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Comment by oolongCat | Hacker News Reader

Calling this a "Crisis" is definitely blowing this out of proportion. True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a look at your favourite websites on the waybackmachine and see how god awful most of them looked just 6-7 years ago, compare the functionality they provided vs what we have now.

Yes I agree some websites do really need to go on a diet, loading unused css, js and multimedia has to be removed, but 1-2MB is not a reason anyone should be throwing their hands in air screaming CRISIS!! Definitely I would applaud anyone who would spend their time optimising their websites to be as small as they can be, but Jesus Christ 2BM and we have a crisis... no way!

I for one think this is a sign we are making progress a very good thing, we are improving as a community and we are getting more out of our web.

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This edit:following medium.com article clocks in at over 100mb in total, due to unoptimised gifs (so don't open it on mobile):

https://medium.com/@tubikstudio/ui-animation-microinteractio...

http://imgur.com/SsurT3W

Aside from the fact that it's impressive to make flat-styled animations that big in gif form, I think the people behind medium.com are just as much to blame for not giving feedback to the uploader about the size of the attached images, nor offering a non-destructive optimising pass or serving the gifs reencoded as .WebM for browsers that support it.

Certainly a type of juicy irony that the article author writing about a "crisis" should include his own post in that crisis.

Not to mention that their sentiment is unoriginal by a factor of possibly a decade.

I wasn't talking about the posted article, I was talking about the article that I linked myself.

I just got a text this morning from my phone company: "Your exceeded your monthly 500MB limit". It's probably not a crisis, but it has some quite real economic consequences if I have to download 2MB worth of nothing whenever I click a link.

Yes, Adblockers to the rescue. But you know, Apple doesn't support Adblockers on an iPhone 5 for whatever stupid reason.

See the main problem then, is not a problem with if websites are obese or paper thin, the question is are websites and our browsers doing a good job of using already existing features for helping users.

I think we should be complaining about developers and admins who doesn't enable gzipping, we should be angry with the fact some websites don't even bother setting headers to cache static resources. We should not be throwing out hands up in air screaming crisis because our web is becoming more useful.

"Useful" doesn't need to mean bloated. You seem to miss the point that many websites these days are bloated even basic articles. We don't need a V8 engine and oversize tyres to go buy milk and bread.

You're forgetting that mobile devices quickly run out of cache memory. This includes iPads. You might visit a news site once every few days, but quite often the same resources need downloading again and again because your iPad has not kept them in cache memory because it ran out already. Desktop browsers have a lot more capacity to keep web resources cached.

Not only that, but RAM memory is also limited on mobile devices. Forget about expecting multiple websites to remain in memory across numerous tabs. My iPad3 can pretty much handle only one tab open. If I switch tabs to another website, then switch back, the whole page loads again. A less bloated web would help this issue.

And then there's accessibility for low-speed areas. Did you even read the article?

Most static servers enable If-Modified-Since header, as well as other detections... Cache sizes, specifically on mobile are very small, and ineffective... it's more often than not, a very small http request to recheck if a cached file is still valid.

Optimizing images is a pretty huge thing, as is enabling gz compression on the streams... these two alone add up to far more saving than setting cache headers, not that they can't or shouldn't be set.

That's a problem with your phone company not websites, 500MB really isn't enough for using the modern web.

Also since when exactly did websites have a mandate to economise to the scale of mobile data? It's always been edge case unless you are specifically targeting that.

500 MB could be enough. As I said, if I need a bigger plan, unoptimized websites have economic consequences. I heard mobile-first is a thing. It doesn't seem too far stretched to assume that users and thus potential customers might be interested in fast-loading websites.

See, what this boils down to is this: People use Adblockers, because they're tired of all that shit that's consuming their bandwidth (at least on mobile). Content publishers complain about people using Adblockers. But they're not willing to get the technical side of their content consumption platform right in order to accommodate their very visitors. They cry foul but are part of the problem obviously.

Unfortunately, I don't get to see what links to avoid (size-wise) before I download all the bloat and waste my bandwidth.

Yeah 500 MB could be enough if technology regressed (which it isn't going to). You're going to need a bigger plan regardless as 500 MB is nothing and mobile internet features are become more rich and ubiquitous.

The growth of website size has been fairly steady, if anything the growth has flattened over the last year or so. It is up to the infrastructure to keep up with that.

In the last year or two we've had the introduction 4G with 2-4 times the speed of 3G and you expect to have the same usage allowance?

For people in the developed world with good technology infrastructure, yes. But it's also quite inconsiderate to tell people to upgrade their dataplan (which for some people might be a financial limit) instead of trying to think of better ways to reduce cruft and unnecessary data transfers.

It's quiet inconsiderate to tell developers to optimize for outdated bandwidth caps (which for some may be extra time, cost etc that they don't have).

You should expect to have to increase you dataplan every few years (because technology) whether that cost is absorbed by you or your phone company is a conversation to have with them.

The problem is that devs are putting more effort into making websites bloated. They'd have more time if they got rid of cruft

But whatever, most of what 500MB isn't enough for is useless to users. So why should they pay more to get it?

> Also since when exactly did websites have a mandate to economise to the scale of mobile data? It's always been edge case unless you are specifically targeting that.

Trends towards mobile-first have been a thing for a while. Especially in developing countries where mobile users outweigh desktop users.

