Browsing the internet without uBlockbOrigin is bad for your health.
Ad blockers don’t protect you against dumbass frontend devs who serve 5mb png files to be stuffed into 600x400 boxes.
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Shit, I might use that on a desktop with broadband.
Thanks kind stranger, I didn’t realize this was configurable.
Is 50kb enough or should I go higher.
Also. Thanks!
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I have mine at 50kb, and most things load, but I do get some images that don’t. Just play with it and increase it until the frequency you need to tap pictures to render them doesn’t piss you off anymore.
No but the good blockers give you the power to disable elements on a case by case basis.
Removing the background image for fandom wiki articles makes them load 3x faster.
I especially hated wallpaper website that load full size pictures on previews grids
Raymond Hill is a hero of our times. Not even kidding.
*googles the name*
Raymond Earl Hill was an American tenor saxophonist and singer, best known as a member of Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm in the 1950s.
Well, I mean we all have our own ideas about the world.
True, true
See also The Website Obesity Crisis, nearly a decade ago.
Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled “The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat”. It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.
The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.
The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design.
The author links their tweet saying “your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature.” At the time, that page on Twitter was 900 KB. Today it is 11 MB.
And a lot of that is tracking nonsense.
I work on a full blown web app, and we’re about 11 MB (will look into trimming the fat). We have features like PDF report generation, 2D drawing, and fairly heavy algorithms relevant to our industry. We have thousands of Typescript files, and something like 500k+ lines of code. We also have lots of SVGs for icons, canvas stickers, etc.
So after all that, we’re about the size of an average Twitter/X page. Those are not the same order of magnitude in complexity…
And a lot of that is tracking nonsense.
That’s in the slides. It’s one of my favorites:
Thats mostly because of the overload quantity of ads, trackers, plugins, integrations, etc all websites have now. Using an adblocker halves your bandwidth usage. If you have a data cap, an adblocker is a must.
And then, optimization. As an Angular developer, knowing many websites nowadays are Angular or similar, the lack of optimization is a big problem. Most don’t even use lazy loading, not to mention managing the module imports into different components. They import everything into the main component and don’t do lazy loading leading you to websites that have 20-40MB (!!!) of initial load (when you open the website). This is so common that I think junior angular devs will slowly just kill angular popularity and give it a bad look. Takes work to optimize Angular, and many devs don’t care enough and just rush it. And then there are companies that don’t understand that web frameworks need optimization and just underpay devs or rush the dev time.
Please don’t use Angular (or similar complex web frameworks like Vue or React) if you don’t know how to correctly optimize it, or don’t have time or care for it. And don’t overload your pages with ads and integrations. You are ruining the web.
I’d hazard a guess and say it all stems from advancements in tech. There was a need to get the most out of something because of limited resources. Now that everyone’s got some fairly serious hardware (yes, even the cheap shit), there’s rarely that urge to optimize.
Rather than optimize each new technology as it comes along and gets adopted, it seems as though the mantra is “fuck it, add it to the pile”. And it snowballs. As developers feel the need to optimize less, the lessons get passed down to the next generation, and so on.
So we’re left with apps/end-user stuff that appear to have been on the opposite of a diet.
And thats why i believe that ublock origin is needed for modern web browsing
Yup. If websites respected me, I’d respect them back and not need uBlock Origin.
No corporate website respects you in the slightest, they are just greedy for your metrics.
Yup, hence why uBlock Origin stays on.
I have been just bewildered at the proliferation of excessive scripts and garbage on seemingly every webpage over the last decade. I’m no web-dev, but I’m pretty positive that the vast majority of websites could remove 99-some percent of their javascript bs and their websites would function just fine. So many are pretty much unusable these days. It’s atrocious.
I recommend to use an adblocker. It’s not a moral question anymore but pure self-defence, says multiple US secret services.
