[HN Gopher] The 49MB web page
___________________________________________________________________
The 49MB web page
Author : kermatt
Score : 769 points
Date : 2026-03-15 19:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thatshubham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thatshubham.com)
| Bratmon wrote:
| Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these
| "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding
| profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but
| pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at
| McDonalds" takes.
| ronsor wrote:
| Well, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if
| they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise
| their strategy.
| jdross wrote:
| "I'm going to either steal your work in a way you don't
| consent to, or not consume it" isn't really great. The
| alternative is paywalls
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Much of their work consists of poorly sourced articles,
| sensationalism, disinformation, and bias to sway the
| audience.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Then the correct stance is to not visit those sites.
| xigoi wrote:
| Steal? Their server gave me some HTML and it's up to my
| user agent to present it however I want.
| int_19h wrote:
| Anything that kills adtech faster is a good thing at this
| point.
| decimalenough wrote:
| I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if
| they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then
| navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
| Bratmon wrote:
| 100,000 people clicking at $0.01 CPM is way worse for them
| than 10,000 people clicking at $2 CPM.
| bsjshshsb wrote:
| 49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Solution, see my post. ;-)
| Bratmon wrote:
| If you can think of any, then congratulations! You've saved
| journalism!
|
| You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die
| with you.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| 48MB
| Bratmon wrote:
| Which MB should they cut out?
|
| Bear in mind that any cut that reduces their CPM or rate
| of conversation to paid will have to also include an
| equivalent reduction in their staff.
| bsjshshsb wrote:
| Maybe the old "speed the page up and fewer people will
| bounce" adage applies?
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Reminds me of the recent discussion about how news
| websites have to get more shit as they lose users, but
| wait no they don't because nobody heard of a restaurant
| making worse food because people didn't want to eat
| there, because that would become a death spiral very
| quickly.
|
| (Can @dang explain why he decided to rate-limit me now?)
| neya wrote:
| This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism
| instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit
| and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and
| putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
| pibaker wrote:
| I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize
| this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by
| buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified
| ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to
| people not wanting to pay for online news.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay
| for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls)
| are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to
| me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for
| my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't
| seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy
| them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why
| journalists are different? They sell a service for money
| like all the others, but for some reason they have a
| special status and it's totally understandable that they
| respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually,
| somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we
| should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's
| worth to save them from themselves.
| apublicfrog wrote:
| Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a
| problem where most people wanted to come in and get food
| for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and
| people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset
| they could no longer go out to eat when there were none
| left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal,
| you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality
| drops in turn.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > if every restaurant in town had a problem where most
| people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it
| was an expectation in the industry)
|
| Then the industry itself would not be very sustainable,
| wouldn't it? In that case, I would expect the industry to
| radically change or to disappear like many other
| industries whose expectations were made unsustainable by
| tech progress. For some reason, we're incredibly excited
| of it happening to coding, music, art, but not to
| journalism. Journalism must survive in its current form
| at all costs.
| neya wrote:
| It is an interesting view point. The core issue is
| journalists have just become middle-men in a free
| information era and demanding money for it. Like I said,
| what's to stop me (or someone) to simply write a
| crawler/agent that just gathers data on a bunch of sites
| where information is curated (like X, HN, Reddit) and
| presenting it to me in a readable format? I think people
| see this and hence the reluctance to pay. The average Joe
| gets his news from social media (Facebook / Instagram / X /
| etc.) and doesn't think any online news journal is worth
| paying $20/month for.
|
| It only proves my point - if journalists really added value
| - like reporting on something that you can't just find out
| by browsing social media, maybe they would have a chance.
| But, what we see and have is only just sloppy reporting.
|
| Here's one example:
|
| https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-
| fi...
| pibaker wrote:
| > a free information era
|
| Not all information is out there for free, monetarily and
| in terms of personal liberty. News articles frequently
| quote "sources inside" some three letter agencies or
| major corporations who will face consequences if they
| speak to the public under their real names, and will be
| rightfully dismissed if spoken anonymously _without a
| journalist being able to ascertain their identity_. There
| is also information that is only spread behind closed
| doors -- trade shows, conferences, sometimes even
| governmental meetings -- where the participants may not
| want the public to know what they are doing. Then there
| is the investigative digging, knowing who to ask
| questions and what questions to ask...
|
| I understand you may think all journalism is just reddit
| and twitter compilations but it was not always the case.
| Most people, you likely included, do not even know what
| they are missing out when their local journalism
| collapses (again, due to loss of newspaper sell and
| classified ad revenues) and leaves everyone in the dark
| about what is going on in local politics.
| scared_together wrote:
| In the case of the New York Times, they have subscriptions and
| many are willing to pay for their work - but their
| subscriptions are not ad-free.
| vesselapi wrote:
| This is what killed my willingness to subscribe to most
| outlets. If I'm paying, I expect the page to load in under a
| second with zero tracking. Instead you get the same bloated
| experience minus a banner ad or two.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding
| profitable ads
|
| I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should
| succeed.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| If the ad-tech sausage factory needs 49MB of JS for a clickbait
| article, that is not "earning" a living. They are just
| externalizing costs to users and ISPs. You can defend the
| hustle, but the scale of waste here is cartoonish.
|
| If you need a CDN and half a browser runtime just to show 800
| words about celebrity nonsense, the business model is broken.
| Everyone else is footing the bandwidth bill for nonsense they
| never asked to recieve.
| decimalenough wrote:
| This is why people continue to lament Google Reader (and RSS in
| general): it was a way to read content on your own terms, without
| getting hijacked by ads.
| Cyphase wrote:
| RSS and feed readers still exist! All hope is not lost.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Sure, I use Feedly myself, but RSS is increasingly
| marginalized. I use to follow blogs, but it's not usable for
| mainstream media, Reddit, HN, etc etc.
| lightandlight wrote:
| > Reddit, HN
|
| Hacker News still has a feed (that's the only reason why I
| saw this thread). And Reddit gives you a feed for your
| subscribed subreddits.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| something like RSSHub can be used in conjunction with your
| RSS reader and will generate feeds for sites that dont have
| them. RSS-Bridge is another option
| fsflover wrote:
| People should stop lamenting Google Reader and start using RSS.
| There are numerous threads about it on HN, e.g.,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459233
| bergheim wrote:
| What on earth do you have to rely on alphabet, an ad company,
| to read rss for? there are _many_ other options, that are not
| made by an ad company.
|
| Google Reader was never the answer. It's such a shame that
| people even here don't realize that relying on Google for that
| had interests at odds - and you weren't part of the equation at
| all.
|
| Well, except for your data. You didn't give them enough data.
| So they shut down shop. Gmail though, ammirite? :D
|
| Yeah I wonder why gmail was not one of the shut down products
| /s
| bot403 wrote:
| Why lament it? I've been using Inoreader for over a decade
| after Google Reader went away. And I gladly pay for it year
| after year.
| nativeit wrote:
| Got to this article/comments section via FreshRSS. Still the
| greatest way to consume media on the web.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| This rubbish also exists disproportionately for recipe
| pages/cooking websites as well.
|
| You have 20 ads scattered around, an autoplaying video of some
| random recipe/ad, 2-3 popups to subscribe, buy some affiliated
| product and then the author's life story and then a story ABOUT
| the recipe before I am able to see the detailed recipe in the
| proper format.
|
| It's second nature to open all these websites in reader mode for
| me atp.
| jopsen wrote:
| Good sites do exist. It's just that they drown.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| True, these ad heavy cooking sites also dabble extensively in
| SEOmaxxing their way to the top.
| nativeit wrote:
| I remember browsing the web in 1993-1994. It was literally a
| list of webpages. Yahoo was there, though, so presumably
| they've fallen farthest?
| ray023 wrote:
| I think it's a GOOD thing, actually. Because all these
| publications a dying anyway. And even if your filter out all the
| ad and surveillance trash, you are left with trash propaganda and
| brain rot content. Like why even make the effort of filtering out
| the actual text from some "journalist" from these propaganda
| outlets. It's not even worth it.
|
| If people tune out only because how horrible the sites are, good.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| I think that unless one is well-connected or is willing to pay
| significant money, time, and/or effort to obtain high-quality
| information, one will still generally get more accurate
| information about the world by reading between the lines of the
| propaganda than one would by not reading the propaganda at all.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even
| bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of
| its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the
| effort.
|
| Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web
| surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites
| --those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript
| bloat--will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
|
| We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and
| past it into a search engine and find another site with the same
| or similar info but with easier access.
|
| I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic.
| Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only
| one website, generally dozens have the story and because of
| syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical
| text and images.
|
| My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and
| it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one
| click).
|
| I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes
| YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all
| ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped
| by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work
| sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.)
|
| Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that
| unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for
| websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data.
|
| Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not
| the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a
| different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they
| deserve to be treated as such.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use
| alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix
| with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure
| OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web
| without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a
| temporary stopgap.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be that way, you can only push people so
| far before they riot. History has thousands of instances
| and many have been very ugly, 1789 and 1917 for instance.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| To be frank, I don't think the general public cares
| enough. And the other side is always ready to use
| children safety, foreign hackers and scam prevention as
| an argument. Nobody will riot over tech people losing the
| ability to run their own machines with their own
| software. It already happened to printers and, most
| importantly, phones. When 95% of normal activities happen
| on mobile devices anyway, they will come for computers.
| They'll run a campaign, they'll lobby politics, cartel
| chip vendors and start introducing small changes in
| hardware and OS that will make it always a bit more
| inconvenient running your own software. Until there's
| nothing left to defend, and the industry will move on.
| int_19h wrote:
| People riot when they can't make ends meet, not when they
| can't install an app on their phone. Rioting is very
| costly.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| If Google were just starting YouTube today then DRM would
| likely be enforced through a dedicated app. The trouble for
| Google is that millions watch YouTube through web browsers
| many of whom aren't even using a Google account let alone
| even being subscribers to a particular YouTube page.
| Viewership would drop dramatically.
|
| Only several days ago I watched the presenter of _RobWords_
| whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many
| more people just watch his presentations than watch and
| _also_ subscribe.
|
| The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al
| with high ranking commercial content are the millions of
| small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want
| to tell the world at large their particular stories. Enforced
| DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.
| int_19h wrote:
| YouTube is already actively blocking alternative clients.
| that's why yt-dlp needs a JavaScript runtime these days:
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
|
| They are also not averse to using legal means to block them.
| For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone,
| Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so
| Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to
| remove it from the store:
| https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-
| youtu...
