example is only to show that this problem is merely organisational. If there is no QA process in organisation, quality criteria are non-existent. If there are ever shifting bossy MBAs on top design positions, it will always be like that and get worse in time. The only thing we can do as "web crafters" is to make our personal sites suck less. When it comes to job, who will sacrifice job security for the sake of "better user experience"?
alistproducer2 11y ago
It's what it has always been. Sites/companies that go the extra mile and provide better user experiences get rewarded; other that don't lose market share. At the end of the day, if the content is good enough most people will deal with the crappy load times.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  People spends too much time improving technology and not content. Infinitely fast access to void is not worthy.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  Sadly, I don't think this is true for individual content publishers. The size of any individual publisher's audience is not big enough for them to stay afloat with a clean user experience. Flipboard and Facebook pull this off by providing the better user experiences of "you can read everything" and "you're already on here anyway" respectively, but that wouldn't work for someone like CNN.
billyhoffman 11y ago
There is a major thing going on here that is not mentioned in the article: One department doesn't deliver a website. Is that "Terms of Service" modal there because a front-end dev thought "interrupting the user experience is a great idea!" No, it's there because of legal. And all those social sharing widgets? They are there because of marketing. And the 5 different ad exchanges? They are there from Sales/BizDev. And that 400KB of JS crap? That's Optimizely and their crappy A/B testing library that the dev team put it. And that hero image that's actually 1600px wide and then resized in CSS to 400px? It's there because that was the source image from the external agency and no one thought to modify it. The biggest challenge with modern web sites/apps is that they are largely built by committee. Often its not literally built by a committee, but I mean that while multiple departments are all involved and all get to add to the site, but no one is really responsible for the final, overall user experience of the site. And even if there is a "user experience" or "performance" team, they rarely have the power to change things. A customer of ours is a Alexa top 100 B2C company that provides a market place for buyers and sellers. They get commissions from sales, but a large part of revenue is ads. The "performance team" makes no head way against any of the terrible performance problems with ads because the ads team is judged based on the ads/conversions, not on performance of the page. Even when the ads are hurting the conversion rates of the sales/commissions, the ads team doesn't care. It's total deadlock of departments saying "performance and user experience is not my responsibility, I only do X".
- ommunist 11y ago
  that is exactly my point. And even when you have a single professional webdev/design team, you have no power over legal restrictions (EU cookie widget) or contractual obligations boss signed (ads must appear next morning). Real world just goes forward. Users have more power with adblockers over their UX than UX designer.
  - eterm 11y ago
    One way you can avoid the need for an EU cookie widget is by not setting unneccessary cookies.
Touche 11y ago
There are some strong points in this article but I think it reaches the wrong conclusion. Flipboard and Instant Articles are not an alternative business model. They are a loss-leader, plain and simple. The goal is still to get you on their webpage where you'll see the ads. Good ole capitalism solves this problem quite easily. CNN banks on its brand to keep people coming to their site but there are plenty of non-terrible news sites on the web so for those who care about a nice user experience can just use those instead.
ised 11y ago
I enjoyed this article. But I have one nitpick. The author suggest HTTP/2 as a solution to web cruft. I could be wrong, but I see the HTTP/2 ploy as a proposed way to deliver more cruft, faster. What do you think is going to be in those compressed headers? How large do HTTP headers need to be? What exactly are they trying to do? I look at headers on a daily basis and most of what I see is not for the benefit of users. We can safely assume the compressed headers that HTTP/2 would enable would have nothing to do with advertising? Again, I could be wrong, but in my estimation the solution to web cruft (unsolicited advertising) is not likely to come from a commercial entity that receives 98% of its revenue from web advertisers. The web cruft problem parallels software bloat and the crapware problem (gratuitous junk software pre-installed on your devices before you purchase them). The more resources that are provided, e.g., CPU, memory, primary storage, bandwidth, the more developers use these resources for purposes that do not benefit users and mostly waste users' time. This is why computers (and the web) can still be slow even though both have increased exponentially in capacity and speed over the last two decades. I still run some very "old" software and with today's equipment it runs lightening fast. The reason it is so fast is because the software has not been "updated".
- billyhoffman 11y ago
  HTTP/2 largely won't help the problems mentioned in the article. If I'm loading 200+ assets for 30-50 hosts, HTTP/2 can't help because I'm making 30-50 TCP connections and fetching 5-8 resources over each. The efficiency of HTTP/2 over HTTP/1.1 really doesn't excel when fetching so few resources per connection. HTTP/2 helps when you are downloading 200+ assets for 1 or 2 hosts.
  - ised 11y ago
    I routinely use HTTP/1.1 pipelining from the command line to retrieve 100 assets at a time. But these are assets that I actually want: i.e., the content. Somehow I doubt that the 200+ "assets" coming from 1 or 2 hosts automatically when using a web browser authored by a corporation or "non-profit organization" that is connected to the ad sales business are going to be "assets" that I actually want.
- 11y ago
odiroot 11y ago
But I like my weather widget on news sites. It's the second most useful feature beside the articles. Naturally it doesn't make sense if it shows weather for a place across the ocean.
myth_buster 11y ago
This is incredibly ironic as I've used Telerik components for internal app development in our organization and the amount of cruft that gets loaded is way damn high. The payload is high and round trips are numerous. I ditched all that and developed my own framework from scratch using the open source libraries and managed to reduce the payload and increase responsiveness. At some point in the past, it made sense to pay Telerik boat loads of money to get libraries that were supposedly plug-and-play but now there are even better solutions available for free thanks to OSS! Edit: Sounds a lot like Flipboard doesn’t it? If you’re a publisher and you opt in, you let Facebook control the distribution of your content, in return for a far more performant experience for your readers, and presumably shared ad revenue of some sorts. This raised some red flags! Making Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard) the content platform just to reduce cruft and responsiveness appears to be a trojan horse and appears to have similar issues as discussed in the Fb Fraud thread [0]. Another possibility is Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard)would become the Comcasts of tomorrow. The distributed nature of the web is what makes it so invigorating and democratic and I think it would be a mistake to go the cable route. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514
- joedavison 11y ago
  Care to share any great OSS libraries you've found that are good replacements for various Telerik components? Thanks!
  - warfangle 11y ago
    Disclaimer: the last time I used Telerik components was in ASP.net 2.0 about 9 years ago. For React: http://material-ui.com/#/ http://material-ui.com/#/ Bourbon + Refills: http://refills.bourbon.io/ http://refills.bourbon.io/ Material Design Lite: http://www.getmdl.io/ http://www.getmdl.io/ Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/ http://getbootstrap.com/ etc, etc. Even back when I used telerik components, it was often faster to develop my own component, tailored to use-case, than it was to figure out how the hell to customize the 15-deep DOM tree that a table component generated.
    - 11y ago
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Isn't the fundamental issue here that nobody wants to actually pay money for web content? Solve that and you solve the cruft issue.
- bpyne 11y ago