I’ve been working at organizing a bunch of stuff I’ve been collecting over the years … data, writing, lists, ideas, whatever … I kept using all sorts of services, apps, websites, cloud services and all sorts of crap to maintain them all but eventually it all becomes too complicated and breaks down.
I’ve since discovered just using simple text files and services that just use simple text mark down … no special service, nothing proprietary, easily transferable and interoperable.
I started looking at websites the same way … I don’t care what it looks like, I just want to read the information … you made it too hard for me to read your simple text info? You’re asking me to turn off my ad blockers and turn on Java script? All to read 200 words on your site? I’ll skip it and move on to the next site that will allow me.
I manage a web dev team. We try to optimise as much as possible but then there’s all sorts of tracking that gets tacked on by personalisation teams, opti teams, things like Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter/X scripts inserted too… It’s pretty shit. And sometimes when things break it makes it super hard to debug too
I’m a web dev and yes they could. It’s annoying that web devs get blamed for it though, the reason for all the javascript is mostly business decisions out of our control.
Mainly the tracking scripts which the marketing department adds against out will. But also it’s a lot cheaper to have a client-rendered web app than a traditional website (with client side rendering you can shut off all your web servers and just keep the api servers, our server side processing went down 90% in the switchover). And it’s more efficient for the company to have one team working in one programming language and one framework that can run the backend and frontend, so the frontend ends being a web app even if it’s not really necessary.
Fwiw, I don’t blame the devs. That’s just me saying I’m not an expert. I understand it’s a management/corporate decision.
And thanks for the explanation. That clarifies the changes I’ve been noticing.
A bunch of websites operating as web apps would help explain the bloat. Great idea if somebody is navigating a good chunk of your website. Horrible idea if 99% of your traffic is people being linked to a news article and then leaving afterwards.
REACT EVERYTHING
I made a stupid little page that downloads a Pathfinder 2e SRD API, and then randomly combines an ancestry, background, and class from that list and displays it on screen. It’s really nothing special, I hacked it together in an afternoon. But I showed it to a friend and they were blown away that I didn’t use a framework for it. I was like, “it does three things. Why would it need a framework? What would I even use a framework for?”
They still couldn’t believe I did it by hand.
I’ve chatted with a few experienced web devs, and from what I’ve heard, there’s a whole group of “web programmers” out there that just learn React and other fameworks, but don’t actually know how to code anything themselves. So many places won’t even consider you if you don’t know React.
And here I am still thinking jQuery is an excessive amount of page bloat.
This is accurate. I’m a full stack dev, and a huge number of job postings I’ve seen over the past ten years or so have switched to React.
If only they paid web developers more…
I could not give two fucks about the memory efficiency of a web page I worked on since I barely take enough home to afford groceries.
Unless they pay me more to care, it’s still your problem internet person.
When my title changed from web developer to software developer I got a 60% pay increase, but my job hardly changed in reality. I still only make just enough to do doordash on the side as an extra safety net and not as a necessity to afford food.
But when anyone asks what I do for work and I tell them, they immediately assume we’re absolutely loaded and I’m picking up the check everywhere we go.
Yup. I do make a fair bit more than the average person, but I have a family, kids, and a lot of experience. I’m far from poor, but I’m not making what people seem to assume I make. I live in a middle-class area, my kids go to publicly funded schools, and I drive reliable, older cars (both ~15yo, will be replacing one soon for something <10yo).
I probably could make $200k+, but I’d have to work crazy hours doing unethical work. As it stands, I’m in the 12% tax bracket, so very much in the middle class, and I choose to make less in exchange for a better work/life balance. Fortunately, my wife doesn’t have to work for us to make ends meet, and the same goes for a few of my coworkers (one legally can’t because of immigration nonsense). If we both did what I do (my wife couldn’t, she doesn’t have the formal education or experience for that), we’d be rich, but that’s just not the case.
If you don’t mind me asking what do you do? I’m always curious since truthfully the $200k/y fang jobs sometime make me think I’m the odd one out who’s not gonna retire by 40. And as primarily a perl developer on a team of 2 I feel like were in our own world most of the time.