| alpinisme wrote:
| What does playing fair mean in this context? It would be one
| thing if you were a paid subscriber complaining that even
| paying sucks so you left, but it sounds like you're not.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I'd like to answer that in detail but it's impractical to do
| so here as it'd take pages. As a starter though begin with
| them not violating users' privacy.
|
| Another quick point: my observation is that the worse the ad
| problem the lower quality the content is. Cory Doctorow's
| "enshitification" encapsulates the problems in a nutshell.
| zahlman wrote:
| If you have enough detail for a blog post I'd heartily
| encourage you to submit it.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I actually had one a while back but it became too taxing
| to keep it up to date. I've covered much of this stuff on
| HN though.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| You're right, it means nothing. But it cuts two ways. These
| sites are sending me bytes and I choose which bytes I
| visualize (via an ad blocker). Any expectation the website
| has about how I consume the content has no meaning and it's
| entirely their problem.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It is strange to hear these threats about avoiding websites
| from people who are not subscribers and also definitely using
| an ad blocker.
|
| News sites aren't publishing their content for the warm fuzzy
| feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They're running
| businesses. If you're dead set on not paying and not seeing
| ads, it's actually better for them that you don't visit the
| site at all.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| 'Running a business' is not carte blanche to do whatever
| you like to get money, and it does not silence valid
| criticism. Businesses still exist in society and have to
| act accordingly. A primary mechanism that society has to
| enforce rules is criticism and shame.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Have you ever entertained that maybe consumers should act
| accordingly too?
|
| That website is loaded with too many ads, I left it and
| am not going back.
|
| Not
|
| That website has too many ads, I'm getting an ad blocker
| and going back.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| A business is not entitled to make people look at their
| ads. If they offer something in a publicly accessible
| place and they get ad eyeballs, good for them. If they
| don't, sucks for them. If they don't like it there are
| plenty of other markets they can do business in.
| WarmWash wrote:
| You're not entitled to any webpage except your own...
| Eisenstein wrote:
| If they want to charge users with ad-blockers under the
| Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for unauthorized access for
| viewing non-protected pages then they should do that.
| Otherwise, you are wrong.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| I am a paid subscriber to NYT and have been reading it paper
| / internet for 30+ years. It is an Enshittification winner in
| terms tracking and click bait. It doesn't feel like a serious
| news outlet anymore, feels like Huff Post or similar.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Yes this, I was a subscriber for about a decade even back
| then an adblocker was required for sane reading even with a
| subscription. I cant imagine what it looks like without an
| adblocker these days.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| > Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web
| surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news
| sites--those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of
| JavaScript bloat--will just go elsewhere or load pages without
| JavaScript.
|
| No.
|
| "savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience
| terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers
| to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor
| what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about
| either. The only consideration is whether the site has content
| they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true
| that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't
| doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
|
| Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any
| sleep over people like us.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" ...but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people
| like us."_
|
| Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The
| profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to
| ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues
| hardly nudge the graphs.
|
| Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
| zbentley wrote:
| Sure, but GP's still right: savvy internet users are a
| rounding error in volume ... and thus revenue as well. So
| whatever forces are enshittifying news websites, they'll
| not reconsider because power users complain.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues._
|
| NYT's revenue and subscription base are both increasing
| quite well.
|
| Ad revenue was up 20%, and profit was up 26% in Q4. Revenue
| was over $700,000,000. 12,300,000 people pay for the New
| York Times.
| keane wrote:
| It's hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org
| (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or
| https://newsminimalist.com
| TheMode wrote:
| https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS
| tomcatfish wrote:
| Cannot reproduce on my machine
| goodmythical wrote:
| similar for me. homepage: 47.25 kB transferred with
| articles averaging ~70kB with ublock origin having
| refreshingly zero impact.
| TheMode wrote:
| 200KB uncompressed*
|
| You can download the homepage html see the style block.
| benbristow wrote:
| Comes to about 2MB for me, which seems to be because
| they've added the EU cookie policy compliance bloat
| (probably from a third-party). Once that's agreed to via
| cookies the page is 47KB.
| aembleton wrote:
| 27KB of CSS for me, but only if I switch off uBO.
| Otherwise, there's no CSS. I think the CSS is just for the
| cookie popup styling.
| gxs wrote:
| I'm honestly dumbfounded that these exist
|
| In the past some site had light versions, but I haven't come
| across one in over 10 years
|
| Makes me wonder if this isn't just some rogue employee
| maintaining this without anyone else realizing it
|
| It's the light version, but ironically I would happily pay
| these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite
| pages and not track me. They don't make anywhere close to
| that from me in a year
|
| Sadly, here's how it would go: they'd do it, it be
| successful, they'd ipo, after a few years they'd need growth,
| they'd introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you'd
| somehow wind up watching ads again
| chrneu wrote:
| a lot of these are internal tools that they just haven't
| disabled access to for whatever reason. old.reddit still
| exists for whatever reason.
| basilikum wrote:
| That's only a matter of time until they kill it.
| i.reddit.com is already dead.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Love both of them. CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox
| News" for my taste, though.
|
| If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would
| be best. I really love the different perspectives.
|
| I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal
| with them on a case by case basis.
| jszymborski wrote:
| > CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my
| taste, though.
|
| Don't worry, it'll be just like the real Fox news after the
| Paramount merger.
| kitd wrote:
| At least the BBC has RSS feeds for its stories, which
| avoids having to go through the dire news front page.
| tommica wrote:
| Ahh, I love them. The fact that they are fast, give you the
| exact thing you are looking for without any other noise is
| just amazing!
| yabones wrote:
| I also love https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news
|
| They also compress the hell out of the images, so it all
| loads shockingly well on poor connections.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web
| surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news
| sites--those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of
| JavaScript bloat--will just go elsewhere or load pages without
| JavaScript.
|
| They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would
| never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker
| running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.
|
| Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to
| contribute revenue anyway. You're doing them a very tiny favor
| by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their
| hosting bills.
| jkestner wrote:
| > They also know that web surfers like you would never
| actually buy a subscription
|
| I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck
| that. One reason I don't use apps is that I can't block ads.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck
| that._
|
| Dead trees FTW.
|
| I'm lucky enough to live somewhere that gets dead trees for
| NYT, WSJ, local rag, and more. I value news, so I pay for
| it, and it's still less than I spend on coffee each month.
|
| The best part: The newspaper ends. No everscroll zombie
| addiction.
| aprentic wrote:
| I'm about to go full cycle.
|
| For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a
| good product at a fair price. I started getting a few
| subscriptions to various services.
|
| Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid
| accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.
|
| Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience
| relative to less legitimate methods of acces.
| gzread wrote:
| What is your most hated service? There must be people here
| looking for a new product to create.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Why would you feel guilty for not visiting a site you're
| not paying for and where you're blocking ads?"_
|
| This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather
| complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).
|
| In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I
| actually possess some)!
|
| In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers
| at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production
| was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for
| what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism
| was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about
| forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.
|
| Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what
| happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of
| newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly
| lesser value.
|
| In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will
| not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with
| magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).
|
| So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are
| a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while
| ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be
| _MUCH_ easier than it is now (this would apply to all
| websites and would also be a huge boon for open source
| developers).
|
| What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with
| no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or
| whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to
| say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very
| small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and
| the transaction is done (only enter one's details if
| purchasing something that has to be delivered).
|
| That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user
| wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be
| implemented by blockchain or such.
|
| The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious--and
| they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry
| money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and
| the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to
| high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.
|
| In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits
| with cash--I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries,
| the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no
| big deal but it isn't.
|
| It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without
| name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the
| internet payment problems.
|
| Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but
| many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount
| for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the
| money was going into producing better products.
|
| For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a
| copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough
| money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully
| on par with MSO.
|
| Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a
| minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people
| when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the
| numbers could run into the hundreds per week).
|
| I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a
| scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.
|
| Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.
| int_19h wrote:
| That's why we need to spread the word and get more people
| using adblockers. It's not even a hard sell - the difference
| is so striking, once it has been seen, it sells itself, even
| for the most casual users.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > They know this. They also know that web surfers like you
| would never actually buy a subscription ..
|
| That's not true I had a subscription for multiple years. I
| canceled it because they
|
| A. Kept trying to show me bullshit ads, B. The overall
| deterioration of the quality of the content especially the
| opinion section.
| WarmWash wrote:
| >Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going
| to contribute revenue anyway.
|
| It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription
| conversion, it's under 1%.
|
| It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the
| internet is full of children, even grown children now in
| their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea
| that ad blocking will save the internet.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web
| surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news
| sites--those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of
| JavaScript bloat--will just go elsewhere or load pages without
| JavaScript.
|
| Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people
| have with computers but they don't want random article readers
| anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
| hahajk wrote:
| > We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and
| past it into a search engine and find another site with the
| same or similar info but with easier access.
|
| Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed
| enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to
| have the same issues.
| zbentley wrote:
| The AP and Reuters are well-staffed and have functional
| websites. The sites aren't great (they've been afflicted with
| bloat and advertising along with most outlets, just at a
| marginally lower rate), but they are at least usable.
| ajxs wrote:
| Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed:
| They don't _archive_ well.
|
| Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the
| actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback
| Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but
| lots of interesting content has already been lost to time
| because of this.
| userbinator wrote:
| Depending on the site, unfortunately that might be
| interpreted as a feature and not a bug.
| username223 wrote:
| The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles
| include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is
| typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and
| tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking
| at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.
| doe88 wrote:
| I don't understand all these sites with _moving parts_ even
| with muted soon, like if everything was a collection of GIFs.
| NYT followed this path and started to insert muted clips
| preheminently on their _page one_ , very very annoying.
| napolux wrote:
| and the NYT web team was praised as one of the best in the world
| some (many?) years ago.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Some of them are good (formerly Richard Harris - Svelte[0])
| some of them should stop podcasting.
|
| [0]: https://svelte.dev/
| keane wrote:
| previously: nytlabs.com
| https://web.archive.org/web/20191025052129/http://nytlabs.co...
|
| now: https://rd.nytimes.com
| mvrckhckr wrote:
| Only major media can get away with this kind of bloat. For the
| normal website, Google would never include you in the SERPs even
| if your page is a fraction of that size.
| galphanet wrote:
| This is just the top of the iceberg. Don't get me started on
| airlines websites (looking at you Air Canada), where the product
| owner, designers, developers are not able to get a simple
| workflow straight without loading Mb of useless javascript and
| interrupt the user journey multiple times. Give me back the
| command line terminal like Amadeus, that would be perfect.
|
| How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be
| used by the user and not for the shareholders?