  I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay for content. The Web breaks apart for-pay models in different ways: people want content from more publishers than they can afford; and, people want to share. Getting people to pay for content on the web is a tricky issue. Looking at it as a consumer, I don't mind paying, but to whom? "Walled gardens" tend to force you into a subscription model: pay "The Economist" (e.g.) annually and you have access to their content. In modern times, people read content from all over the place without respect for boundaries. Realistically, you will probably want content from more publishers than you can afford to pay in subscriptions. Should publishers move to a model in which you pay per article? If so, how much? Do they price low ($0.10 USD) with the belief that more people will pay? Do writers get a percentage or flat rate? How is the quality of writing affected by each option? How do we share content in a for-pay model? Communal reading and discussion is what people do. It's the same way with music. People share articles, music, and pictures with others who might be interested. In turn, sharing entices dialog and dialog entices relationship-building. I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay. The Web opened up individuals to a much larger set of publishers. Publishers in turn tried to keep a subscriber model while trying to curtail the very human desire to share. Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    >Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue. I don't see how that fundamentally solves the problem of how you pay content producers. For a business model to survive you need to extract something from the end user eventually. With ads there is this turtle stacking problem - revenue comes from a consumer buying something from a retailer > retailer pays for ads on a website. So at the end of the day there is an exchange of money, just not between the content producer and the consumer. If the desire is to kill the relationship between content and ads then the content needs to capture the revenue through another means - sales of hardcover books (internal ads), subscription services etc... there really aren't that many models. Publishers are already very available, and sharing exists. Different channels for paying authors don't.
api 11y ago
We had a similar problem in 1999. They called it 'portalitis' back then. Go find some shots of the old Yahoo homepage for an example. Then Google came out with one blank and 'search' and we finally exited that ugly crufty era. Now we're back!
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Such is the nature of cruft: it accrues. Like barnacles, the longer you sail your ship the more of it you will find encrusted on your hull. Eventually you have to roll up your sleeves and scrape it off, and when you do, you will briefly be able to enjoy a cruft-free state. But once you leave drydock, it will start accruing all over again.
  - cgriswald 11y ago
    True, but I think there might be limits. I hate to think what 90's designers would have done with the massive screen real estate we have available today. Would it have been worse or would they have realized they'd saturated the human brains ability to separate objects? Interestingly, the Google home page has more stuff on it today than it did back in 2001, but appears less crufty. Good layout seems to help eliminate some of the cruft. Stuff that used to all be relegated more or less to the center of the screen has been pushed away from the main search box; available, but not interfering. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://www.google.com/ http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://www.goo... versus https://www.google.com https://www.google.com Mobile is definitely cruftier, but mainly because of the smaller screen real estate and because if you don't have their app installed, they add a modal to prompt you to get it.
- digisth 11y ago
  Yeah. I'm sure many remember all the other stuff that came with it last time: flash banners, popups/popunders, auto-reopening windows, etc. It was mighty crufty. I wonder how many other developers got into disagreements back then with other departments about how that stuff "was the future" and that there "was no fighting it" and that "everybody should just accept it now." Then we got clean / low-cruft designs for a while. Now we're back indeed. Cruft is cyclical.
realusername 11y ago
(My opinion here, I know not everyone is going to agree). What I really would like to have, is web capabilities without design, I mean the browser should be in charge of most design. What I would like is more meaningful tags like <panel>, <post>, <user>, <description>, <icon>, <horizontal-menu> and let the browser handle the actual representation. CSS could be just used for rough positioning + size indication and background-color could be completely replaced by a 'contrast' tag and the browser would display the color according to the user choice or operating system interface. The website would then adapt itself to the user and not the opposite.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  This is starting to happen with things like google material and similar UI libraries that try to standardize appearances across devices. It isn't as granular as you are asking but I actually like that aspect. Delegating design and display to the browser isn't ideal for a lot of reasons. I would like to exercise control over how my content is displayed and regularly load in reset sheets for css. Display is something delegated to a framework not a browser (my opinion). I think that <something/> should be in charge of handling representation and we are seeing that with ui frameworks that standardize displays across devices and applications. > background-color could be completely replaced by a 'contrast' tag What? There are many different colors on websites and users are lazy. Also, css should ideally be for styling not positioning, but it is one of the only options right now.
  - realusername 11y ago
    It might be a strange (and incomplete) thought but how I see it is that the browser would deduce the color. Contrast would be relative to text. For example the panel has a contrast of 0.8, so the browser should chose a color which is readable according to the text color if we would put both on the same panel. This color could be picked from the OS design. It does not mean that it would be ugly tough since you can use pretty good designs and colors, the web would just look much more consistent.
    - vonklaus 11y ago
stevoski 11y ago
I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia a few months ago. I wanted to see a film. I searched in Google for films showing in Kuala Lumpur. I found myself on a web page that, while accurately listing movies and schedules currently showing, looked like it had been created around 2000. And it was fast. No animations, no auto-complete, no infinite-scroll, no JavaScript frameworks. Just the information I wanted, delivered to my phone seemingly as soon as I touched the link. Simple black-on-white text, plain layout. This made me somewhat sad, because it showed me what the web browsing experience could have been today.
- jkestner 11y ago
  Obligatory: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com I'm glad I got off the train as web sites became web apps. I made one of the latter, though it actually was designed to complete certain tasks as opposed to being a container for content. Websites now seem to be trying to emulate native apps - not just in terms of cramming a bunch of UI into a page, but also in the closedness. I hate how 95% of content sites bury the hyperlinks to anything that takes you off their site, including the source.
  - keithpeter 11y ago
    The mfws page is 5k or so and one script (and I might want to fight about that depending on the reason it is there - see the page code at the bottom). Suppose you had another 5k budget for css. What could you do with it to make the page look 'nicer' in the sense of closer to mainstream Web pages that ordinary people might use? Edit: clarity
    - bewuethr 11y ago
      Like this? http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
      - keithpeter 11y ago
        Yup, that is a tad more modish.
Mithaldu 11y ago
Minor gripe: I wish people would stop talking about Ad-Blocker. Pretty much since i started using the web (back when with Opera) I've had a tool available that is much more general and has given me much more control about how the web uses my bandwidth: An URL-Blocker. I don't use it for ads, exclusively, although lots of those fall under it too. I use it to block anything i find annoying when i use the web, be it overly big header images, fonts i don't like, Javascripts that are used by many pages to "enhance the experience", and sometimes ads too. Thinking about it as a tool to only block ads, instead of one to customize the web and block urls themselves seems narrow-minded to me and misses the point.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Please give us more details about the URL blocker you use. Is it a browser plugin? Is it a network change at the OS level (HOSTS)? Is it a firewall or routing block? Is it middleware in a container running in your VPC?
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    I still use Opera 12 and it's built-in. You can give it a file like this: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/urlfilter.ini https://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/urlfilter.ini And it'll apply black/white-listing in whichever way you configure it before actually getting data from any URL. Editing features are built into the browser. To have it available on a more global scale, you could probably use something like squid proxy, but i don't know if it gives power quite like that. URL-Blockers however are a thing that by all rights should be built into the core of any browser, just like number-black-listing should be a default feature of every phone (but isn't).
    - mtone 11y ago
      I do this directly on my router running Tomato firmware. The initial setup is a bit more involved, but it applies equally to all browsers and mobile devices in the home. The script I use is http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/script-clean-lean-and-mean-adblocking.68464/ http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/script-clean-le...
emodendroket 11y ago
The Gruber quote is (as is typical for him, I guess) insane hyperbole. The mobile Web is not "looking like a relic" because I'm not going to go installing an app to read an article; that's more trouble than dismissing the modal yammering on about privacy policies.