Not to suggest you don’t deserve to be paid more, but it feels like the issue would more be that the people paying for the site aren’t instructing the people that develop it to make these accommodations.
Because I know plenty of devs that just straight up don’t give a shit about accommodating low-end devices, regardless of what they’re paid. It’s like a point of pride almost.
Hell, that’s the energy of the DontKillMyApp people: they just straight up think their app should use as many resources as it likes as long as it likes, and they shouldn’t have to be considerate in development. Strain on device be damned.
I’ve seen some that straight up admit they don’t even think the user should be able to kill an app process.
I know this isn’t the main point of your comment, but DontKillMyApp is about much more than system resource management. It’s about consistent behavior so that developers can program to a standard rather than a wild west of whatever a handset decides to do.
Either you write your app to accommodate every special case implementation of background execution requirements, or users get upset when the instant message isn’t delivered and blame the app.
To make matters worse, many Chinese devices just kill everything in the background that’s not on a hard coded whitelist. This is a failure of Android when it doesn’t require consistent behavior. On these devices, applications that have a legitimate reason to run in the background just don’t work correctly.
I think the situation is getting much better with recent Android versions.
To make matters worse, many Chinese devices just kill everything in the background that’s not on a hard coded whitelist.
Looking at Xiaomi’s Miui here. My last phone was a Xiaomi one and it was great. It didn’t take long for me to install LineageOS on it tho because Miui is horrible. It killed every app you had opened the second you switched to another one. Things like email verification codes were literally impossible to enter into an app because when you went into your mail app, copied the code and then went back into the app you wanted to enter it in, that app would have to start up again because it was already killed in the background.
Also, Miui itself used up like half my RAM without anything being opened and it was buggy as hell.
A lot of devs I know are purely ticket in ticket out… so unless someone convinced management there’s a performance problem and that they’d need to prioritize it over new features (good luck), then it will not be done.
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Don’t worry, a new internet is coming soon. Then we can leave all this behind.
We can’t even adopt IPv6 properly, let alone implement and migrate to a new and improved internet.
You mean Web3? Yeah Web3 is going to do jack shit to solve this, if anything it’ll make it worse
No, I don’t mean web3
Then what? Implants from musk? Or all audio like podcasts for everything (which is also not better whatever the marketing says).
Maybe Piper Net (Silicon Valley)
Guess where they got their inspiration from?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/where-is-hbo-silicon-valleys-real-pied-piper-look-in-troon-scotland
AKA the new internet (the SAFE network) that has been in development for 18 years and is about to hit beta here in the upcoming weeks.
Piper Net sitting on a couch surrounded by BBC (Big Bastard Companies)
I think about that show surprisingly often and how amazing a compression method like that would be right now. Our internet and storage speeds have not remotely kept up with the rapidly expanding size of files these days.
Maybe they’re talking about the fediverse or something? Idk.
At work we have this timecard management system that’s an enormous pain to use. All the bottom rung employees hate it because it’s anything but intuitive. For example, it has stupid things like weekdays sorted alphabetically and a scroll bar to select the day of the month in a form. It’s like the interfaces were tested exactly one time and never visited again, so long as it works minimally.
What’s this crappy app have to do with big web pages? That application is awful for us worker bees, but management loves it because it produces nice reports. Management is the real customer for which the product is optimized. Similarly, many web pages are awful because they’re mainly rated on how it looks. Nobody is including how fast it loads in the contract, and at the product demo you bet those resources are cached in the browser.
Ask yourself: who with the money in hand is actually looking at how fast the page loads on a slow connection or low-end devices?
TLDR: Looks > performance.
it has stupid things like weekdays sorted alphabetically
Holy shit, that’s stupid. Why would you even do this in the first place?! I can’t comprehend how anyone could come to the conclusion that that’s a good way to sort it.
alphabetically was probably the default sorting method for an array of data and they didn’t bother to fix it, just my guess.
