EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of reducing the energy consumption to be mentioned
I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
It's a small thing, but as you say internet video is relatively heavy.
To reduce my AI footprint I use the udm=14 trick[1] to kill AI in Google search. It generally gives better results too.
For general web browsing the best single tip is running uBlock Origin. If you can master medium[2] or hard mode (which will require un-breaking/whitelisting sites) it saves more bandwidth and has better privacy.[3]
To go all-out on bandwidth conservation, LocalCDN[4] and CleanURLs[5] are good. "Set it and forget it," improves privacy and load times, and saves a bit of energy.
Sorry this got long. Cheers
[0] https://greasyfork.org/whichen/scripts/23661-youtube-hd
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1j5tktg/ubloc...
Once you find it for a website you can just save it though so you don't need to go through it again.
LocalCDN is indeed a nobrainer for privacy! Set and forget.
Is it? My front end engineer spending 90 minutes cutting dependencies out of the site isn’t going to deny YouTube the opportunity to improve their streaming algorithms.
Everyone needs to be aware that we are part of an environment that has limited resources beyond "money" and act accordingly, whatever the scale.
Is it really? I was surprised to see that surfing newspaper websites or Facebook produces more traffic per time than Netflix or Youtube. Of course there's a lot of embedded video in ads and it could maybe count as streaming video.
Typical websites are not static and include a huge amount of JavaScript and other stuff from different ad networks, analysis tools, etc. It looks like most of it isn't cached. Video delivery on the other hand is incredibly well optimized because everyone knows it's data intensive.
A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient.
I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms.
- Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse.
- Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off.
- Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.
Like how industrial manufacturing are the biggest carbon consumers and compared to them, I’m just a drop in the ocean. But that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a responsibility to recycle because culminate effect of everyone like me recycling quickly becomes massive.
Similarly, if every web host did their bit with static content, you’d still see a big reduction at a global scale.
And you’re right it shouldn’t the end of the story. However that doesn’t mean it’s a wasted effort / irrelevant optimisation
A nice side effect of these choices is that I only spend a small part of my pay. Never had a credit card, never had debt, just saved my money until I had enough that the purchase was no big deal.
I don't really have an issue with people who say that their drop does not matter so why should they worry, but I don't understand it, seems like they just needlessly complicate their life. Not too long ago my neighbor was bragging about how effective all the money he spent on energy efficient windows, insulation, etc, was, he saved loads of money that winter; his heating bill was still nearly three times what mine was despite using a wood stove to offset his heating bill, my house being almost the same size, barely insulated and having 70 year old windows. I just put on a sweater instead of turning up the heat.
Edit: Sorry about that sentence, not quite awake yet and doubt I will be awake enough to fix it before editing window closes.
I'll have to speculate what you mean
1. If you mean drawing pixels directly instead of relying on HTML, it's going to be slower. (either because of network lag or because of WASM overhead)
2. If you mean streaming video to the browser and rendering your site server-side, it will break features like resizing the window or turning a phone sideways, and it will be hideously expensive to host.
3. It will break all accessibility features like Android's built-in screen reader, because you aren't going to maintain all the screen reader and braille stuff that everyone might need server-side, and if you do, you're going to break the workflow for someone who relies on a custom tweak to it.
4. If you are drawing pixels from scratch you also have to re-implement stuff like selecting and copying text, which is possible but not feasible.
5. A really good GUI toolkit like Qt or Chromium will take 50-100 MB. Say you can trim your site's server-side toolkit down to 10 MB somehow. If you are very very lucky, you can share some of that in the browser's cache with other sites, _if_ you are using the same exact version of the toolkit, on the same CDN. Now you are locked into using a CDN. Now your website costs 10 MB for everyone loading it with a fresh cache.
You can definitely do this if your site _needs_ it. Like, you can't build OpenStreetMap without JS, you can't build chat apps without `fetch`, and there are certain things where drawing every pixel yourself and running a custom client-side GUI toolkit might make sense. But it's like 1% of sites.
I hate HTML but it's a local minimum. For animals, weight is a type of strength, for software, popularity is a type of strength. It is really hard to beat something that's installed everywhere.
HTML/CSS/JS is the only fully open stack, free as in beer and free and not owned by a single entity and standardized by multinational standardization bodies for building applications interfaces that is cross platform and does that excellent. Especially with electron you can build native apps with HTML/CSS/JS.
There are actually web apps not „websites” that are built. Web apps are not html with sprinkled jquery around there are actually heavy apps.
Everyone writing about "future view" or "next gen" would have to prove to me that they really understand current state of things.
I like reminding students about Steve Jobs. While others pushed for web apps, he launched the App Store alongside the iPhone in 2008 and changed everything. I ask my students, why not stick with web apps? Why go native?
Hopefully, these questions get them thinking about new platforms, new technologies and solutions, and maybe even spark ideas that lead to something better.
Just picture this: it's 2007, and you're standing in front of Steve Jobs telling him: “You don't understand anything about the web, Steve.”