amelius 11y ago
Don't worry. Eventually the cruft will get filtered out by AI, just like in adblockers, but in a much more powerful way. Essentially, the circuits in your brain that remove cruft subconsciously now, will be implemented in software.
guelo 11y ago
The latest stratechery article discusses this same topic from more of a high level industry trends and business forces perspectives, https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/ https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/
Touche 11y ago
Here's a first-pass user style sheet that gets rid of most of the noise. #breaking-news, [data-video-id], .sibling, .pg-rail, .js-gigya-sharebar { display: none; } body { padding-top: 0 !important; } .nav-header { position: relative; }
jasonsync 11y ago
It's called "bloat". Maybe "selling out". To many hands on deck. VC's want profitability. It resolves itself usually. Sometimes. Websites get bloated over time. Difficult to read. Slow to load. Messy UI. Runaway code. Ads everywhere. People stop visiting. Less bloated alternatives appear. Slashdot ... MySpace ... been there done that. Reddit, Imgur .. drifting slowly but surely towards bloat. Mobile apps suffer too. To a lesser extent due to limited screen space. Poorly designed apps, non-native apps, heavy Javascript frameworks, ad popups etc. Even worse, when a mobile developer decides to build a simple website for the first time. Install Mercurial, Vagrant, Bower, NPM, Grunt, Mongo, Express, Mongoose, Passport, Angular .. update everything .. cache clean everything .. check your environment settings .. mess around with Heroku .. create a Docker image for easy deployment. Spin up a virtual machine. Now hand off that 5 page website to someone else when the project is complete. They'll add bloat to bloat. Better or worse? The web is old. We're focused on apps. Eventually we'll move back to the web and clean things up.
- Dysprosium 11y ago
  Imgur is already bloated. As for reddit, I'm curious about what makes you think they're drifting towards bloating. They use JavaScript (replying to a comment creates a new textarea), AJAX (posting a comment), WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps), modals (sign up), but they do this in a very moderate way and the result is really robust. It seems to me that they perfectly know the power of all these technologies but have a very strong QA which doesn't let a single shit get pushed in prod.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    > WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps) What are you talking about?
    - Qwertious 11y ago
      >scrollaway 9 hours ago | parent | flag If I leave this up for an hour without refreshing, I'll get: >scrollaway 10 hours ago | parent | flag Again, without ever refreshing the page.
cognivore 11y ago
HOST file ad blocking. Bang! Problem solved. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm This works so well I have a vastly different user experience than other people. I rarely see ads and pages load fast. Of course, you can't do this on the stupid devices we use but don't actually control (phone, tablets, I'm looking at you), so I wish someone would offer a DNS service that blocks these. I'm thinking of creating one for myself at this point.
- icandothis 11y ago
  You can do this on any Android phone if you have root as it has a standard hosts file on it. I used to use that exact hosts file on my phone but I found a compressed version that was for iOS and is only 28kb big. It blocks the same sites but it just a bit more lean.
- userbinator 11y ago
  If your devices use DHCP to get their DNS server, you can probably setup a firewall/router with the appropriate filtered DNS.
Animats 11y ago
Cruft removal suggestions: 1. Read the source of your own web pages. What's really necessary? 2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers? 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed. 4. Stuff that's not going to change, including most icons, should have long cache expiration times so they don't get reloaded. 5. Look at your content management system. Is it generating a unique page of CSS for each content page? If so, why? Is it generating boilerplate CSS or Javascript over and over again? 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft. 7. You can probably remove the IE6 support now.
- Domenic_S 11y ago
  > 2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers? Marketing answer: yes. GA and Omniture do different things/generate different reports. Each tracker usually does one critical thing better/differently than the last, so it's really easy for marketing to say they want all of them. > 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed. Yes they do, because tracking. > 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft. 5KB of html cruft is nothing compared to the massive amounts of JS cruft being loaded (your point #2). This is wasted effort imo.
- wangii 11y ago
  #3 "social" button not communicate with the social network? Good idea to kill fb/twitter!
andreapaiola 11y ago
Well... I try to do something... http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/ http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/
narrator 11y ago
As far as the monetization of content goes, content creators are desperate because there is too much information out there. The people who make money with content these days are people who filter content and write for highly specific niches. I guess celebrity gossip and "Hottest Girls of Instagram!" also works pretty well as a content marketing strategy too. Give the devil his due. One thing I hate about most content I get is how all the big stories of the day tend to creep in. I have a twitter account I use for personal marketing and I never ever post anything off topic or related to politics or whatever the hot meme of the day is. I only post information related to the very specific niche that I am covering. I pulled up my twitter feed recently and there are biotech people commenting on Greece. There are startup gurus retweeting Greece. If it's not Greece it's whatever is the hot topic of the day like <insert social issue that even saying you don't care about will result in social excommunication> or the Ukraine war or whatever. Frankly, I don't care, I don't have the time, it does not affect me personally. I have way too much stuff to think about already. This is why people don't pay for content. The supply is off the charts and the demand is not there and most people are just recycling crap that they read somewhere else anyway.
- iSnow 11y ago
  I am not sure if I'd classify Twitter as content, but to be less snarky, focused platforms tend to stay more on-topic than twitter. I find small subreddits to be very much on-topic, for example.
natch 11y ago
Just want to say, that is a really nicely written and presented article. Loved the way it had a good lead-in, clear and well explained examples with good screenshots, and how it dug into the whys and also explored the future without driving some agenda other than its main point of understanding the cruft problem. I realize the point of the article wasn't about quality of content but more about all the clutter around the content, but it bears saying, if the author is here to hear, that this was some really well done content.
deleted 11y ago
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flinty 11y ago
The article by Ben Thompson on Stratechery is a good one to go along with this one. https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/ https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/
irq-1 11y ago
An unmentioned alternative is Firefox "Reader View" or Readability [0], which reformat the source post-download. They don't work on all sites and can get somethings wrong. Still, its a solution that's: open, distributed and can't be easily stopped by content producers. Imagine a Firefox mode that always had Reader View on; a sort of filtered/limited web browser. [0] https://www.readability.com/ https://www.readability.com/
msane 11y ago
What I find really silly is "would you like to subscribe to my blog?" popups which appear over top of the content after scrolling. Let alone the browser-level modal: "Allow This Person's blog to send you push notifications?" I've come to dislike the first 5-20 seconds after loading a news article on mobile, while ads and popups are still adjusting the position of the article text.
- shostack 11y ago
  Unfortunately, these tend to work. I'm sure many people blindly implement them, but many have tested the results and found that they won out.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
njharman 11y ago
That chadburn looks like it has a marble face and seems unusual. Which made me go lookup what a chadburn is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph
mirimir 11y ago
I typically browse via nested VPN chains and Tor, and overall latency is ca. 500-1000 msec. Leaving aside my concerns about privacy and malware, ads and third-party tracking conversations simply don't work for me. My circumstances are unusual, of course. But I suspect that many who connect via geostationary satellites have similar experiences.
Too 11y ago
So in summary RSS is new again?
FollowSteph3 11y ago
I found it ironic that the author talking about web cruft also had some on their website. The header image on my cell phone in landscape mode took up 20% of my screen and stayed even if I scrolled. Anyways I thought that was pretty funny :)
beans1 11y ago
Why do ad blockers not hide social media links? I would love this. It is cruft I deal with every day. I have never used this feature but been forced to implement it so many times.

