News Sites Are Fatter and Slower Than Ever

> Websites designers live in a bubble, they’re increasingly disconnected from users. Their work requirements include design (fonts, layouts elements), advertising (multiple ad serving and analytics), data collection (even though most sites collects way more data that they are able to process), a/b testings, and other marketing voodoo.

I run:

  uBlock Origin
  Disconnect
  Ghostery

On the posted article's page, uBO didn't detect any adds, but Disconnect blocked 22 content requests, and I still could read the article and see its illustrations.

Ghostery blocked one gravatar widget.

I've been running NoScript in Firefox for about a week. It blocked 22 scripts, and 2 "objects," whatever those are. Again, I can see the article just fine, and it even looks nicely styled.

The hamburger menu doesn't work, but that's javascript.

I can read the comments, because they didn't outsource their comment management.

Yeah, there does seem to be a disconnect between designers and users. All that stuff that was blocked above? I don't need it, and I don't miss it. All I want to do is read the content.

Here's a really bad one: With NoScript, I've noticed a handful of sites that don't display content at all with scripts turned off. But if you turn off css styles, you can see the content. All that trouble to mask content that I've actually downloaded.

To turn off styles in Firefox: View/Styles/NoStyle. Or if you like a one click toggle button, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-style...