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be
| used by the user and not for the shareholders?
|
| Or for developers to pad their CV.
| niccl wrote:
| Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment
| than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.
| userbinator wrote:
| _How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be
| used by the user and not for the shareholders?_
|
| Loudly oppose the trendchasing devs who have been brainwashed
| into the "newer is better" mindset by Big Tech. I'm sure the
| shareholders would want to reduce the amount they spend on
| server/bandwidth costs and doing "development and maintenance"
| too.
|
| Simple HTML forms can already make for a very usable and cheap
| site, yet a whole generation of developers have been fed
| propaganda about how they need to use JS for everything.
| ngruhn wrote:
| > Don't get me started on airlines websites
|
| You can't beat China Southern . They have the most dog shit
| website I've ever seen. The flight was fine but I gave up doing
| online check in after 3 attempts. Never mind the bloat:
|
| - required text fields with wrong or missing labels. One field
| was labeled "ticket no.". It kept getting rejected. I randomly
| tried passport number instead. It worked.
|
| - sometimes fields only have a placeholder that you can't fully
| read because the field has not enough width ("Please enter the
| correct...") and the placeholder disappears once you start
| typing.
|
| - date picker is randomly in Chinese
|
| - makes you go through multi step seat selection process only
| to tell you at the end that seat selection is not possible
| anymore.
|
| - signed up with email; logged out and went back to the SAME
| login page; now sign up via phone number is required!?
| shalmanese wrote:
| Almost nobody uses websites in China. You're expected to
| interact with them via WeChat Mini-app where the experience
| is generally fine.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once.
|
| They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and
| could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page
| with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason
| the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct
| fiber to out datacenter few blocks away.
|
| We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit of
| connection speed, anything more and they just make nonsense out
| of it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Same for fancy computers. Dev on a fast one if you like, but
| test things out on a Chromebook.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| "Craptop duty"[1]. (Third time in three years I'm posting an
| essentially identical comment, hah.)
|
| [1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-
| laptop/
| tom1337 wrote:
| I now wonder if it'd be a good idea to move our end to end
| tests to a pretty slow vm instead of beefy 8 core 32gb ram
| machine and check which timeouts will be triggered because
| our app may have been unoptimized for slower
| environments...
| bombcar wrote:
| It's worth doing at least sometimes; schedule an over The
| Weekend-to-Weekend test on slow hardware and log the
| issues.
|
| Even if you don't fix them, knowing where the weak points
| are is valuable for when they do snap in production.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| For blocking presubmit checks, getting the fastest
| machine you can is probably reasonable. Otherwise, the
| advantage of the craptop approach is that it needs
| basically no infra work and gives an immediate impression
| of the site, and not CI, being slow.
|
| If you're willing to build some infra, there's probably a
| lot more you can do--nightly slow-hardware runs come to
| mind immediately, browser devtools have a convincing
| builtin emulation of slow connections, a page displaying
| a graph of test runtime over time[1] isn't hard to set
| up, etc.--but I don't really have experience with that.
|
| [1] See e.g. https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/ov
| erview?numDays=3....
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| I kid you not a few jobs ago I found several race
| conditions in my code and tests by running them at the
| same time as a multi threaded openssl burn test. :)
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| Gonna bookmark that article for tomorrow, craptop duty is
| such a funny way to put it.
|
| Similarly, a colleague I had before insisted on using a
| crappy screen. Helped a lot to make sure things stay
| visible on customers' low contrast screens with horrible
| viewing angles, which are still surprisingly common.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Based on the damage rate for company laptop screens, one can
| usually be sure anything high-end will be out of your own
| pocket. =3
| drcongo wrote:
| Music producers often have some shitty speakers known as grot
| boxes that they use to make sure their mix will sound as good
| as it can on consumer audio, not just on their extremely
| expensive studio monitors. Chromebooks are perfectly
| analogous. As a side note, today I learned that Grotbox is
| now an actual brand: https://grotbox.com
| pipe01 wrote:
| Doesn't having a brand for that kinda go against the
| definition?
| Krutonium wrote:
| Based on the website they're banking on people thinking
| they were always a brand, and thus a lot of artists use
| their speakers?
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm pretty damn sure those videos were put on the page because
| someone in marketing wanted them. I'm pretty sure then QA
| complained the videos loaded too slowly, so the preloading was
| added. Then, the upper management responsible for the mess
| shrugged their shoulders and let it ship.
|
| You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or
| that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which
| is actually the code). Please stop blaming the devs. You're
| laundering blame. Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever
| up to the devs alone.
|
| From the perspective of the devs, they expect that the
| infrastructure can handle what the business wanted. If you have
| a problem you really should punch up, not down.
| arccy wrote:
| Sounds just like a "helpless" dev that shifts blame to anyone
| but themselves.
| sublinear wrote:
| Do you have a suggestion how else to handle the situation I
| described?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| There's a magic word that can be used in scenarios like
| this: "No."
|
| Failing that, _interpret_ the requirements.
|
| Nobody can watch a bunch of videos _at once_ that don't
| even show up until you scroll! That's a _nonsense
| requirement_ and the dev's failure to push back or
| redirect in a more viable direction is a sign of _their_
| incompetence, not that of the non-technical manager that
| saw YouTube's interface and assumes that that's normal
| and doable.
|
| It is! You'd have to know about lazy loading and CDNs,
| but neither is black magic.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| It's not a sign of their incompetence, it's a sign of the
| realities of many corporate environments.
|
| But hey, if you want to rail against incompetent
| developers who exist in a make-believe world where they
| hold all the power are simply too lazy and incompetent to
| 'do the right thing' then go ahead!
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > realities of many corporate environments
|
| Stop making excuses and start taking ownership and
| responsibility of your craft.
|
| I work in huge government departments, large financial
| orgs, and other "enterprise" places that are the poster
| child for the "realities of corporate environments".
|
| Automatically saying "yes" to everything makes you a
| useless meat robot.
|
| If you do _everything_ that the customer asks, without
| push back, negotiation, or at least a deeper
| understanding, then you will produce broken garbage.
|
| I see this all the time: _" The customer asked for X, so
| I pressed the button!"_ is the cry of the incompetent
| junior tech that will never be promoted.
|
| Nobody wants a uselessly slow website. Nobody wants to
| piss of their customers. Nobody wants angry rants about
| their online presence to make headline news.
|
| What the customer wanted was multi media content. That's
| fine. The technical specifics of _how_ that is presented
| is up to the engineering team to decide. You 're not
| advisors! You _own_ the technical decision making, so act
| like it.
|
| If you _make the decision_ to shove nearly a gigabyte
| down the wire to show the landing page, then _that 's on
| you_. The manager asking for "video clips" or whatever as
| the feature probably doesn't even know the difference
| between megabyte and gigabyte! They shouldn't have to in
| the same way that I shouldn't have to know about my
| state's electrical wiring standards if I get a sparky out
| to add a porch light. If my house burns down, that's the
| _electrician 's fault_, not mine as the customer!
|
| Similarly, if someone asks for lights inside their pool,
| an electrician that strings ordinary mains cabling
| through the water should be jailed for criminal
| negligence. _Obviously_ , only special low-voltage
| lighting can be used in water, especially near people.
| Duh.
|
| Act like an electrician, not like a bored shopkeer who's
| memorised the line "the customer is always right" without
| realising that the full quote ends in _"... in matters of
| taste. "_
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| There's nothing "make believe" here, incompetent devs,
| and devs (regardless of competence) who don't push back
| against silly requirements _absolutely_ exist.
| sayamqazi wrote:
| I have tried push back but then the other guy that says
| "I can do it" gets the ticket handed to him.
|
| Me: we cant do X bceause it has Y and Z implcations for
| end users
|
| Manager: It fits our brand and we have to do it.
|
| Dev: I can do it and the implications are mitigated by
| (handwavy explanation)
|
| Maanger: sounds good. (To me) Maybe you can make a
| (useless) diagram for this featuer that will be realy
| handy for KT
|
| --Days later--
|
| Feature is delivered and the Y and Z were ethier not
| mitigated or there was a attempt-ish to mitigate them
| sublinear wrote:
| > You'd have to know about lazy loading and CDNs, but
| neither is black magic.
|
| I suppose you've never experienced the corporate hell
| that can happen with a CDN. The dev could submit a dozen
| servicenow tickets only to see half of them rejected by
| those same incompetent non-technical managers, or they
| could just make the thing work now and move on.
|
| The next project will be better after the dust settles
| and those rejections have been reviewed and escalated
| into proper discussions. Nobody tells the story of that
| project because it does the things everyone expects.
| Guess who led those discussions and fought to get the
| meetings on the calendar? The "incompetent" devs of
| course!
| LandR wrote:
| Man, I probably say no to like 40% of the requests I get
| as a dev. Often we will come up with a better way of
| doing things by just spending 15-30 mins talking to the
| business about the actual problem they are having.
|
| Some are just flat out refused as they are just too
| stupid and will cripple the system in some way.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| In general, how people communicate internally and with the
| public is important.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
|
| Have a wonderful day =3
| zahlman wrote:
| "Developers" here clearly refers to the entire organization
| responsible. The internal politics of the foo.com providers
| are not relevant to Foo users.
| sublinear wrote:
| I agree except for your definition of "developers". I see
| this all the time and can't understand why the blame can't
| just be the business as a whole instead of singling out
| "developers". In fact, the only time I ever hear
| "developers" used that way it's a gamer without a job
| saying it.
|
| The blame clearly lies with the contradictory requirements
| provided by the broader business too divorced from
| implementation details to know they're asking for something
| dumb. Developers do not decide those.
| hobs wrote:
| From the perspective of the devs, they have a responsibility
| for saying something literally wont fly anywhere, ever,
| saying the business is responsible for every bad decision is
| a complete abrogation of your responsibilities.
| sublinear wrote:
| Why don't you tell your boss or team something like that
| and see how well that flies.
|
| The responsibility of the devs is to deliver what was
| asked. They can and probably do make notes of the results.
| So does QA. So do the other stakeholders. On their
| respective teams they get the same BS from everyone who
| isn't pleased with the outcome.
|
| Ultimately things are on a deadline and the devs must meet
| requirements where the priority is not performance. It says
| nothing about their ability to write performant code. It
| says nothing about whether that performant code is even
| possible in a browser while meeting the approval of the
| dozens of people with their own agendas. It says everything
| about where you work.