362 points by jsnell 11y ago

Not sure why he took CNN as an example instead of this very article... http://i.imgur.com/4w9TxOw.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4w9TxOw.jpg > 146 requests, 1.8MB transferred.

TheWoodsy 11y ago
I ended up with 67 Requests and 2.8M. uBlock Origin > Flash disabled > Going through a Squid transparent proxy with SquidGuard lists from shallalist.de (adv,anonvpn,remotecontrol,spyware,tracker)
jessaustin 11y ago
Some parts of the web are worse than others. He must hang out at Telerik a lot.
pp19dd 11y ago
CNN is a fairly reputable news organization, and a pretty good example of how broadcast can have a strong digital presence. They're going to be mimicked by other news organizations without a doubt. Compare them to a local TV station's site, and what you'll see there is basically video clips dumped onto articles or section fronts. CNN takes the trouble to write news copy alongside script (or are at least pretty good at rewriting) because you can't just repurpose TV script for a news article. And in other news, http://www.cnn.com/cnn_adspaces/ http://www.cnn.com/cnn_adspaces/
DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
That's strange. I get much different figures. https://veuwer.com/i/2uys.png https://veuwer.com/i/2uys.png Perhaps they're working on it?
- detaro 11y ago
  Did you clear the cache beforehand? (since you don't have "disable cache" checked)
andrewstuart2 11y ago
If you'd finished the article, you'd probably notice he says (twice) exactly why he used CNN. Not that they're one of the worst, but rather that this is pervasive. > Again, I don’t mean to call out CNN as the “bad example,” but rather use them to show a specific example of a model that has become pervasive for content on the web.
dredmorbius 11y ago
With JS enabled TFA killed my (old) Android browser. Twice. Disabling JS I managed to read it.

markbnj 11y ago

I think "the web" in this case really means media sites and some retailers. The media sites don't have a clue how to make money, other than to include all the usual ad networks and tracking scripts and then sit back and hope. The ecommerce guys are obsessed with slicing and dicing visitor behavior and tracking conversions. Seems to me that outside these (admittedly rather vaguely defined) spaces the web is a much cleaner and snappier place.

keyboardwarrior 11y ago
Tend to agree with this. For instance big porn sites, where every byte count, rarely has major bloat.

williamcotton 11y ago

The cruft is because the underlying economics of how data is hosted and distributed is flawed. The incentives between advertisers, readers, publishers, hosting and distribution providers are currently misaligned. In other words, building an info-economic system based on "free" content that is supported by online advertising results in: the people who make the content don't get paid enough and the content itself is horribly mangled by advertisements and other priorities. However, we can build other kinds of info-economic systems. Perhaps we could follow the model of publishing back when we still used copyrights as an effective way to align the incentives between authors and publishers. Covering the costs of hosting and distribution are a lot easier to manage when the content itself isn't hard-coded in to an ad-selling-machine as delivery options like BitTorrent or WebTorrent are now an option. Permanent seeds could be kept alive at very little cost to publishers. Perhaps we could experiment with royalties, or selling virtual shares in media, or buying virtual goods that list you as a supporter, or allow people to invest in the creation of and share ownership in media...

