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Comment by joncrane | Hacker News Reader

I've recently started using a Firefox extension called uMatrix and all I can say is, install that and start using your normal web pages and you'll very quickly see exactly why web pages take so long to load. The number and size of external assets that get loaded on many websites is literally insane.

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It's the cascade of doom... we have an internal benchmark without ads, and it's funny to see without ads we load something like 6Mb of JS but if you load the ads, the analytics cascade of hell will load 350Mb of JS to display one picture.

6MB of JS without ads? What are you loading into the browser, an entire operating system?

One whole React webapp.... plus pictures. It really isn't "JS" as much as the whole "resources" reported by Chrome.

6MB of JS without ads is unfortunately on the small side these days. Worked for a company that had 15MB of JS, after minification and compression (mostly giant JS libraries that we on the dev team used one small feature of).

I've been using uMatrix for ages and it was baffling to me how some websites that are literally just nice looking blogs have an unreal number (i.e. 500+) of external dependencies.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

This is a joke, right?

the joke is that is-odd has a dependency - the is-number package

Look at how often it was downloaded last week alone: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

We're all doomed.

I notice there's an isEven as well. I wonder if they're mutually recursive.

there is also is-odd-even which uses both as dependencies, so it appears they're not

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd-or-even

The commit history is surprisingly long. The actual test evolved from

  return !!(~~i >> 0 & 1)

  return !!(~~i & 1);

  const n = Math.abs(value);
  return (n % 2) === 1;

I love uMatrix but it can be a serious hassle to get an embedded video to play sometimes. Sometimes I'll allow scripts from the embedding site and suddenly there are dozens or hundreds of new dependencies popping up and not my video. At this point I really have to ask myself if it is worth it. Maybe if I'm lucky its a YouTube video and I can track it down on YouTube's site, but if not it's going to be a big headache and a lot of reloads before the stupid thing plays.

I just got in the habit of turning it off, when I'm either too lazy to bother, or I'm on a site I'll probably never visit again. sites that are already setup ofc generally stay that way.

The big headache is when you have a site half-setup -- its correct for all of your usage, and then you try something new and you get a video that doesn't load, and you sit there waiting until you realize umatrix probably found something new

Same problem here (not using uMatrix but something similar being NoScript) => I'm now constantly using 2 browsers, Firefox with NoScript as a base, then temporarily switching to Chrome to access the sites which are demanding in terms of dependencies as you described.

It's easy to convince atechnical people to adopt uMatrix when you show them that they can watch shows without ads and load pages in less than a second.

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