| jkestner wrote:
| Maybe everyone's got a different situation, but when a
| different department tried to put ActiveX avatars all
| over their site, though it offended me from a UX
| perspective, I was able to get higher ups to reject it by
| pointing out that it would shut out 20% of their
| customers.
|
| We always have discussions here about how you have to
| learn to talk to communicate your value to clients in a
| language they understand. Same goes for internal
| communications.
| hobs wrote:
| I didn't say anything about their development abilities,
| what I am pointing to is their professional
| responsibility. If a doctor is asked by a client to cut
| off their arm and they say no, and the client fires them,
| did the doctor err? (No) This doesn't comment on their
| ability to do surgery.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| So just to check, instead of doing something you were
| told to, that you know is a stupid idea (after telling
| all concerned it's a dumb idea and being told to go ahead
| anyway, eg adding a crapton of video to a page), you
| would just resign, to protect your personal integrity?
| lentil_soup wrote:
| no, you offer a technical solution to the problem. Show
| some videos is the problem. Downloading almost a GB of
| video content on page load is the (bad) technical
| solution. There are better ways and as a developer it's
| part of your job to solve things in a way that makes
| sense.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The responsibility of the devs is to deliver what was
| asked.
|
| Software development isn't factory work. And factory
| workers are expected to notice problems and escalate
| them.
|
| Anyway, they're paying me far too much to have me turn
| off my brain and just check the boxes they want checked
| in all situations. Sometimes, checking boxes because they
| need to be checked is the thing to do, but usually it's
| not.
| sublinear wrote:
| > Software development isn't factory work
|
| We're definitely way past the point where there is a
| singular definition of what "software development" is
| _supposed to_ mean.
|
| I also didn't describe anything like factory work.
| xigoi wrote:
| > Please stop blaming the devs. You're laundering blame.
| Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever up to the devs
| alone.
|
| If a bridge engineer is asked to build a bridge that would
| collapse under its own weight, they will refuse. Why should
| it be different for software engineers?
| sublinear wrote:
| It's a website and not a bridge. Based on the description
| given, it's not a critical website either. If it was, the
| requirements would have specified it must be built
| differently.
|
| You're not even arguing with me BTW. You're arguing against
| the entire premise of running a business. Priorities are
| not going to necessarily be what you value most.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > If it was, the requirements would have specified it
| must be built differently.
|
| I've seen a lot of times where "business people" ask for
| a feature that sounds good but isn't technically viable
| for any number of reasons. The devs not doing pushback
| would lead to similarly non-functional/broken stuff
| getting shipped.
|
| The pushback doesn't even need to be adversarial, just do
| some requirements engineering, figure out what they want
| and go "Okay, to implement X in the best possible way, we
| should do Y and avoid Z because of W."
|
| In the bridge analogy, the people who are asking for a
| specific design might not know that it'd collapse under
| its own weight and the engineers should look for the best
| solution.
|
| There are environments where devs can't do that sort of
| requirements engineering and those are generally pretty
| dysfunctional - obviously you don't need that for every
| feature request, but it's nice to have that ability be
| available when needed.
| zbentley wrote:
| While I assume that there are plenty of critical websites
| out there which are built with efficiency and resource
| consumption control in mind, the few I have worked on
| were not.
|
| On those sites you're right: the approach was _different_
| , but not necessarily _better_. Tracking library bloat
| and marketing-driven design were reduced. But insane
| "security" constraints (e.g. "you have to stay on
| outdated revisions of this library" or "containers are
| not allowed on the backend, only bare metal", no joke--
| constraints that led to significant _increased_ security
| risk) and extremely user-hostile design practices
| increased, as well as there being an exceedingly long
| hurry-up-and-wait turnaround time for shipping important
| fixes /improvements.
|
| Working on a safety/state-critical site isn't a panacea,
| in other words.
| chuckadams wrote:
| It is indeed not a bridge, and lives are not at stake.
| But there also used to be a thing called "professional
| pride".
| nikanj wrote:
| Because bridge engineers can be sued if the bridge kills
| people
| xigoi wrote:
| I wish we could sue developers who create unusably bad
| software wasting time of millions of people.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Because software engineers aren't real engineers. A real
| engineer has liability insurance.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The devs are the subject matter experts. Does marketing
| understand the consequences of preloading all those videos?
| Does upper management? Unlikely. It's the experts' job to
| educate them. That's part of the job as much as writing code
| is.
| swasheck wrote:
| this isn't purely laundering blame. it is frustrating for the
| infrastructure/operations side is that the dev teams
| routinely kick the can down to them instead of documenting
| the performance/reliability weak points. in this case, when
| someone complains about the performance of the site, both dev
| and qa should have documented artifacts that explain this
| potential. as an infrastructure and reliability person, i am
| happy to support this effort with my own analysis. i am less
| inclined to support the dev team that just says, "hey, i
| delivered what they asked for, it's up to you to make it
| functional."
|
| > From the perspective of the devs, they expect that the
| infrastructure can handle what the business wanted. If you
| have a problem you really should punch up, not down.
|
| this belittles the intelligence of the dev team. they should
| know better. it's like validating saying "i really thought i
| could pour vodka in the fuel tank of this porsche and
| everything would function correctly. must be porsche's
| fault."
| sublinear wrote:
| Yes, but can you blame someone for trying when all the gas
| stations are 1000 miles away? That's the exact situation
| the devs are put in all the time.
|
| Oh, and the rest of the business doesn't even know what a
| car or gasoline are!
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| Fuck that. I just left a job where the IT dept just said "yes
| and" to the executives for 30 years. It was the most fucked
| environment I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot coming
| from the MSP space. Professionals get hired to do these
| things so they can say "No, that's a terrible idea" when
| people with no knowledge of the domain make requests. Your
| attitude is super toxic.
| sublinear wrote:
| I suppose the realities of teamwork can be seen as "toxic"
| by some individuals.
| jmye wrote:
| I suppose I understand why devs who don't know how to say
| no, or work with stakeholders, are terrified of AI. What
| value do you have, at this point, when you're unwilling
| to or incapable of pushing back on bad ideas?
| sublinear wrote:
| You'd have to define a "bad idea" much more precisely and
| in the context of that particular business.
|
| Developers often do push back and warn against ideas that
| have too many compromises, but cannot outright say no
| just because of that. There are too many other people
| involved.
|
| You seem to think that any one person/group
| has/wants/should have full control when deemed necessary.
| That doesn't make sense unless either the success
| criteria are lacking (you call the shots alone and
| probably miss a ton of opportunities), or the
| requirements are so constrained that all the work is just
| optimizing the implementation (someone else already
| called the shots without you).
|
| If your work is either of those situations it means the
| business plan sucks. AI is the least of your worries.
| jmye wrote:
| * I want to be clear, I'm using "you" in the general
| sense - apologies if it reads as accusatory.
|
| If you lack the ability to say no to objectively bad
| ideas, you have very little value as a developer. Anyone
| can code a feature just because someone said to code it
| (Claude builds trivial objects for me every day when I
| know what I want but can't remember the specific syntax
| or pattern to do it). It takes actual skill and expertise
| to both recognize bad ideas, and convince people they're
| bad ideas.
|
| > You seem to think that any one person/group
| has/wants/should have full control when deemed necessary.
|
| No, I think subject matter experts should function as
| experts and should have decision-making power within
| their scope of expertise - if they're unable to convince
| others, then they are ineffective and should be replaced
| by SMEs who _are_ effective.
|
| I don't understand why you think a committee approach and
| implementation of bad ideas, regardless of what the
| experts in the room think, is an optimal business
| pattern.
| allreduce wrote:
| And the devs are responsible for finding a good technical
| solution under these constraints. If they can't, for
| communicating _their_ constraints to the rest of the team so
| a better tradeoff can be found.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| If you want to see context aware pre-fetching done right go to
| mcmaster.com ...
|
| There are good reasons to have a small cheap development
| staging server, as the rate-limited connection implicitly
| trains people what not to include. =3
| psim1 wrote:
| And this! https://www.mcmaster.com/help/api/ Linked from the
| footer of every page!
|
| I'm so happy to have seen their web site that I want to do
| business with them, even though I have no business to be
| done.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Some CAD/CAM applications directly integrate a component
| toolbox. =3
| userbinator wrote:
| Making it easy to buy stuff from them definitely helps
| their bottom line. Unfortunately the few companies I've
| wanted to buy from but their website was horrible and made
| me go elsewhere, either completely ignored or dismissed my
| complaints about having just lost a customer.
| vunderba wrote:
| PSA for those who aren't aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers
| have a _Network_ tab in the developer tools where you can dial
| down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection.
|
| Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see
| how well your site will perform on more modest setups.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I once spent around an hour optimizing a feature because it
| felt slow - turns out that the slower simulated connection
| had just stayed enabled after a restart (can't remember if it
| was just the browser or the OS, but I previously needed it
| and then later just forgot to turn it off). Good times,
| useful feature though!
| solarkraft wrote:
| Working as intended!
| vunderba wrote:
| hahaha - I've done something similar. I had an automated
| vitest harness running and at one point it ended up leaving
| a bunch of zombie procs/threads just vampirically leeching
| the crap out of my resources.
|
| I naturally assumed that it was my code that was the
| problem (because I'm often the programmer equivalent of the
| Seinfeld hipster doofus) and spent the next few hours
| optimizing the hell out of it. It turned out to be
| unnecessary but I'm kind of glad it forced me into that
| "profiling" mindset.
| 6510 wrote:
| I wonder if that works beneficial on old computers that
| freeze up when you try load the GB js ad-auction circus
| news circus website. I want to browse loaded pages while
| the new tabs load. If the client just hangs for 2 min it
| gets boring fast.
| FabHK wrote:
| Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004
| Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything
| sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open
| one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even
| if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of
| text. So painful.
| alanning wrote:
| One tool I've found useful in low-power/low-bandwidth
| situations is the Lynx web browser [1]. Used to be
| installed by default in most Linux distributions but I
| think that's probably not the case anymore. Wikipedia
| says its also available on OSX and Windows.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
| eru wrote:
| Links is a bit more usable than lynx, I found.
| 6510 wrote:
| https://www.netsurf-browser.org
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Not supported on OS X for some time.