Yeah, good luck with that. For that reason I'll politely decline your offer to prove how much I know about this topic, but you're more than welcome to share your own perspective.
The binary is a compressed artefact and the stream is a TLS pipe. But the principle is the same.
In fact videos streams over the web are actually based on how HTTP documents are chunked and retrieved, rather than the other way around.
My goal was to question the way we do things. Game streaming, for example, works differently. The game runs entirely on a remote server. The server has a GPU/CPU combo that renders the game in real time and user input is sent back to the server via UDP/WebRTC or a TCP tunnel.
Also, native mobile apps work quite differently from both video and game streaming.
Bottom line: we've seen some great innovations over the last 35 years, and I'm hoping to see plenty more. The most important thing is to question everything we do, to have that "yes, but why?" mindset.
Video streaming is still HTTP and the data is chunked. The reason data is chunked is so that you can have adaptive bitrate. Ie if one chunk takes too long to download then the next chunk will be the same time slice but at a lower bitrate. All served over HTTP.
HTTP itself has evolved massively over the years too. HTTP3 is actually a binary protocol built on top of UDP.
You’ve got the right attitude questioning why things are. But you’re also not alone. Which is why modern HTTP doesn’t look anything like its 90s predecessor and why so many public facing systems have adopted HTTP.
You do see proprietary video streaming protocols too. But the reason they’re not generally used for public-facing services is the same reason HTTP is everywhere: firewalls and routers work fine with HTTP because HTTP is ubiquitous. Whereas proprietary formats, and particularly ones based on UDP, don’t always play nicely with routers and firewalls.
In fact UDP in particular is a troublesome datagram for routing.
I’ve worked in the broadcasting sector for a while but it’s been a long long time since I’ve worked in the games industry. So I don’t know what is commonly used for game streaming. But for video streaming, they moved away from proprietary protocols to HTTP. As latency drops and bandwidth increases, I would expect to see the same trend with game streaming too.
2. Everything in our world is dwarfes standing on the shoulders of giants. To rip everything up and create something completely new is most of the time an idea that sounds better than it really would be. Anyone who thinks something else is mostly to young to see this pattern.
I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas).
This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally, but making your website smaller and "being vocal about it" (whatever you mean by that) doesn't make an iota of difference. It also only works if your site is basically just text. If your website uses other resources (images, videos, 3D models, audio, etc.), the impact of first load is just noise anyway.
You can have a bigger impact by telling 100,000 people to drive an hour less each month and if just 1% of your hypothetical audience actually does that, you'd achieve orders of magnitude more in terms of environmental and societal impact.
Now, it is true that it didn't save much because probably many people were uploaded 8K videos at the time, so drop in the bucket. But personally, I found it quite inspiring and his decision was instrumental in my deciding to never upload 4K. And in general, I will say that people like that do inspire me and keep me going to be as minimal as possible when I use energy in all domains.
For me at least, trying to optimize for using as little energy as possible isn't an engineering problem. It's a challenge to do it uniformly as much as possible, so it can't be subdivided. And I do think every little bit counts, and if I can spend time making my website smaller, I'll do that in case one person gets inspired by that. It's not like I'm a machine and my only goal is time efficiency....
Depending on the type of video this may not matter, but it often does. For example, my FPS gaming and dashcam footage gets utterly destroyed if uploaded to youtube at 1080p. Youtube's 4K seems roughly equivalent to my high bitrate 1080p recordings.
Plus, trying to signal your way to societal change can have unintended downsides. It makes you feel you are doing something when you are actually not making any real impact. It attracts the kind of people who care more about signaling the right signals than doing the right thing into your camp.
And no, a million small sites won't "become a trend in society".
If we want to really fix places with bigger impact we need to change this approach in a first place.
This is micro-optimisation for a valid use case (slow connections in bandwidth-starved situations), but in the real world, a single hi-res image, short video clip, or audio sample would negate all your text-squeezing, HTTP header optimisation games, and struggle for minimalism.
So for the vast majority of use cases it's simply irrelevant. And no, your website is likely not going to get 1,000,000 unique visitors per hour so you'd have a hard time even measuring the impact whereas simply NOT ordering pizza and having a home made salad instead would have a measurable impact orders of magnitude greater.
Estimating the overall impact of your actions and non-actions is hard, but it's easier and more practical to optimise your assets, remove bloat (no megabytes of JS frameworks), and think about whether you really need that annoying full-screen video background. THOSE are low-hanging fruit with lots of impact. Trying to trim down a functional site to <14kB is NOT.
I've tried to really cut down my website as well to make it fairly minimal. And when I upload stuff to YouTube, I never use 4K, only 1080P. I think 4K and 8K video should not even exist.
A lot of people talk about adding XYZ megawatts of solar to the grid. But imagine how nice it could be if we regularly had efforts to use LESS power.
I miss the days when websites were very small in the days of 56K modems. I think there is some happy medium somewhere and we've gone way past it.