ommunist 11y ago
I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the user, stripping out 'cruft' to make web useful again and ....m consumable after all. Good example is Safari Reader feature and Readability plugin for Chrome. Those are just the beginning.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses. The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange. Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors. In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless. Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible. Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

And the answer: "Why does CNN show ads? To make money. Why does CNN include tracking services? To learn more about the reader, to show more targeted ads, to make more money. Why does CNN use social media buttons? To get people to share the article, to get more page views, to get more ad views, to make more money." And as ads make them less money they show more of them, or more intrusive ones. They a/b test where to put them or how to make them "appear" suddenly on the hope of stealing a click, and they try to disguise them as other news stories. But the bottom line is that the ad supported web at the ad rates people can get, is challenging at best and in cases like Dr. Dobbs Journal, well they give up.

d--b 11y ago

Strange that this is coming from telerik, a company that creates really heavy and closed javascript framework libraries, that you can probably load from their own domain. They definitely have their part of responsibility in that 'cruft'...

paulojreis 11y ago
I had about the same feeling. Telerik components come to mind when thinking about extra/unnecessary complexity.
ommunist 11y ago
Oh, telerik also has wonderful system of web components for IIS, and its CMS powers Iranian governmental sites. Which given Iranian networks are not exactly the fastest, gives very interesting experiences for those inside the max2MBit world.
jeswin 11y ago
We can (must) judge this article on its own merit. While not particularly informative, it is well written and explains the problem very, very clearly. The examples and analysis make sense even to people who aren't developers. It helps to raise awareness about an important issue, and is a part of the solution. Telerik's cruft is somewhat different from the cruft referred to in the article. They offer "rich" UIs, which we might hate, but is just what many companies choose when they try to replace their old Windows Forms apps with web apps. With modern browsers, they aren't really that computationally expensive. And in any case, they aren't responsible for the type of issues mentioned in TFA. Like loading from dozens of domains, interstitial ads, social media links, and 200+ requests. Telerik's products cannot be evaluated in isolation without looking at their history. They primarily cater to enterprise-y Microsoft shops, and they been in the business at least from the classic Asp.Net days (10+ years). Their components were DLLs earlier (which they probably still offer), but have now moved to somewhat leaner, modern JavaScript libraries. Their market moves very slowly, and it makes sense for them to move at a similar pace.
- ommunist 11y ago

ommunist 11y ago

The web today does indeed look broken. But this (oh, especially CNN) example is only to show that this problem is merely organisational. If there is no QA process in organisation, quality criteria are non-existent. If there are ever shifting bossy MBAs on top design positions, it will always be like that and get worse in time. The only thing we can do as "web crafters" is to make our personal sites suck less. When it comes to job, who will sacrifice job security for the sake of "better user experience"?

alistproducer2 11y ago

It's what it has always been. Sites/companies that go the extra mile and provide better user experiences get rewarded; other that don't lose market share. At the end of the day, if the content is good enough most people will deal with the crappy load times.

agumonkey 11y ago
People spends too much time improving technology and not content. Infinitely fast access to void is not worthy.
sanderjd 11y ago
Sadly, I don't think this is true for individual content publishers. The size of any individual publisher's audience is not big enough for them to stay afloat with a clean user experience. Flipboard and Facebook pull this off by providing the better user experiences of "you can read everything" and "you're already on here anyway" respectively, but that wouldn't work for someone like CNN.

billyhoffman 11y ago

There is a major thing going on here that is not mentioned in the article: One department doesn't deliver a website. Is that "Terms of Service" modal there because a front-end dev thought "interrupting the user experience is a great idea!" No, it's there because of legal. And all those social sharing widgets? They are there because of marketing. And the 5 different ad exchanges? They are there from Sales/BizDev. And that 400KB of JS crap? That's Optimizely and their crappy A/B testing library that the dev team put it. And that hero image that's actually 1600px wide and then resized in CSS to 400px? It's there because that was the source image from the external agency and no one thought to modify it. The biggest challenge with modern web sites/apps is that they are largely built by committee. Often its not literally built by a committee, but I mean that while multiple departments are all involved and all get to add to the site, but no one is really responsible for the final, overall user experience of the site. And even if there is a "user experience" or "performance" team, they rarely have the power to change things. A customer of ours is a Alexa top 100 B2C company that provides a market place for buyers and sellers. They get commissions from sales, but a large part of revenue is ads. The "performance team" makes no head way against any of the terrible performance problems with ads because the ads team is judged based on the ads/conversions, not on performance of the page. Even when the ads are hurting the conversion rates of the sales/commissions, the ads team doesn't care. It's total deadlock of departments saying "performance and user experience is not my responsibility, I only do X".

ommunist 11y ago
that is exactly my point. And even when you have a single professional webdev/design team, you have no power over legal restrictions (EU cookie widget) or contractual obligations boss signed (ads must appear next morning). Real world just goes forward. Users have more power with adblockers over their UX than UX designer.
- eterm 11y ago
  One way you can avoid the need for an EU cookie widget is by not setting unneccessary cookies.