| lstodd wrote:
| Chawan is nice
|
| https://chawan.net/
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Didn't want to upgrade the memory?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's the speed of the JavaScript compiler, on those old
| browsers they were expected to handle a few kilobytes max
| of event listeners. The chrome vs Firefox browser wars
| sped up JavaScript compilation by 10x at least
| deepsun wrote:
| If only there was browser-as-a-service. That would load
| the pages over it's fast connection and show them to you.
| fwip wrote:
| I feel like there already was one, on HN a few years ago.
| If I remember right, they were hoping to charge
| $20/month.
|
| Edit: Ah, this was it: https://mightyapp.webflow.io/
| mattnewton wrote:
| sounds like the MacOS network utility. I've been bit by
| leaving it on after testing ios apps :D
| reactordev wrote:
| Imagine the speed of those optimizations once you turned it
| off. lol. Love it!
| tech_hutch wrote:
| It's like removing weighted clothing
| rkuska wrote:
| Have the same story but I forgot to disable tc netem on a
| server, luckily it was just staging.
| nicbou wrote:
| I still test mine on GPRS, because my website should work
| fine in the Berlin U-Bahn. I also spent a lot of time working
| from hotels and busses with bad internet, so I care about
| that stuff.
|
| Developers really ought to test such things better.
| renehsz wrote:
| Thank you for doing this! I really mean it. We need more
| developers who care about keeping websites lean and fast.
| There's no good reason a regular site shouldn't work on
| GPRS, except maybe if the main content is video.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's mostly just text on a page. It should be snappy!
| pseudohadamard wrote:
| For Firefox users, here's where it's hidden (and it really is
| hidden): Hamburger menu -> More tools -> Web developer tools,
| then keep clicking on the ">>" until the Network tab appears,
| then scroll over on about the third menu bar down until you
| see "No throttling", that's a combobox that lets you set the
| speed you want.
|
| Alternatively, run uBlock Origin and NoScript and you
| probably won't need it.
| jraph wrote:
| What a weird comment, not sure what you are trying to
| achieve. Any web developer knows how to find the network
| tab of the web developer tools in any browser including
| Firefox, and then the throttle option is immediately there.
|
| You can make it look like any feature in any UI is hidden
| by choosing the longest path to reach it, using many words
| to describe it despite the target audience already knowing
| this stuff, and making your windows as small as possible.
|
| Moreover, that a developer tool is a bit hidden in submenus
| in a UI designed for nontechnical users is fair game.
|
| Even considering this, right click > inspect or
| Ctrl+shift+k also gets you the web developer tools. Not
| that hidden.
|
| And then usually the network tab is visible immediately, it
| is one of the first tabs unless you moved it towards the
| end (even then, usually all the tabs are visible; but it's
| nice you can order the tabs as you want, and that a scroll
| button exists for when your window is too small -- and if
| the web developer panel is too small because it's docked at
| the left you can resize it, dock it to bottom or undock
| it).
|
| This stuff is pretty standard across browsers, it's not
| like Firefox's UI is specifically weird for this. I don't
| have ideas for improving this a lot, it looks quite well
| designed and optimized to me already.
|
| And then no, ublock Origin and No Script can't help you
| optimize the size of the web page you are working on. You
| ought to unblock everything to do this. They are a solution
| for end users, who have very few reasons to use the
| throttle feature. And unfortunately for end users, blocking
| scripts actually breaks too much to be a good, general
| workaround against web pages being too heavy. I know, I
| browse the web like this.
| pseudohadamard wrote:
| Any web developer knows how to find the network tab of
| the web developer tools
|
| Exactly. As you point out, _any web developer_. My
| comment was aimed at helping out people who aren 't web
| developers.
| wpm wrote:
| For macOS users you can download the Network Link Conditioner
| preference pane (it still works in the System Settings app)
| to do this system wide. I think it's in the "Additional Tools
| for Xcode" download.
| szszrk wrote:
| This made me chuckle.
|
| I had a fairly large supplier that was so proud that they
| implemented a functionality that deliberately (in their JS)
| slows down reactions from http responses. So that they can
| showcase all the UI touches like progress bars and spinning
| circles. It was an option in system settings you could turn
| on globally.
|
| My mind was blown, are they not aware of F12 in any major
| browser? They were not, it seems. After I quietly asked about
| that, they removed the whole thing equally quietly and never
| spoke of it again. It's still in release notes, though.
|
| It was like 2 years ago, so browsers could do that for 10-14
| years (depending how you count).
| vunderba wrote:
| That's great. Well, just to let them know if they ever need
| something like that in the future, I'm available for hire
| as an overpriced consultant.
|
| I guarantee with 100% satisfaction that my O(n^n) code will
| allow visitors sufficient time to fully appreciate the
| artistic glory of all the progress bars and spinners.
| lionkor wrote:
| It doesn't throttle Websockets, so be careful with that
| redman25 wrote:
| CPU/network throttling needs to be set for the product
| manager and management - that's the only way you might see
| real change.
|
| We have some egregious slowness in our app that only shows up
| for our largest customers in production but none of our
| organizations in development have that much data. I created a
| load testing organization and keep considering adding
| management to it so they implicitly get the idea that fixing
| the slowness is important.
| anthk wrote:
| I used the text web (https://text.npr.org and the like) thru
| Lyx. Also, Usenet, Gopher, Gemini, some 16 KBPS opus streams,
| everything under 2.7 KBPS when my phone data plan was throttled
| and I was using it in tethering mode. Tons of sites did work,
| but Gopher://magical.fish ran really fast.
|
| Bitlbee saved (and still saves) my ass with tons of the
| protocols available via IRC using nearly nil data to connect.
| Also you can connect with any IRC client since early 90's.
|
| Not just web developers. Electron lovers should be trottled
| with 2GB of RAM machines and some older Celeron/Core Duo
| machine with a GL 2.1 compatible video card. It it desktop
| 'app' smooth on that machine, your project it's ready.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit
|
| Marketing dept. too. They're the primary culprits in all the
| tracking scripts.
| sitharus wrote:
| often we're told to add Google XSS-as-a-serv.. I mean Tag
| Manager, then the non-tech people in Marketing go ham without
| a care in the world beyond their metrics. Can't blame them,
| it's what they're measured on.
|
| Marketing and managers should be restricted as well, because
| managers set the priorities.
| whstl wrote:
| We should 100% blame them.
|
| I recently had to clean up a mess and after days asking
| what's in use and what's not, turns out nothing is really
| needed, and 80 tracking pixels were added "because that's
| how we do it".
| xp84 wrote:
| Reserve a huge share of the blame for the "UX dEsIgNeRs".
| Let's demand to reimplement every single standard widget in a
| way that has 50% odds of being accessible, has bugs, doesn't
| work correctly with autofill most of the time, and adds 600kB
| of code per widget. Our precious branding requires it.
| albedoa wrote:
| > Let's demand to reimplement every single standard widget
| in a way that has 50% odds of being accessible, has bugs,
| doesn't work correctly with autofill most of the time, and
| adds 600kB of code per widget.
|
| You're describing the web developers again. (Or, if UX has
| the power to demand this from software engineering, then
| the problem is not the UX designers.)
| boomlinde wrote:
| That e.g. a form should work predictably according to
| some unambiguous set of principles is of course a UX
| concern. If it doesn't, then maybe someone responsible
| for UX should be more involved in the change review
| process so that they can actually execute on their
| responsibility and make sure that user experience
| concerns are being addressed.
|
| But sure, the current state of brokenness is a result of
| a combination of overambitious designs and poor
| programming. When I worked as a web developer I was often
| tasked with making elements behave in some bespoke way
| that was contrary to the default browser behavior. This
| is not only surprising to the user, but makes the
| implementation error prone.
|
| One example is making a form autosubmit or jump to a
| different field once a text field has reached a certain
| length, or dividing a pin/validation code entry fields
| into multiple text fields, one for each character. This
| is stupidity at the UX level which causes bugs downstream
| because the default operation implemented by the browser
| isn't designed to be idiotic. Then you have to go out of
| your way to make it stupid enough for the design spec,
| and some sizeable subset of webpages that do this will
| predictably end up with bugs related to copying and
| pasting or autofilling.
| sayamqazi wrote:
| I as a developer cannot refuse to not build as-is what
| was signed off by product manager in figma.
|
| Recently had to put so many huge blurs that there was
| screen tearing like effect whenver you srcolled a table.
| AND No i was not allowed to use prebake-blurs because
| they wouldnt resize "responsively"
| whstl wrote:
| If you don't have an engineering manager or tech lead
| able to back you on saying no to a PM, there is something
| seriously broken with that organization.
| zbentley wrote:
| True, but this describes at least half of software
| engineering organizations in my experience.
| albedoa wrote:
| Yes. If the UX group has the power to compel you to do
| what you describe through a PM, without any involvement
| from or consideration for the warnings of you or your
| managers, then the problem is not "UX dEsIgNeRs".
| pseudohadamard wrote:
| You can still make a site unusable without having it load
| lots of data. Go to https://bunnings.com.au on a phone and
| try looking up an item. It's actually faster to walk around
| the store and find an employee and get them to look it up on
| an in-store terminal than it is to use their web site to find
| something. A quick visit to profiles.firefox.com indicates
| it's probably more memory than CPU, half a gigabyte of memory
| consumed if I'm interpreting the graphical bling correctly.
| saintfire wrote:
| How gaslit I must be to remark how more painless this is to
| use than literally any NA store website I've used.
|
| Less useless shit popping up (with ad block so I mean just
| the cookies, store location etc harassments) Store selector
| didn't request new pages every time I do anything;
| resulting in all the popups again. (just download our
| spyware and all these popups will go away!) Somehow my page
| loads are snappier than local stores despite being across
| the planet.
|
| Not saying it's a good site. It's almost the same as Home
| Depot. Just _slightly_ better. I mean there 's an AI button
| for searching for a product so you can do agentic shopping
| with a superintelligence on your side.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| this is a general problem with lots of development. Network,
| Memory, GPU Speed. Designer / Engineer is on a modern Mac with
| 16-64 gig of ram and fast internet. They never try how their
| code/design works on some low end Intel UHD 630 or whatever.
| Lots of developers making 8-13 layer blob backgrounds that runs
| at 60 for 120fps on their modern mac but at 5-10fps on the
| average person's PC because of 15x overdraw.
| hibikir wrote:
| You don't even need video for this: I once worked for a company
| that put a carousel with everything in the product line, and
| every element was just pointing to the high resolution
| photography assets: The one that maybe would be useful for full
| page print media ads. 6000x4000 pngs. It worked fine in the
| office, they said. Add another nice background that size, a few
| more to have on the sides as you scroll down...
