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Comment by lsh | Hacker News Reader

ha - that blog post is 26MB large and makes my laptop cry

The Related Articles carousel at the bottom is responsible for a lot of that. In at least one of the tiles, it's backing an 82x45 thumbnail with a 2800x1556 PNG. The PNG is 6 MB, which works out to over 1.5 KB per pixel. Annotated screenshot at https://twitter.com/callahad/status/989119555711782917

What's worse, it's clear the CMS knows that the image is going to be displayed as a small thumbnail: the markup uses the picture tag and srcset attribute to provide alternative images, indicating that they'll be around 120 or 240 pixels wide, depending on device DPI.

...and yet, the actual file it serves is the same, full-resolution PNG in all cases.

This is a problem that the CMS should be solving.

Well, and the page itself is just hideously unusable. 1/3 of the space is covered with noise begging me to leave the article I'm trying to read. The top 1/3 is 80% blank space that keeps popping up and going away as I scroll, making the simple act of scrolling through an article feel unpredictable, as I'm never sure if I'm even going to be able to see the entire animation they want me to look at. Overall the experience of reading this blog is claustrophobic and stress-inducing. I almost thought I was on Medium for a bit.

They somehow made the blog post more painful to read than a CNN article. That's talent right there.

Yes, it’s incredible how just the preview images of “related articles” are over 13 MiB in size. That’s pretty dumb.

As is using GIFs instead of actual videos. It’s 2018, damnit.

Google shot themselves in the foot there though - autoplay videos are / can be disabled, but with gifs that's a bit more difficult and / or gifs are a way to force people to get exposed to videos.

Maybe they could change Chrome to allow autoplay videos, which have no audio? Would make them very much functionally equivalent to GIFs.

I've taken to blocking gifs due to abuse.

Mostly just transparent-until-hover, but still.

https://pastebin.com/m5CEVfhL

> ha - that blog post is 26MB large and makes my laptop cry

Sadly that also reflects the state of the new Gmail. It's bigger and slower to load than ever before. At least based on testing I've done on a test-account given to me by Google.

(Which may or may not contain debug-builds, extra logging, instrumentation, etc. I'll not entirely exclude the possibility that the final release builds may leaner.)

Anyhow, needless to say, I'm happy with Fastmail :D

Looks way better without javascript.

> Looks way better without javascript.

This sentence is nearly always true, applied to websites. (The exception would be mathjax, and a few more things)

I had the blog post open on my mobile for the past day and this really explains why my phone was acting up.. It's gotten noticeabley faster right after closing it.

it crashed my browser AND my firewall, never seen that before.

How about the size of the new gmail?

I use the business gmail version for work and it hasn't changed. Might be an opt-in thing?

I can't figure out how to enable it for home or work email :(

At the bottom of the G Suite blog post:

> The all-new Gmail experience is available for businesses to start using today in the G Suite Early Adopter Program (EAP) and can be turned on in the Admin console. [...]

> Personal Gmail users can opt-in to the new experience, too (Go to Settings in the top right and select “Try the new Gmail.”).

Does anyone have an idea on how one can enroll in EAP? I couldn't find any setting or a link, but would really like to try it for our G-Suite.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/82691

Took me ages to find this...

In Google Admin

Apps > G Suite > Settings for Gmail > Advanced settings

...and then scroll down to :

New Gmail Early Adopter Program

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