Targeting desktop is slowly becoming the edge case for anything targeting a mass audience. Look at a lot of the recent high-value tech companies. Do Uber/Snapchat/Whatsapp/Instagram target desktop or mobile first?

Where are users in general spending the majority of their time? On a desktop/laptop, or on a phone/tablet?

Mobile-first is designing for a mobile interface. I quiet clearly stated "economise to the scale of mobile data". That is, supporting users on heavy mobile data restrictions.

Users, regardless of device used, are primarily on wifi and that is what is designed for. In modern countries most users don't really have data restrictions low enough to come into effect through websites so going into the future this will not be a problem.

Which countries would that be? As far as I know there are strict data restrictions basically everywhere (apart from legacy plans). You get about 10 of those "modern" websites a day with 1 GB which is for example what US's Sprint "Unlimited" plan offers you.

Most of Asia and Europe. The American plans are so expensive and restrictive they don't reflect the current state of the technology at all. That's what's causing all this 'crisis' scaremongering. 1GB is a fairly basic plan over here and for that you can expect to have to watch your usage.

Then please tell that my German and French mobile providers. While cheaper than their US counterparts I still have to watch my usage. China also has basically the same prices (not adjusted for income parity!). I know that especially north and east of Germany the plans are significantly less restrictive but that's far from universal.

Apart from laziness there is no reason for those websites to be so large.

Apart from greediness there is no reason for data to be so expensive...

Sure there's always room for an amount of optimization and good practice but it's insane to rely on that instead of fixing the problem. The growth in page size has been fairly linear and predictable.

The real headline here should be "German and US carriers cannot keep up with natural growth in technology"

So tell me: Out of a 2 MB website with 300 HTTP requests, what do you usually get as a visitor?

You make it sound as if the natural growth in technology is what makes these websites huge. I run a web app, which is uptodate technology-wise. It has a responsive design with @2x images and @3x. It uses JS in a sensible manner. It's fast and easy to use. Top notch technology. Yet, the average request sums up to 200KB. And 60KB of that is a custom font.

This is not about the natural growth in technology, it is about 50-70% of the 2MB are entirely worthless to the user, because they are usually Ads, trackers, wrongly compressed images (ImageOptim does wonders here) and using 10 JS frameworks in parallel.

It's almost as if you're saying: See, img tags now support the width attribute, so let's upload a 10MB photo and just tell the browser to resize it to 100px, because technology.

I'm not picking through all that hyperbole and condemnation of every dev that isn't you to try a maintain a reasonable argument.

So I go with a "those in glass houses" approach:

The only reason I can't see the terrible quality of your website's photos on my phone is that all the content is so damn small and zoomed out I can barely make out the text never-mind the picture pixels. I don't really want to zoom in because the shade of lime green you've chosen is so jarring it'll likely give me a migraine if it fills the screen.

If you're referring to the domain of my email in my profile: This isn't my website. It's just an email provider.

Well what's your website then and I'll judge it. Either that or refine your argument.

I was in Hong Kong last year and I was looking at limited data plans then.

I'm in the UK and the only network offering unlimited data is so slow you'll struggle to use more than 3GB in a month.

I've since given in and just paying through the nose for 16GB/month, so that I can not have to watch my data usage. (Un?)fortunately, the network is so fast I've found my data usage is already around 9-10GB/month, so I'm going to have to start watching that again soon.

> True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a look at your favourite websites on the waybackmachine and see how god awful most of them looked just 6-7 years ago, compare the functionality they provided vs what we have now.

Well, the article disagrees that this is always what is going on, for example:

> Here's the PayPal website as it looks today. The biggest element on the page is an icon chastising me that I haven't told PayPal what I look like. Next to that is a useless offer to 'download the app', and then an offer for a credit card. I can no longer control the sort order, there are no filter tools, and you see there are far fewer entries visible without scrolling.

and

> It's like we woke up one morning in 2008 to find that our Lego had all turned to Duplo. Sites that used to show useful data now look like cartoons. Interface elements are big and chunky. Any hint of complexity has been pushed deep into some sub-hamburger.

Of course many things improved, today you can make more with less, a lot more. But all of that can easily be undone by just piling on a bunch of hires stock photographs or even video, 20 ad networks and 5 tracking scripts. And one might also to consider the memory footprint and CPU usage of multiple open tabs, and how leet efficient pages and bloated crap alike get put into the browser cache which is of finite size and flushes out older things to make room. Then multiply that by number of visitors. Crisis or not, it's a LOT of waste if you really think it through.

True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality...

What functionality do you have in mind when you're talking about the average read-only news-article type of web page?

> and so has functionality

If a web site is no longer readable because it layouts every 2 seconds to accommodate 145 ads, it does not have more functionality; it has less.

That is true. However, that does not describe all webpages, and I think implies a false dichotomy. There are plenty of sites which use modern functionality to deliver an experience that did not exist a decade ago.

It strikes me that my browsing experience not has seen a net improvement in the past 6-7 years. Whereas the functionality of websites is undoubtedly better, the ad-swamp is definitely greater too. I call it a draw. For all the content/UI improvement, there is a corresponding increase in advertising encroachment. If we assume that in tech things are supposed to improve over time, 6-7 years of static is a regression versus expectations.

Today, it's faster and uses less bandwidth to watch a video than to visit a major news site.

Not to mention... I remember the dial-up days. We were all worrying about pages being too big and taking too long to load then, although "too big" was obviously a different size and had more to do with images than scripts. It's not surprising that people are going to use the resources available to them.

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