GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB | Hacker News Reader

GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

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65 pointsalex_suzuki16 comments

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Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162000

https://eu.usatoday.com

I don't know if it's available outside of Europe, feels like browsing a website locally on my machine.

It does IP-based geo location. All non-EU visitors are redirected to https://www.usatoday.com/

I just checked it out using a VPN. I felt like I was transported back in time to the later 90's. Quickly went through the page source. Much more HTML action going on that the old version.

There is practically nothing on the webpage for uBlock, Ghostery and Privacy Badger to block.

It's like a dream come true.

Wow, it's like browsing the internet in 2009 again - everything just works.

How did the web get so morbidly bloated again?

It's beautiful. This is how the web should be.

And how quite a few sites are. It's always a pleasure using those.

Sadly, the majority of sites linked to from Hacker News are not. Half of them is a form of Medium.com and the other half are abominations ranging from autoplay videos that follow you as you scroll to full page reload / jumps if you scroll down too far. It is a constant UI/UX dark/bad pattern showcase.

I use uBlock Origin and there are 50 websites I mostly fixed with custom css via Stylebot, but still, I see several new pages like that daily.

This is what the web should be like.

This recipe website is blazing fast too for EU visitors like me, but not quite for all the right reasons:

https://food52.com/

If you're not from the EU, this is what their site returns:

    We're sorry you’re not able to access the site at this 
    time, but this is a temporary measure to ensure we can
    best protect your data under new privacy regulations. We
    value your support; thanks for your patience and we can't
    wait to have you back!

The message has been up since May — a bit annoying if you're using a search engine to find recipes and hit a link from such a defective service. Plenty of alternatives though.

Accessing http://geniuskitchen.com from the EU just redirects to https://www.foodnetwork.com/not-available.html :/

This probably means that they disrespect users.

I noticed with Forbes that if you go to their cookie policy page and switch everything off, it takes several minutes to think about it ("applying your settings"!) then gives you a message saying that they haven't got a version of the page you can use.

This seems... disingenuous.

Anyway, the link above is a breath of fresh air. So fast!

> They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34.

This strengthens my feeling that JS in web pages (as opposed to web apps) is used mainly against the user, not for them, and it's best to just turn it off unless you really need some specific functinality.

It's really fast, but something is wrong with their links. Hyperlinks to related articles ("Related: " or "More: ") doesn't seems to work.

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