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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

Wow, first photo is a 2000x1489px PNG (4.5MB) and it is scaled to just 451x335px. (not even clickable to view at full size, it's just for page decoration)

Nice web design, google!

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There's also an animated GIF (Turn_it_to_11.gif) that weighs 6.7MB and is not even visible until you click "Show related articles" at the bottom. And even if you do that, it's only displayed in 164x82px instead of the original 2880x1200px.

Looks like Google's CDN works so well that creating resized versions to save bandwidth is not worth it. :)

Sounds like their automatic compression functionality on their CDN isn't exactly working the way its supposed to. I know AWS Cloudflare has something like this that I use in conjunction with saving website images on S3.

> Looks like Google's CDN works so well that creating resized versions to save bandwidth is not worth it. :)

Worth it to them, maybe; what about the poor reader?

Ouch, good catch!

The page loads 41 requests and 12.88 MB of data, with the page taking 2+ seconds to properly load the content (1.09s according to Chrome dev tools, but this is just the initial DOM load).

For a simple webpage with white background and dark text.

Not only that, all those MBs are there just to help deliver a 1800 byte text-payload. That's literally a 2500x bloat-factor.

But hey, AMP is because Google care deeply about quick web-pages. No alternate agenda here, no siree.

Google is a mind-bogglingly massive company. You can't infer anything about its stance on perf from a blog post, except perhaps that the people who care about web perf aren't babysitting the blog (which is probably using a third-party CMS).

Incidentally, I only see a 260K image when I dev-tools that page. I can't reproduce the 4.5MB download.

And resized to that size, saved as JPEG with 90% quality and optimized results in 25 KB. So 180x size reduction with almost no quality loss (and you can always link original image if someone wants details).

Yikes. Add this to the long list of Google not following their own recommendations.

Or maybe I've just revealed Google's secret new 5xdpi range of phones :-)

It's truly amazing how bloated and slow most of Google's products have become, you can tell that they have hired literally zero people who came from poor places with slow internet.

I think they just get too caught up in their tooling and silly over-engineering and never actually think about the end product.

Quanta mag <https://www.quantamagazine.org/> used to do similar numbnuttery, 5MB animated crap typical. They seem to have caught on - current front page banner is 'only' 1MB ie. only ~20% of shakespeare's entire life's work, uncompressed.

But we need AMP! Faster, faster page loads, loads.

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