|
| I was asked to look at the site when it was already live, and
| some VP of the parent company decided to visit the site from
| their phone at home.
| rhysfonixone wrote:
| Many web application frameworks already have extensive built-
| in optimization features, though examples like the one that
| you shared indicate that there are fundamentals that many
| people contributing to the modern web simply don't grasp or
| understand that these frameworks won't just 'catch you out'
| on in many cases. It speaks to an overreliance on the tools
| and a critical lack of understanding of the technologies that
| they co-exist with.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Peanuts! My wife's workplace has an internal photo gallery
| page. If your device can cope with it and you wait long enough,
| it'll load about 14GB of images (so far). In practice, it will
| crawl along badly and eventually just crash your browser (or
| more), especially if you're on a phone.
|
| The single-line change of adding loading=lazy to the <img>
| elements wouldn't fix everything, but it would make the page at
| least _basically_ usable.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Haha excellent. Presumably all the images are the full res
| haven't been scaled down for the web at all?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Could it be any other way?
| Bender wrote:
| Amazing. Well, any employee that wants more ram could use
| that internal site as an excuse.
|
| _" Why do you want 64 GB RAM in your laptop?"_
|
| _" I need that to load the gallery"_
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, and a machine that is at least two generations behind the
| latest. That will cut down on bloat significantly.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Well as long as the website was already full loaded and
| responsive, and the videos show a thumbnail/placeholder, you
| are not blocked by that. Preloading and even very agressive
| pre-loading are a thing nowaadays. It is hostile to the user
| (because it draws their network traffic they pay for) but
| project managers will often override that to maximize gains
| from ad revenue.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Should also give designers periodically small displays with low
| maximum contrast, and have them actually try to achieve
| everyday tasks with the UX they have designed.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| There's essentially zero chance the developers get to make
| choices about the ads and ad tracking.
|
| I wouldn't even guarantee it's developers adding it. I'm sure
| they have some sort of content management system for doing
| article and ad layout.
| Crowberry wrote:
| I hate this trend of active distraction. Most blogs have a popup
| asking you to subscribe as soon as you start scrolling.
|
| It's as if everyone designed their website around the KPI of
| irritating your visitors and getting them to leave ASAP.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| 49mb web page? Try a 45mb graphql response.
| zahlman wrote:
| This site more or less practices what it preaches.
| `newsbanner.webp` is 87.1KB (downloaded and saved; the Network
| tab in Firefox may report a few times that and I don't know why);
| the total image size is less than a meg and then there's just
| 65.6KB of HTML and 15.5 of CSS.
|
| And it _works_ without JavaScript... but there does appear to be
| some tracking stuff. A deferred call out to Cloudflare, a hit
| counter I think? and some inline stuff at the bottom that defers
| some local CDN thing the old-fashioned way. Noscript catches all
| of this and I didn 't feel like allowing it in order to weigh it.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came
| with a monthly data quota of 400 MB.
|
| The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no
| longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a
| newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the
| cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of
| advertising: _everything_ was advertised in newspapers. Facebook
| Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as
| was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate
| listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because
| most people aren 't actually that interested in the news to pay
| the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers
| that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who
| have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on:
| the _Financial Times_ , _Bloomberg_ , and so on.
|
| The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting
| because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling
| flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news
| reporting is becoming a niche product.
|
| The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from
| their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch
| attempt to remain profitable.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading
| 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our
| monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.
| biotinker wrote:
| 2010 was a couple years after YouTube enabled 1080p uploads.
| 250MB a month was insanely small in 2010.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Third world country fo ya. We got home internet in ~2007
| and I remember visiting friends to have exciting YouTube-
| watching activity.
| idop wrote:
| In the late '90s, a friend recommended I download some
| freeware from a website. It was 1.2MB. I told him "are you
| crazy? 1.2MB? It's gonna take a whole week!"
| qingcharles wrote:
| A lot of free government phone plans supplied to homeless,
| parolees etc in the USA only come with 3GB of transfer credit,
| which is usually burned up in about 3 days, leaving them
| without any Internet access. (or sometimes it'll drop to a
| throttled connection that is so slow that it can never even
| load Google Maps)
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics
| no longer works out.
|
| Yes it does, from nytimes actual earning release for Q 2025:
|
| 1. The Company added approximately 450,000 net digital-only
| subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2025,
| bringing the total number of subscribers to 12.78 million.
|
| 2. Total digital-only average revenue per user ("ARPU")
| increased 0.7 percent year-over-year to $9.72
|
| 2025 subscription revenue was 1.950 billion dollars.
| Advertising was 565 million that includes 155 million dollars
| worth of print advertising.
|
| Sure operating profit is only 550 million very close to the
| advertising revenue, but the bulk of their income is
| subscriptions, they could make it work if they had to. My
| suspicion is that if they dropped all the google ads they could
| have better subscription retention and conversion rates as
| well.
| lousken wrote:
| rule #1 is to always give your js devs only core 2 quad cpus +
| 16GB of RAM
|
| they won't be able to complain about low memory but their
| experience will be terrible every time they try to shove
| something horrible into the codebase
| userbinator wrote:
| I also use and like the comparison in units of Windows 95
| installs (~40MB), which is also rather ironic in that Win95 was
| widely considered bloated when it was released.
|
| While this article focuses on ads, it's worth noting that sites
| have had ads for a long time, but it's their obnoxiousness and
| resource usage that's increased wildly over time. I wouldn't mind
| small sponsored links and (non-animated!) banners, but the moment
| I enable JS to read an article and it results in a flurry of shit
| flying all over the page and trying to get my attention, I leave
| promptly.
| gxs wrote:
| I would love for someone more knowledgeable in this space than
| I to chime in on the economics of this industry
|
| Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth
| it?
|
| I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don't give a
| shit
|
| I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I'm in
| my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a
| large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc
| that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a
| result, I've never had a tolerance for anything but the most
| reasonable advertisements
|
| I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be
| motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful
| the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it
| isn't
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as
| "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any
| particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall
| YOLO programming.
| BoneShard wrote:
| it's still engineering, just for different constraints - cost &
| speed.
| nayroclade wrote:
| There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and
| engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work
| on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make
| their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job
| to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you
| to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site
| down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in
| McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Ublock origin helps mitigate at the least a little bit here.
| mrb wrote:
| Let's play a fun prediction: I ask HN readers what will be the
| page size of NYTimes.com in 10 years? Or 20 years?
|
| Want to bet 100 MB? 1 GB? Is it unthinkable?
|
| 20 years ago, a 49 MB home page was _unthinkable_.
| aembleton wrote:
| In 10 years - 100MB In 20 years - 20MB
|
| I think there'll continue to be growth in page sizes, but then
| maybe we'll consider efficiency, or the NYTimes shuts down and
| the 20MB page will be the liquidators selling the domain. Maybe
| we don't even use domains by then as everything is on an app.
| dizzy9 wrote:
| I remember in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast re-launched the
| official Dungeons & Dragons website to coincide with the
| announcement of the fourth edition rules. The site was something
| in the region of 4 MB, plus a 20 MB embedded video file. A huge
| number of people were refreshing the site to see what the
| announcement was, and it was completely slammed. Nobody could
| watch the trailer until they uploaded it to YouTube later.
|
| 4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an
| absurd size for a website.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| Modern web dev is ridiculous. Most websites are an ad ridden
| tracking hellacape. Seeing sites like hn where lines of js are
| taken seriously is a godsend. Make the web less bloated.
| Jigsy wrote:
| I agree with this. Just because a website _can_ eat all my RAM
| doesn 't mean it _should_...
| wat10000 wrote:
| What really blows my mind is how unusable it is. How often do
| you visit a web site and there's so much crap overlaid on the
| page that you can barely see the actual content? Surely that
| can't be good for their ability to make money, yet they
| persist.
| frereubu wrote:
| When working at the BBC in the late 90s, the ops team would start
| growling at you if a site's home page was over 70kb...
| snickerer wrote:
| Allowing scripting on websites (in the mid-90s) was a completely
| wrong decision. And an outrage. Programs are downloaded to my
| computer and executed without me being able to review them first
| --or rely on audits by people I trust. That's completely
| unacceptable; it's fundamentally flawed. Of course, you disable
| scripts on websites. But there are sites that are so broken that
| they no longer work properly, since the developers are apparently
| so confused that they assume people only view their pages with
| JavaScript enabled.
|
| It would have been so much better if we had simply decided back
| in the '90s that executable programs and HTML don't belong
| together. The world would be so much better today.
| coin wrote:
| Stepping back, it's pretty ridiculous that I need to download
| executable code, often bloated, solely to view read-only
| content. Just render the thing on the backend and send it to
| the client.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| But the web-dev-hype people told me that JS-heavy SPA's (and
| associated designs) were faster and better for the user!
|
| I didn't bother validating this, but I'm sure they wouldn't
| lie or misinterpret!!
| jiggawatts wrote:
| For me personally the most infuriating example of this is
| the Azure Updates[1] page, which in my job I need to check
| nearly daily to see what's reaching EoL, what's new, etc...
|
| A couple of years ago they redeveloped it as a SPA app.
|
| The original server-rendered version of it worked _just
| fine_ , but it "had" to be made into an interactive client-
| side monstrosity that loads many times slower for
| "reasons".
|
| It doesn't even load successfully about a quarter of the
| time. It shows items in _reverse_ order (entries from 2013
| _first_ ), which is some sort of async loading bug. They
| will never fix this. It's been there for two years already,
| it'll be there for a decade more, mark my words.
|
| Then, it takes about a minute to load sometimes on a poor
| connection.
|
| The links are JavaScript and don't allow "open in new tab".
|
| Etc...
|
| All of this to enable client-side filtering, which is a
| non-feature nobody ever wanted. A simple server-side filter
| capability would do the same thing, faster.
|
| And anyway, the filtering is _broken!_ If click the "New
| or updated" filter, it drops down an empty selection with
| no options. Clicking anything else doesn't change what is
| shown!
|
| While developing this over-engineered monstrosity, they
| _took the original site offline_ for "maintenance!"
|
| Hilariously, despite Azure having _multiple_ CDN products,
| the Azure Updates page doesn 't correctly use their own CDN
| and marks almost everything as "no-cache; no-store" causing
| 2.5 MB (after compression) to be re-transferred every time,
| despite using unique signed URLs with SHA256 hashes in
| them!