Then why not use labels?
Value=“1Monday” Label=“Monday”
That’s even more work than skipping the “weekdays” array wherever the sorting happens
You could probably write a browser plug-in / extension to manipulate the DOM to fix these issues.
Also yes, some people look at page load times. Our team does this. But apparently not a lot of people do this, judging by the replies in this thread.
A UserScript or UserStyle could fix it up.
And make some clueless Facebook addict with seventeen toolbars scream “You haCKED OUR WEBSITE?!”
Yeah, I’m guessing a bunch of random workers are going to do that…
Friday Monday Saturday Sunday Thursday Tuesday Wednesday
In its defense, that also flows better if you’re trying to sing it.
At my current dev role I try to do optimizations to make new system area pages pretty lightweight, but it’s a bit of a struggle as I’m working with devs who have been in the same role for decades. WCAG is not prioritized, and they pull in a ton of JS libraries that usually aren’t even used. A lot of the practices I see in use are from 10 years ago, but slowly tidying up the horror show with each dev product meeting.
Admittedly could be much worse though, at least our pages aren’t 21MB large.
WCAG
Ours doesn’t even try at all, because we’re largely a B2B shop and we know our customers (in the low thousands). It’s still dumb, because we could totally hire a QA or developer who has some kind of need where accessibility would be helpful, and we even have a couple of colorblind people on the team, yet we don’t prioritize anything. It’s a little disappointing, but I guess the need hasn’t arisen yet.
We build a very interactive web app with tons of data, and a fresh load is still well under 21MB (looks like ~5MB transferred over the network, ~15MB total). I don’t understand how a typical website could use more than our app when we do lots of complex stuff (2D drawing library, lots of calculations, we’re adding in 3D soon, etc).
When ever I used to have issues with my internet I used to use news.com.au as a test to see if the issue was fixed, if that site loaded than anything would.
Wet Ass Pussy is clearly the answer.
I have a WAP phone, and to my surprise google loads
I’m delighted. I wonder if they still employ one lone engineer with the title “WAP Architect” :-)
npm install everything --force
More reason to use Brave, keep JS disabled by default and just re-enable on a site-by-site basis.
Ignoring the shady practices of Brave Software, this doesn’t really solve the problem. Sites will still use way too much scripting to be flashy, and that will continue to be a problem for everyone, because some of these sites willbe needed for some and will require all scripts to function properly.
What might help more in the long run is complain to the site owners that their site, despite you having an up to date browser, does not work on your phone. Sure, some of those complaints will fall on deaf ears, but even some changing means progress.
My simple home page is 10 KB now. And you might not think that’s such a big deal, but it has more content than Google’s search page and that rings in at a couple MB IIRC. 😁
How do I measure how much data my page loads? Now I’m curious
Chrome reports the memory a tab uses if you hover over the tab. Look at the task manager within your browser. Try clicking on the burger bar, then “More tools” and “Task Manager” within the browser.
Oh, I didn’t know I could do this in DevTools! I figured I would need some other tool
If you can’t answer this question you’re doing it wrong. It should be as simple as “how large are the files in my web hosting folder”. All this fucking tech stack bloat is so unnecessary.
- Press F12 to open the Debugger.
- Click the “Network” tab
- Press Ctrl+F5 to reaload the whole page (including previously cached files)
- under the list of transfered files in the greyish bar above the debug console (if enabled…) you see the total number of requests the site made and the total filesize that has been transfered; lower is better.
Picture: https://superuser.com/a/1718133
Thank you for the detailed answer!
On the contrary! I absolutely loathe how bloated webpages have become over the last few decades, so it’s very refreshing and laudable to see a webpage that tries to keep itself as small as possible.
Gemini
Capricorn
You made me look, alas, no dice to a web thingy.
Shh it’s a secret https://geminiprotocol.net/