Touche 11y ago

There are some strong points in this article but I think it reaches the wrong conclusion. Flipboard and Instant Articles are not an alternative business model. They are a loss-leader, plain and simple. The goal is still to get you on their webpage where you'll see the ads. Good ole capitalism solves this problem quite easily. CNN banks on its brand to keep people coming to their site but there are plenty of non-terrible news sites on the web so for those who care about a nice user experience can just use those instead.

ised 11y ago

I enjoyed this article. But I have one nitpick. The author suggest HTTP/2 as a solution to web cruft. I could be wrong, but I see the HTTP/2 ploy as a proposed way to deliver more cruft, faster. What do you think is going to be in those compressed headers? How large do HTTP headers need to be? What exactly are they trying to do? I look at headers on a daily basis and most of what I see is not for the benefit of users. We can safely assume the compressed headers that HTTP/2 would enable would have nothing to do with advertising? Again, I could be wrong, but in my estimation the solution to web cruft (unsolicited advertising) is not likely to come from a commercial entity that receives 98% of its revenue from web advertisers. The web cruft problem parallels software bloat and the crapware problem (gratuitous junk software pre-installed on your devices before you purchase them). The more resources that are provided, e.g., CPU, memory, primary storage, bandwidth, the more developers use these resources for purposes that do not benefit users and mostly waste users' time. This is why computers (and the web) can still be slow even though both have increased exponentially in capacity and speed over the last two decades. I still run some very "old" software and with today's equipment it runs lightening fast. The reason it is so fast is because the software has not been "updated".

billyhoffman 11y ago
HTTP/2 largely won't help the problems mentioned in the article. If I'm loading 200+ assets for 30-50 hosts, HTTP/2 can't help because I'm making 30-50 TCP connections and fetching 5-8 resources over each. The efficiency of HTTP/2 over HTTP/1.1 really doesn't excel when fetching so few resources per connection. HTTP/2 helps when you are downloading 200+ assets for 1 or 2 hosts.
- ised 11y ago
  I routinely use HTTP/1.1 pipelining from the command line to retrieve 100 assets at a time. But these are assets that I actually want: i.e., the content. Somehow I doubt that the 200+ "assets" coming from 1 or 2 hosts automatically when using a web browser authored by a corporation or "non-profit organization" that is connected to the ad sales business are going to be "assets" that I actually want.
11y ago

odiroot 11y ago

But I like my weather widget on news sites. It's the second most useful feature beside the articles. Naturally it doesn't make sense if it shows weather for a place across the ocean.

myth_buster 11y ago

This is incredibly ironic as I've used Telerik components for internal app development in our organization and the amount of cruft that gets loaded is way damn high. The payload is high and round trips are numerous. I ditched all that and developed my own framework from scratch using the open source libraries and managed to reduce the payload and increase responsiveness. At some point in the past, it made sense to pay Telerik boat loads of money to get libraries that were supposedly plug-and-play but now there are even better solutions available for free thanks to OSS! Edit: Sounds a lot like Flipboard doesn’t it? If you’re a publisher and you opt in, you let Facebook control the distribution of your content, in return for a far more performant experience for your readers, and presumably shared ad revenue of some sorts. This raised some red flags! Making Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard) the content platform just to reduce cruft and responsiveness appears to be a trojan horse and appears to have similar issues as discussed in the Fb Fraud thread [0]. Another possibility is Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard)would become the Comcasts of tomorrow. The distributed nature of the web is what makes it so invigorating and democratic and I think it would be a mistake to go the cable route. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514

joedavison 11y ago
Care to share any great OSS libraries you've found that are good replacements for various Telerik components? Thanks!
- warfangle 11y ago
  Disclaimer: the last time I used Telerik components was in ASP.net 2.0 about 9 years ago. For React: http://material-ui.com/#/ http://material-ui.com/#/ Bourbon + Refills: http://refills.bourbon.io/ http://refills.bourbon.io/ Material Design Lite: http://www.getmdl.io/ http://www.getmdl.io/ Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/ http://getbootstrap.com/ etc, etc. Even back when I used telerik components, it was often faster to develop my own component, tailored to use-case, than it was to figure out how the hell to customize the 15-deep DOM tree that a table component generated.
  - 11y ago

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

Isn't the fundamental issue here that nobody wants to actually pay money for web content? Solve that and you solve the cruft issue.

bpyne 11y ago
I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay for content. The Web breaks apart for-pay models in different ways: people want content from more publishers than they can afford; and, people want to share. Getting people to pay for content on the web is a tricky issue. Looking at it as a consumer, I don't mind paying, but to whom? "Walled gardens" tend to force you into a subscription model: pay "The Economist" (e.g.) annually and you have access to their content. In modern times, people read content from all over the place without respect for boundaries. Realistically, you will probably want content from more publishers than you can afford to pay in subscriptions. Should publishers move to a model in which you pay per article? If so, how much? Do they price low ($0.10 USD) with the belief that more people will pay? Do writers get a percentage or flat rate? How is the quality of writing affected by each option? How do we share content in a for-pay model? Communal reading and discussion is what people do. It's the same way with music. People share articles, music, and pictures with others who might be interested. In turn, sharing entices dialog and dialog entices relationship-building. I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay. The Web opened up individuals to a much larger set of publishers. Publishers in turn tried to keep a subscriber model while trying to curtail the very human desire to share. Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  >Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue. I don't see how that fundamentally solves the problem of how you pay content producers. For a business model to survive you need to extract something from the end user eventually. With ads there is this turtle stacking problem - revenue comes from a consumer buying something from a retailer > retailer pays for ads on a website. So at the end of the day there is an exchange of money, just not between the content producer and the consumer. If the desire is to kill the relationship between content and ads then the content needs to capture the revenue through another means - sales of hardcover books (internal ads), subscription services etc... there really aren't that many models. Publishers are already very available, and sharing exists. Different channels for paying authors don't.

api 11y ago

We had a similar problem in 1999. They called it 'portalitis' back then. Go find some shots of the old Yahoo homepage for an example. Then Google came out with one blank and 'search' and we finally exited that ugly crufty era. Now we're back!

smacktoward 11y ago
Such is the nature of cruft: it accrues. Like barnacles, the longer you sail your ship the more of it you will find encrusted on your hull. Eventually you have to roll up your sleeves and scrape it off, and when you do, you will briefly be able to enjoy a cruft-free state. But once you leave drydock, it will start accruing all over again.
- cgriswald 11y ago
  True, but I think there might be limits. I hate to think what 90's designers would have done with the massive screen real estate we have available today. Would it have been worse or would they have realized they'd saturated the human brains ability to separate objects? Interestingly, the Google home page has more stuff on it today than it did back in 2001, but appears less crufty. Good layout seems to help eliminate some of the cruft. Stuff that used to all be relegated more or less to the center of the screen has been pushed away from the main search box; available, but not interfering. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://www.google.com/ http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://www.goo... versus https://www.google.com https://www.google.com Mobile is definitely cruftier, but mainly because of the smaller screen real estate and because if you don't have their app installed, they add a modal to prompt you to get it.
digisth 11y ago
Yeah. I'm sure many remember all the other stuff that came with it last time: flash banners, popups/popunders, auto-reopening windows, etc. It was mighty crufty. I wonder how many other developers got into disagreements back then with other departments about how that stuff "was the future" and that there "was no fighting it" and that "everybody should just accept it now." Then we got clean / low-cruft designs for a while. Now we're back indeed. Cruft is cyclical.