|
| This is the state of web-dev in the 2020s: A multi-
| trillion-dollar _software company_ can 't hire developers
| that know anything else other than SPA web app development!
|
| This commonly used page has _spectacularly_ poor web
| engineering, and this is from a company that sells a web
| app platform, a CDN, and the ASP.NET web app development
| framework!
|
| If they can't get it right, who can!?
|
| [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/
| userbinator wrote:
| GitHub also got infected with this horrible "JS SPA"
| disease shortly after MS bought them. Now you can't even
| browse files or view issues without it.
|
| _If they can 't get it right, who can!?_
|
| Berkshire Hathaway, apparently:
| https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
|
| Pure content, not fluff, and even has a small but
| unobtrusive ad.
| eitau_1 wrote:
| Weird, I remember Github as a pioneer of SPAs: in ~2013
| you could browse code tree without the page reloading.
|
| Though I agree today's Github is awful slow, JS is
| required to see issues, ...
| arthurjj wrote:
| My favorite part of that site, besides it loading
| incredibly fast, is even though it has an ad, for a
| wholly subsidiary, on it it is hard coded in the html.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| There is obviously huge demand for scripting on websites. There
| is no one authority on what gets allowed on the web, if the
| existing orgs didn't implement it, someone else would have and
| users would have moved over when they saw they could access new
| more capable, interactive pages.
|
| The 49MB webpage just shows what our priorities are. It shows
| the target audience has fast internet that can load this
| without issues. On my average home connection in Australia, I
| can download a 49MB page in 0.3 seconds. We spend time
| optimising for what matters to the end user.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Is the page actually done downloading 0.3 seconds after it
| starts? Or is it just (your Internet speed) / 49MB = 0.3
| seconds?
| diacritical wrote:
| > Programs are downloaded to my computer and executed without
| me being able to review them first--or rely on audits by people
| I trust
|
| Would've been cool if we could know if site X served the same
| JS as before. Like a system (maybe even decentralized) where
| people could upload hashes of the JS files for a site. Someone
| could even review them and post their opinions. But mainly
| you'll know you're getting the same JS as before - that the
| site hasn't been hacked or that you're not being targeted
| personally. If a file needs to update, the site could say in
| the changelog something like "updated the JS file used for
| collapsing comments to fix a bug". This could be pushed by the
| users to the system.
|
| Especially important for banking sites and webmail.
| maxloh wrote:
| > Programs are downloaded to my computer and executed without
| me being able to review them first--or rely on audits by people
| I trust.
|
| JavaScript and WebAssembly programs are always executed in a
| sandboxed VM, without read access to the host OS files (unless,
| of course, you grant it).
|
| Enabling scripting was a necessary step for interactive
| websites. Without it, a full page load would be required every
| time you upvote a Hacker News comment. In my opinion, the real
| problem is that browsers allow too many connections to third-
| party domains, which are mostly ads and trackers. Those should
| require user-approved permissions instead of being the default.
| rho_soul_kg_m3 wrote:
| Why can't MY browser send some random JS to THEIR website? If
| it's safe for me to run some stranger's code, should it be safe
| for strangers to run my code?
| basilikum wrote:
| Disable not just JavaScript, but also CSS. I'm not kidding.
| Many websites actually contain all the content in HTML but use
| CSS to hide and then use JavaScript to show it again.
| aembleton wrote:
| If scripting wasn't allowed, we'd probably all have a different
| browser that allowed it - probably wrapped in a Flash wrapper.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Even enterprise COTS products can have some of these issues. We
| have an on-premise Atlassian suite, and Jira pages sometimes have
| upwards of 30MB total payloads for loading a simple user story
| page -- and keep in mind there is no ad-tech or other nonsense
| going on here, it's just pure page content.
| 65 wrote:
| I worked at big newspapers as a software engineer. Please do not
| blame the engineers for this mess. As the article says news is in
| a predicament because of the ads business model. Subscriptions
| alone usually cannot cover all costs and ads will invariably make
| their way in.
|
| For every 1 engineer it seems like there are 5 PMs who need to
| improve KPIs somehow and thus decide auto playing video will
| improve metrics. It does. It also makes people hate using your
| website.
|
| I would constantly try to push back against the bullshit they'd
| put on the page but no one really cares what a random engineer
| thinks.
|
| I don't think there's any real way to solve this unless we either
| get less intrusive ad tech or news gets a better business model.
| Many sites don't even try with new business models, like local
| classifieds or local job boards. And good luck getting PMs to
| listen to an engineer talking about these things.
|
| For now, the bloat remains.
| lambdaone wrote:
| The article says "I don't know where this fascination with
| getting everyone to download your app comes from."
|
| The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the
| purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.
| drnick1 wrote:
| It's almost criminal that the article does not mention network-
| wide DNS blocklists as an obvious solution to this problem. I
| stop nearly 100% of ads in their tracks using the Hagezi ultimate
| list, and run uBlock on desktop for cosmetic filtering and
| YouTube.
|
| I should really run some to tests to figure out how much lighter
| the load on my link is thanks to the filter.
|
| I also manually added some additional domains (mostly fonts by
| Google and Adobe) to further reduce load and improve privacy.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" ...how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the
| filter."_
|
| Not done any rigorous tests but my experience has been rhat it
| can be lower than a tenth.
| int_19h wrote:
| It does indeed work pretty well today, but they have already
| developed ways to circumvent it. For example, serving ads from
| the same domain as the main page.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| I just loaded the nytimes.com page as an experiment. The volume
| of tracking pixels and other ad non-sense is truly horrifying.
|
| But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's
| somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed
| 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos
| were journalistic in nature (they were not ads).
|
| So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But
| I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline
| bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content.
| One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an
| editorial issue, not an engineering issue.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every
| page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page,
| what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user
| before they explicitly click play?
| jaredklewis wrote:
| I don't think you are supposed to think anything.
|
| It's a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you
| like that kind of content, great. If not, there's lots of
| other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe
| to the economist which has few videos and they never auto
| play.
|
| But that's a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and
| hundreds of tracking assets is not.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| Is that with Firefox's built-in tracking prevention disabled?
| binaryturtle wrote:
| It would be less hypocritical if that critique of the situation
| wasn't posted on a website that itself loads unnecessary 3rd
| party resources (e.g. cloudflare insights).
|
| Luckily I use a proper content blocker (uBlock Origin in hard
| mode).
| aembleton wrote:
| Even with ad blocking, it's transferring over 200KB of data,
| half of which is to load a couple of fonts. Not terrible but
| the basic HTML is only 17KB.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| The sad thing is, this is already a paywalled site.
|
| I'm afraid someone who wants to support professional journalism
| and agrees to pay ~$300/yr for an NYT subscription still gets
| most (all?) of this nonsense?
| nativeit wrote:
| It's certainly one of the reasons why I ended my NY Times
| subscription in 2024, and split that money between recurring
| donations to public media, Archive.org, and the EFF.
| opengrass wrote:
| Removing the round navbar in the other pages is unsettling.
| xrd wrote:
| I was really surprised when I went to book a flight on Frontier
| (don't judge me!) and a request from analytics.tiktok.com loaded.
| I have a lot of discomfort about that. Bloat and surveillance go
| hand in hand.
| jackby03 wrote:
| Its a crazy goal , amazing , congrats. Its vanilla stack?
| benbristow wrote:
| Bit unfair, turned off my adblocker and ran NY Times website with
| cache disabled via Dev Tools, came to 3MB. Still pretty damn high
| but not 49MB. (Will say I'm in the UK so might be different
| across the pond).
| aembleton wrote:
| I'm also in the UK, and it came to 31MB. Then I turned off uBO,
| Firefox tracking protection, and rejected the cookie notice,
| and it went over 40MB.
| ericra wrote:
| Not only are loading times and total network usage ridiculous,
| sites will continue to violate your privacy via trackers and
| waste your CPU even when background idling. I've written about
| these issues a few times in the last few years, so just sharing
| for those interested:
|
| A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages:
| https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html
|
| Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site:
| https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html
| ksec wrote:
| >I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to
| download your app comes from.
|
| So they could do exactly what they are doing on the web and may
| be even more but with Native code so it feels much faster.
|
| I got to the point and wonder why cant all the tracking companies
| and ad network just all share and use the same library.
|
| But on Web page bloat. Let's not forget Apps are insanely large
| as well. 300 - 700MB for Banking, Traveling or other Shopping
| App. Even if you cut 100MB on L10n they are still large just
| because of again tracking and other things.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Yes, it's 100% horrible. For me the solution is simple. If I
| click a link and the page is covered in ads and popup videos I
| CLOSE THE PAGE!!!!
|
| Vote with your behavoir. Stop going to these sites!
| scosman wrote:
| I opened a startup's page the other day, and their streaming demo
| video was 550mb
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| An anecdote from an OG (me):
|
| The same phenomenon worsened during the DotCom Meltdown and the
| Great Financial Crisis. This accelerated desperation is a sign of
| the times; paying subscribers are likely cancelling due to
| current economic conditions.
| postalrat wrote:
| 49mb web page? How about a 49meg go cli.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| Oh yeah, that old topic. We've already discussed this back when
| text-heavy websites started reaching megabyte sizes. So I'm going
| to go look for the posts in this thread that try to explain and
| defend that. I'm especially looking forward to the discussions
| about whether ad blocking is theft or morally reprehensible. If
| those are still around.
| workfromspace wrote:
| I cannot even imagine browsing the internet or using my devices
| without Consent-O-Matic and NextDNS _.
|
| _ with almost all options and filters enables ofc
| jlebar wrote:
| Got to hand it to this guy, this page loads FAST.
| Beijinger wrote:
| "The Sticky Video Player Publishers love embedding auto-playing
| videos these days, which isn't really popular. You'll find
| mulitple forum, Reddit, HN, or Twitter threads about it.
|
| To make it somehow worse...when you scroll down, you think it
| would leave you as it leaves the viewport. No. It detaches,
| shrinks and pins itself to the bottom right of your screen and
| continues playing. It keeps the distraction going and as if
| teasing you, features a microscopic 'X' button with a tiny hit
| area (violating Fitts's Law)."
|
| Is there not way to stop this? The do not autoplay videos option
| often does not work.
| aembleton wrote:
| Blocking the domain of the video player works. For example,
| primis.tech you can add this to your uBO filter:
| ||primis.tech$domain=~primis.tech
|
| Primis is one of them, but there are a few of these companies.
| I can't remember them all.
| maho wrote:
| Relevant and fun read: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)
|
| https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
| esher wrote:
| Was about to add this too!