Calculate how much electricity you personally consume in total browsing the Internet for a year. Multiply that by 10 to be safe.
Then compare that number to how much energy it takes to produce a single hamburger.
Do the calculation yourself if you do not believe me.
On average, we developers can make a bigger difference by choosing to eat salad one day instead of optimizing our websites for a week.
Since a main argument is seemingly that AI is worse, let's remember that AI is querying these huge pages as well.
Also that the 14kb size is less than 1% of the current average mobile website payload.
I myself have installed one single package, and it installed 196,171 files in my home directory.
If that isn't gratuitous bloat, then I don't know what is.
Creating an average hamburger requires an input of 2-6 kWh of energy, from start to finish. At 15¢ USD/kWh, this gives us an upper limit of about 90¢ of electricity.
The average 14 kB web page takes about 0.000002 kWh to serve. You would need to serve that web page about 1-300,000 times to create the same energy demands of a single hamburger. A 14 mB web page, which would be a pretty heavy JavaScript app these days, would need about 1 to 3,000.
I think those are pretty good ways to use the energy.
Then multiply that by the number of daily visitors.
Without "hamburgers" (food in general), we die, reducing the size of usesless content on websites doesn't really hurt anyone.
Then multiply that by the number of daily customers.
Without web pages (information in general), we return to the Dark Ages. Reducing the number of hamburgers people eat doesn't really hurt anyone.
Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.
It's just an inconvenient truth for people who only care about the environmental impact of things that don't require a behavior change on their part. And that reveals an insincere, performative, scoldy aspect of their position.
What benefit does an individual get from downloading tens of megabytes of useless data to get ~5kB of useful data in an article? It wastes download time, bandwidth, users time (having to close the autoplaying ad), power/battery, etc.
One could say the same for js libraries, Tailwind and shiny imaged on the web.
Beans also taste good, so does minimal web page.
I love advertising in particular. Advertisers are welcome to every megabyte they can get their hands on when it comes to optimizing for the Vickrey auction deathmatch that decides in the blink of an eye what I'm most likely to spend my money on, if only I knew it actually existed. I am unfortunately both a very picky consumer, and way too lazy painstakingly research everything on the market. I'm actually extremely grateful those 5/50/500 megabytes can go towards something actually useful like trying to figure out what I would like to buy rather than... Whatever else they would be used for, I guess. Project Gutenberg archive torrent seeding or whatever.
For a user's access to a random web page anywhere, assuming it's not on a CDN near the user, you're looking at at ~10 routers/networks on the way involved in the connection. Did you take that into account?
(In addition to what justmarc said about accounting for the whole network. Plus I suspect between feeding them and the indirect effects of their contribution to climate change, I suspect you're being generous about the cost of a burger.)
Instead we should be looking to nuclear power solutions for our energy needs, and not waste time with reducing website size if its purely a function of environmental impact.
And no, reducing resource use to the minimum in the name of sustainability does not scale down the same way it scales up. You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful.
It's never clear to me whether people who push this line are doing so because they're bitter and want to punish other humans, or because they hate themselves. Either way, it evinces a system of thought that has already relegated humankind to the dustbin of history. If, in the long run, that's what happens, you're right and everyone else is wrong. Congratulations. It will make little difference in that case to you if the rest of us move on for a few hundred years to colonize the planets and revive the biosphere. Comfort yourself with the knowledge that this will all end in 10 or 20 thousand years, and the world will go back to being a hot hive of insects and reptiles. But what glory we wrought in our time.
Whataboutism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
> You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful.
Strawmaning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Every bloody mention of the environmental impact of our activities gets at least a reply like yours that ticks one of these boxes.
That's a sweeping misunderstanding of what I wrote, so I'd ask that you re-read what I said in response to the specific quote.
Why don't you read this comment and see if you have the same energy for hamburger eaters that you do for people with websites over 14kb. Because if you don't, it's obvious you're looking to sweat people who actually care about their environmental impact over absolutely nothing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614291
FYI, it's not Whataboutism to say there are more effective things to focus on.
(this was actually stated in agreement with the original poster, who you clearly misunderstood, so there's no "what-about" involved here. They were condemning all kinds of consumption, including the frivolous ones I mentioned).
But
I'm afraid you've missed both my small point and my wider point.
My small point was to argue against the parent's comment that
>>reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future
I disagree with this concept on the basis that nothing can be accomplished on a large scale if the primary concern is simply to reduce resource consumption to a minimum. If you care to disagree with that, then please address it.
The larger point was that this theory leads inexorably to the idea that humans should just kill themselves or disappear; and it almost always comes from people who themselves want to kill themselves or disappear.
..."required".
That allows you to fit pretty much everything in that requirement. Which actually makes my initial point a bit weak, as some would put "delivering 4K quality tiktok videos" as a requirement.
Point is that energy consumption and broad environmental impact has to be a constraint in how we design our systems (and businesses).
I stand by my accusations of whataboutism and strawmaning, though.