realusername 11y ago

(My opinion here, I know not everyone is going to agree). What I really would like to have, is web capabilities without design, I mean the browser should be in charge of most design. What I would like is more meaningful tags like <panel>, <post>, <user>, <description>, <icon>, <horizontal-menu> and let the browser handle the actual representation. CSS could be just used for rough positioning + size indication and background-color could be completely replaced by a 'contrast' tag and the browser would display the color according to the user choice or operating system interface. The website would then adapt itself to the user and not the opposite.

vonklaus 11y ago
This is starting to happen with things like google material and similar UI libraries that try to standardize appearances across devices. It isn't as granular as you are asking but I actually like that aspect. Delegating design and display to the browser isn't ideal for a lot of reasons. I would like to exercise control over how my content is displayed and regularly load in reset sheets for css. Display is something delegated to a framework not a browser (my opinion). I think that <something/> should be in charge of handling representation and we are seeing that with ui frameworks that standardize displays across devices and applications. > background-color could be completely replaced by a 'contrast' tag What? There are many different colors on websites and users are lazy. Also, css should ideally be for styling not positioning, but it is one of the only options right now.
- realusername 11y ago
  It might be a strange (and incomplete) thought but how I see it is that the browser would deduce the color. Contrast would be relative to text. For example the panel has a contrast of 0.8, so the browser should chose a color which is readable according to the text color if we would put both on the same panel. This color could be picked from the OS design. It does not mean that it would be ugly tough since you can use pretty good designs and colors, the web would just look much more consistent.
  - vonklaus 11y ago

stevoski 11y ago

I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia a few months ago. I wanted to see a film. I searched in Google for films showing in Kuala Lumpur. I found myself on a web page that, while accurately listing movies and schedules currently showing, looked like it had been created around 2000. And it was fast. No animations, no auto-complete, no infinite-scroll, no JavaScript frameworks. Just the information I wanted, delivered to my phone seemingly as soon as I touched the link. Simple black-on-white text, plain layout. This made me somewhat sad, because it showed me what the web browsing experience could have been today.

jkestner 11y ago
Obligatory: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com I'm glad I got off the train as web sites became web apps. I made one of the latter, though it actually was designed to complete certain tasks as opposed to being a container for content. Websites now seem to be trying to emulate native apps - not just in terms of cramming a bunch of UI into a page, but also in the closedness. I hate how 95% of content sites bury the hyperlinks to anything that takes you off their site, including the source.
- keithpeter 11y ago
  The mfws page is 5k or so and one script (and I might want to fight about that depending on the reason it is there - see the page code at the bottom). Suppose you had another 5k budget for css. What could you do with it to make the page look 'nicer' in the sense of closer to mainstream Web pages that ordinary people might use? Edit: clarity
  - bewuethr 11y ago
    Like this? http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
    - keithpeter 11y ago
      Yup, that is a tad more modish.

Mithaldu 11y ago

Minor gripe: I wish people would stop talking about Ad-Blocker. Pretty much since i started using the web (back when with Opera) I've had a tool available that is much more general and has given me much more control about how the web uses my bandwidth: An URL-Blocker. I don't use it for ads, exclusively, although lots of those fall under it too. I use it to block anything i find annoying when i use the web, be it overly big header images, fonts i don't like, Javascripts that are used by many pages to "enhance the experience", and sometimes ads too. Thinking about it as a tool to only block ads, instead of one to customize the web and block urls themselves seems narrow-minded to me and misses the point.

stephengillie 11y ago
Please give us more details about the URL blocker you use. Is it a browser plugin? Is it a network change at the OS level (HOSTS)? Is it a firewall or routing block? Is it middleware in a container running in your VPC?
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  I still use Opera 12 and it's built-in. You can give it a file like this: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/urlfilter.ini https://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/urlfilter.ini And it'll apply black/white-listing in whichever way you configure it before actually getting data from any URL. Editing features are built into the browser. To have it available on a more global scale, you could probably use something like squid proxy, but i don't know if it gives power quite like that. URL-Blockers however are a thing that by all rights should be built into the core of any browser, just like number-black-listing should be a default feature of every phone (but isn't).
  - mtone 11y ago
    I do this directly on my router running Tomato firmware. The initial setup is a bit more involved, but it applies equally to all browsers and mobile devices in the home. The script I use is http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/script-clean-lean-and-mean-adblocking.68464/ http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/script-clean-le...

emodendroket 11y ago

The Gruber quote is (as is typical for him, I guess) insane hyperbole. The mobile Web is not "looking like a relic" because I'm not going to go installing an app to read an article; that's more trouble than dismissing the modal yammering on about privacy policies.

amelius 11y ago

Don't worry. Eventually the cruft will get filtered out by AI, just like in adblockers, but in a much more powerful way. Essentially, the circuits in your brain that remove cruft subconsciously now, will be implemented in software.

guelo 11y ago

The latest stratechery article discusses this same topic from more of a high level industry trends and business forces perspectives, https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/ https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/

Touche 11y ago

Here's a first-pass user style sheet that gets rid of most of the noise. #breaking-news, [data-video-id], .sibling, .pg-rail, .js-gigya-sharebar { display: none; } body { padding-top: 0 !important; } .nav-header { position: relative; }

jasonsync 11y ago

It's called "bloat". Maybe "selling out". To many hands on deck. VC's want profitability. It resolves itself usually. Sometimes. Websites get bloated over time. Difficult to read. Slow to load. Messy UI. Runaway code. Ads everywhere. People stop visiting. Less bloated alternatives appear. Slashdot ... MySpace ... been there done that. Reddit, Imgur .. drifting slowly but surely towards bloat. Mobile apps suffer too. To a lesser extent due to limited screen space. Poorly designed apps, non-native apps, heavy Javascript frameworks, ad popups etc. Even worse, when a mobile developer decides to build a simple website for the first time. Install Mercurial, Vagrant, Bower, NPM, Grunt, Mongo, Express, Mongoose, Passport, Angular .. update everything .. cache clean everything .. check your environment settings .. mess around with Heroku .. create a Docker image for easy deployment. Spin up a virtual machine. Now hand off that 5 page website to someone else when the project is complete. They'll add bloat to bloat. Better or worse? The web is old. We're focused on apps. Eventually we'll move back to the web and clean things up.