| LandenLove wrote:
| I recently had to switch to a Japanese LINE account to gain
| access to certain features. I had no idea how good I had it on my
| American LINE account. The Japanese account is covered with ads
| EVERYWHERE on the home screen and even in the chat area. I have
| no idea how this app is still popular in Japan. I would pay to
| remove the ads if I could.
|
| They also have their own tiktok and AI slop that I never knew
| about.
| gingersnap wrote:
| I'm thinking that I gonna start making all my webpages <1mb in
| size, and compensate that with adding windows 95 to each page
| load.
| DorkyPup wrote:
| Author here. Woke up in today to see this on the front page,
| thank you to the person who submitted it! Initially, my biggest
| fear was the HN "Hug of Death" taking it down. Happily,
| Cloudflare's edge caching absorbed 19.24 GB of bandwidth in a few
| hours with a 98.5% cache hit ratio, so the origin server barely
| noticed.
|
| The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are
| spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading
| experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.
| quectophoton wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you have (and want to share) stats about
| requests per second? It's always nice to know these things for
| future reference.
|
| No worries if not :)
| DorkyPup wrote:
| Sure thing! I don't have the exact instantaneous peak since
| Cloudflare groups historical data by the hour on the free
| tier, but the peak 60 minutes last night saw 70,100 requests.
| That averages out to about 20 requests per second sustained
| over the hour. Wish I could be more granular but hope that
| helps a little.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Not the author, but last year I wrote about my experience
| being on #1 on HN [0]. I created a visualization of the
| requests hitting my server.
|
| [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death
| slashtab wrote:
| In Brave browser on Android device, the visualisation
| media(?) is blacked out. just wanted to give you a heads
| up.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know. It seems like when Brave is
| set to aggressively block tracking, it also blocks the
| canvas since it could be used for fingerprinting a
| device.
|
| I'll see if an avg version is viable in the future.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I have done minor experiments with disabling javascript, it
| works most publications are far more readable with javascript
| disabled, you miss carousels and some interactive elements but
| overall a much better experience.
| divan wrote:
| Just wanted to say that article is so much deeper than it seems
| from the title, and also beautifully written. It was a great
| read!
| Nine99 wrote:
| Can you add to clean reading experience by exchanging the
| unreadable font (Outfit Thin) with one that is readable?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "Does anyone even care about how their end-product appears to a
| user anymore?"
|
| Of course not. Its all about maximising shareholder value. The
| users aren't a consideration anymore
| jakub_g wrote:
| > 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data
|
| Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add
| it, but non-technical people.
|
| Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads
| Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of
| someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so
| it's fine.
|
| Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising
| "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod
| without telling developers, and without thinking twice about
| impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads.
|
| (It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it
| doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more
| bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels
| "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing
| developers can do about those requests, they're under full the
| control of all those 3rd-parties.)
|
| Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means
| "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do
| you mean, _performance decreased_ when we added more tracking? ")
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I tried to fight against the introduction of GTM in a project I
| worked on; we spent a lot of effort on coding, reviewing,
| testing, optimizing and minimizing client-side code before our
| end-users would see it, and the analytics people want a
| shortcut to inject any JS anywhere?
|
| I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only
| load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
| zbentley wrote:
| Yeah, it's really hard to compete with a solution that takes
| engineers out of the loop. The biggest reason large orgs go
| so crazy with GTM is that it's a shadow deployment pipeline
| that doesn't require waiting for engineers to work a request,
| or QA, or a standard release process.
|
| And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can
| make the "real" release processes work better for non-eng
| stakeholders, but "better" is never going to reach the level
| of "full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager".
|
| This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of
| Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just
| marketing pages); often, that's because the ownership and
| release process for the WP components is "edit a web UI"
| rather than "use git and run tests and have a test plan and
| schedule a PR into a release".
| aembleton wrote:
| The good thing about the heavy use of GTM, is that its easy to
| block. Just block that one endpoint and you remove most of the
| advertising and tracking. When some new advertising service is
| invented, its already blocked thanks to the blocking of GTM.
| ponector wrote:
| Developers do that as well. Especially now with llm-assisted
| coding. Accept half-baked solution and go to the next ticket.
|
| I've had recently a case at work, while filling a contact form
| to add a new party there were 300+ calls to the validation
| service to validate email and phones. Three calls per every
| character entered to every text input!
| sodimel wrote:
| Here's something I wrote in 2021:
|
| > Today, there's ~30 times more js than html on homepages of
| websites (from a list of websites from 5 years ago).
|
| It seems that this number only go up.
| eviks wrote:
| > users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare
|
| Nice term!
|
| > Or better yet, inject the newsletter signup as a styled, non-
| intrusive div between paragraphs 4 and 5. If the user has
| scrolled that far, they are engaged.
|
| They're engaged _with the content_! There is no way to make some
| irrelevant signup "non-intrusive". It's similar to links to
| unrelated articles - do you want users to actually read the
| article or jump around reading headlines?
| andypants wrote:
| Z-index warfare is so stupid (the practice, not the name). It's
| not only with media publications, but ecommerce sites as well.
|
| There have been countless businesses that have lost out on my
| money because I clicked on their ad (good job!), start reading
| the product info on their website as it loads (that's basically
| a sale), and then the page finished loading with a barrage of
| popups for cookie consent, newsletter signup for a discount
| code, special offers, special sale, spin the wheel for a prize,
| etc. That's when I close the tab and forget about it.
| leokennis wrote:
| Every time some site or person tries to make me feel bad for
| using AdGuard DNS, ad blockers etc. I read an article like this
| and I feel fine.
|
| I see three options:
|
| 1. Show me reasonable ads and I will disable ad blocking
|
| 2. Do the crap described in this article and don't complain when
| I arm myself against it
|
| 3. Do a hard paywall and no ads; force me to pay to see your
| content
| basilikum wrote:
| It's my device. I decide what I download, execute and display
| on my device. A website is free to offer me to download an ad
| and I am free to decline that offer. Demanding me to download
| anything on my device or even worse execute someone else's
| programs [JS] and claiming that I have a moral obligation to do
| so is deeply creepy.
| trashb wrote:
| One of the things I don't get is the economics of these trackers.
|
| Someone is serving this amount of data to every visitor. Even if
| you want to track the user as much as possible, wouldn't it make
| sense to figure out how to do that with the least amount of data
| transfer possible as that would dramatically reduce your
| operating cost?
|
| Perhaps size optimization is the next frontier for these
| trackers.
| ktpsns wrote:
| Traffic for the static payload is super cheap. And the insane
| amount of requests is handled easily by modern event-based
| architectures. The operation costs are most likely only a tiny
| amount of the overall economics of the tracker's buisness
| model. The generated tracking data is certainly worth an order
| of magnitude more then it takes to generate it.
| net01 wrote:
| In the same vein, https://512kb.club/ is a user-submitted website
| that features content under 512 KB in size! (blogs, news, etc.)
| fixxation92 wrote:
| I actually feel offended with a download size this big, it's
| completely careless from the website owners
| dannersy wrote:
| This is about to get substantially worse as companies introduce
| more AI into their workflows.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to
| download your app comes from.
|
| Apps don't have adblockers.
| el_io wrote:
| Most in-app Ads can be blocked with simply changing your dns.
|
| And most people don't even use adblocker when browsing normal
| site. I kind of had to tech my surrounding people to use
| adblocker.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Isn't that a much higher bar for most people? I don't even
| know how to change the dns on my phone, and I am not a
| typical user, I am a dev.
|
| But running a browser that blocks ads like duckduckgos is
| super simple.
|
| But yeah I am sure there are additional tracking and possibly
| retention benefits.
| donohoe wrote:
| I started on this when project when I was at The New Yorker. I
| had just manage to convince people to give us space to do web
| performance optimization - and then we had to drop it quickly to
| work on AMP. Very frustrating.
|
| This site was created to give developers and pms some ammunition
| to work on improving load speed
|
| https://webperf.xyz/
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The leader https://nautil.us on your board is incredibly fast!
| My_Name wrote:
| This is why I have a pi-hole and a selection of addons for my
| browser.
|
| I am considering moving to technitium though, it seems better
| featured.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| You want to know why so many people either jump straight to
| comments or use alternate sources (archive, llms)? Because if you
| load the actual site, it freaking blows to _use the damn thing_.
|
| So much hostile user design.
|
| Edit: NPR gets a little shout out for being able to close their
| annoying pop-ups by clicking anywhere that's not the
| notification. So it's still crappy that it hijacks the screen,
| but not awful I guess?
| jug wrote:
| I was thinking about creating charts of shame for this across
| some sites. Is there some browser extension that categorizes the
| data sources and requests like in a pie chart or table? Tracking,
| ad media, first party site content...? Would be nice with a piled
| bar chart with piles colorized by data category.
|
| Maybe you'd need one chart for request counts (to make tracking
| stand out more) and another for amount of transferred data.
| sgbeal wrote:
| > The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons
| (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side
| quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for.
|
| They thing is, though... they _don't_ have to. It's been my
| standard practice for years to just tap ctrl-w the moment any web
| page pops up a model box. Some leeway is given to cookie dialogs
| _if_ they have a disagree/disable button _prominently_ visible,
| otherwise they're ctrl-w'd too.
|
| "Newsletter..." ctrl-w.
|
| "Please disable your..." ctrl-w.
|
| "Subscribe to read..." ctr-w.
|
| Ctrl-w is your friend.
| t1234s wrote:
| Author forgot to mention scroll hijacking on their list. This is
| one of the worst offenses.
| rayiner wrote:
| The newest thing is "please wait a minute while Cloudflare
| decides you're not a bot." So you sit through that, then deal
| with the GPDR banner, then you get to watch an ad.
| nich_kyson wrote:
| Recently I've read a survey that claimed that one of the websites
| they reviewed shipped 50 mg of CSS.
| AndreyK1984 wrote:
| I started writing in a Dioxus (rust framework) style. max 1KB of
| js code. Sending the diff via WebSocket from the rust server, and
| , what is more important, all code is now on a server, and
| because of websocket and rust it executes almost same speed as on
| the client. Back to normal pages sizes. And, of course, virtual
| scrolling everywhere.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| The layout of news sites peaked with cnn.com back in the 1998 to
| 2002 timeframe. It's been downhill ever since.
| thatmf wrote:
| Imagine just paying for content
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| meanwhile everyone tells me i have to shave every KB off my web
| app
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-16 23:01 UTC)