Dysprosium 11y ago
Imgur is already bloated. As for reddit, I'm curious about what makes you think they're drifting towards bloating. They use JavaScript (replying to a comment creates a new textarea), AJAX (posting a comment), WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps), modals (sign up), but they do this in a very moderate way and the result is really robust. It seems to me that they perfectly know the power of all these technologies but have a very strong QA which doesn't let a single shit get pushed in prod.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  > WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps) What are you talking about?
  - Qwertious 11y ago
    >scrollaway 9 hours ago | parent | flag If I leave this up for an hour without refreshing, I'll get: >scrollaway 10 hours ago | parent | flag Again, without ever refreshing the page.

cognivore 11y ago

HOST file ad blocking. Bang! Problem solved. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm This works so well I have a vastly different user experience than other people. I rarely see ads and pages load fast. Of course, you can't do this on the stupid devices we use but don't actually control (phone, tablets, I'm looking at you), so I wish someone would offer a DNS service that blocks these. I'm thinking of creating one for myself at this point.

icandothis 11y ago
You can do this on any Android phone if you have root as it has a standard hosts file on it. I used to use that exact hosts file on my phone but I found a compressed version that was for iOS and is only 28kb big. It blocks the same sites but it just a bit more lean.
userbinator 11y ago
If your devices use DHCP to get their DNS server, you can probably setup a firewall/router with the appropriate filtered DNS.

Animats 11y ago

Cruft removal suggestions: 1. Read the source of your own web pages. What's really necessary? 2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers? 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed. 4. Stuff that's not going to change, including most icons, should have long cache expiration times so they don't get reloaded. 5. Look at your content management system. Is it generating a unique page of CSS for each content page? If so, why? Is it generating boilerplate CSS or Javascript over and over again? 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft. 7. You can probably remove the IE6 support now.

Domenic_S 11y ago
> 2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers? Marketing answer: yes. GA and Omniture do different things/generate different reports. Each tracker usually does one critical thing better/differently than the last, so it's really easy for marketing to say they want all of them. > 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed. Yes they do, because tracking. > 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft. 5KB of html cruft is nothing compared to the massive amounts of JS cruft being loaded (your point #2). This is wasted effort imo.
wangii 11y ago
#3 "social" button not communicate with the social network? Good idea to kill fb/twitter!

andreapaiola 11y ago

Well... I try to do something... http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/ http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/

narrator 11y ago

As far as the monetization of content goes, content creators are desperate because there is too much information out there. The people who make money with content these days are people who filter content and write for highly specific niches. I guess celebrity gossip and "Hottest Girls of Instagram!" also works pretty well as a content marketing strategy too. Give the devil his due. One thing I hate about most content I get is how all the big stories of the day tend to creep in. I have a twitter account I use for personal marketing and I never ever post anything off topic or related to politics or whatever the hot meme of the day is. I only post information related to the very specific niche that I am covering. I pulled up my twitter feed recently and there are biotech people commenting on Greece. There are startup gurus retweeting Greece. If it's not Greece it's whatever is the hot topic of the day like <insert social issue that even saying you don't care about will result in social excommunication> or the Ukraine war or whatever. Frankly, I don't care, I don't have the time, it does not affect me personally. I have way too much stuff to think about already. This is why people don't pay for content. The supply is off the charts and the demand is not there and most people are just recycling crap that they read somewhere else anyway.

iSnow 11y ago
I am not sure if I'd classify Twitter as content, but to be less snarky, focused platforms tend to stay more on-topic than twitter. I find small subreddits to be very much on-topic, for example.

natch 11y ago

Just want to say, that is a really nicely written and presented article. Loved the way it had a good lead-in, clear and well explained examples with good screenshots, and how it dug into the whys and also explored the future without driving some agenda other than its main point of understanding the cruft problem. I realize the point of the article wasn't about quality of content but more about all the clutter around the content, but it bears saying, if the author is here to hear, that this was some really well done content.

deleted 11y ago

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flinty 11y ago

The article by Ben Thompson on Stratechery is a good one to go along with this one. https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/ https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/

irq-1 11y ago

An unmentioned alternative is Firefox "Reader View" or Readability [0], which reformat the source post-download. They don't work on all sites and can get somethings wrong. Still, its a solution that's: open, distributed and can't be easily stopped by content producers. Imagine a Firefox mode that always had Reader View on; a sort of filtered/limited web browser. [0] https://www.readability.com/ https://www.readability.com/

msane 11y ago

What I find really silly is "would you like to subscribe to my blog?" popups which appear over top of the content after scrolling. Let alone the browser-level modal: "Allow This Person's blog to send you push notifications?" I've come to dislike the first 5-20 seconds after loading a news article on mobile, while ads and popups are still adjusting the position of the article text.

shostack 11y ago
Unfortunately, these tend to work. I'm sure many people blindly implement them, but many have tested the results and found that they won out.
- deleted 11y ago
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njharman 11y ago

That chadburn looks like it has a marble face and seems unusual. Which made me go lookup what a chadburn is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph

mirimir 11y ago

I typically browse via nested VPN chains and Tor, and overall latency is ca. 500-1000 msec. Leaving aside my concerns about privacy and malware, ads and third-party tracking conversations simply don't work for me. My circumstances are unusual, of course. But I suspect that many who connect via geostationary satellites have similar experiences.

Too 11y ago

So in summary RSS is new again?

FollowSteph3 11y ago

I found it ironic that the author talking about web cruft also had some on their website. The header image on my cell phone in landscape mode took up 20% of my screen and stayed even if I scrolled. Anyways I thought that was pretty funny :)

beans1 11y ago

Why do ad blockers not hide social media links? I would love this. It is cruft I deal with every day. I have never used this feature but been forced to implement it so many times.