The 49MB web page
thatshubham.com
thatshubham.com
They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away.
We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit of connection speed, anything more and they just make nonsense out of it.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
Even if you don’t fix them, knowing where the weak points are is valuable for when they do snap in production.
If you’re willing to build some infra, there’s probably a lot more you can do—nightly slow-hardware runs come to mind immediately, browser devtools have a convincing builtin emulation of slow connections, a page displaying a graph of test runtime over time[1] isn’t hard to set up, etc.—but I don’t really have experience with that.
[1] See e.g. https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3....
Similarly, a colleague I had before insisted on using a crappy screen. Helped a lot to make sure things stay visible on customers’ low contrast screens with horrible viewing angles, which are still surprisingly common.
You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which is actually the code). Please stop blaming the devs. You're laundering blame. Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever up to the devs alone.
From the perspective of the devs, they expect that the infrastructure can handle what the business wanted. If you have a problem you really should punch up, not down.
Failing that, interpret the requirements.
Nobody can watch a bunch of videos at once that don’t even show up until you scroll! That’s a nonsense requirement and the dev’s failure to push back or redirect in a more viable direction is a sign of their incompetence, not that of the non-technical manager that saw YouTube’s interface and assumes that that’s normal and doable.
It is! You’d have to know about lazy loading and CDNs, but neither is black magic.
But hey, if you want to rail against incompetent developers who exist in a make-believe world where they hold all the power are simply too lazy and incompetent to 'do the right thing' then go ahead!
Stop making excuses and start taking ownership and responsibility of your craft.
I work in huge government departments, large financial orgs, and other "enterprise" places that are the poster child for the "realities of corporate environments".
Automatically saying "yes" to everything makes you a useless meat robot.
If you do everything that the customer asks, without push back, negotiation, or at least a deeper understanding, then you will produce broken garbage.
I see this all the time: "The customer asked for X, so I pressed the button!" is the cry of the incompetent junior tech that will never be promoted.
Nobody wants a uselessly slow website. Nobody wants to piss of their customers. Nobody wants angry rants about their online presence to make headline news.
What the customer wanted was multi media content. That's fine. The technical specifics of how that is presented is up to the engineering team to decide. You're not advisors! You own the technical decision making, so act like it.
If you make the decision to shove nearly a gigabyte down the wire to show the landing page, then that's on you. The manager asking for "video clips" or whatever as the feature probably doesn't even know the difference between megabyte and gigabyte! They shouldn't have to in the same way that I shouldn't have to know about my state's electrical wiring standards if I get a sparky out to add a porch light. If my house burns down, that's the electrician's fault, not mine as the customer!
Similarly, if someone asks for lights inside their pool, an electrician that strings ordinary mains cabling through the water should be jailed for criminal negligence. Obviously, only special low-voltage lighting can be used in water, especially near people. Duh.
Act like an electrician, not like a bored shopkeer who's memorised the line "the customer is always right" without realising that the full quote ends in "... in matters of taste."
I recon the US electrical code for swimming pool allpows mains voltage as long as the conduit/cabling is certified for use in water (ie: watertight), properly grounded, and behind a GFCI.
And you can skip grounding/GFCI for anything below 24V.
Me: we cant do X bceause it has Y and Z implcations for end users
Manager: It fits our brand and we have to do it.
Dev: I can do it and the implications are mitigated by (handwavy explanation)
Maanger: sounds good. (To me) Maybe you can make a (useless) diagram for this featuer that will be realy handy for KT
--Days later--
Feature is delivered and the Y and Z were ethier not mitigated or there was a attempt-ish to mitigate them
I suppose you've never experienced the corporate hell that can happen with a CDN. The dev could submit a dozen servicenow tickets only to see half of them rejected by those same incompetent non-technical managers, or they could just make the thing work now and move on.
The next project will be better after the dust settles and those rejections have been reviewed and escalated into proper discussions. Nobody tells the story of that project because it does the things everyone expects. Guess who led those discussions and fought to get the meetings on the calendar? The "incompetent" devs of course!
Some are just flat out refused as they are just too stupid and will cripple the system in some way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Have a wonderful day =3
The blame clearly lies with the contradictory requirements provided by the broader business too divorced from implementation details to know they're asking for something dumb. Developers do not decide those.
The responsibility of the devs is to deliver what was asked. They can and probably do make notes of the results. So does QA. So do the other stakeholders. On their respective teams they get the same BS from everyone who isn't pleased with the outcome.
Ultimately things are on a deadline and the devs must meet requirements where the priority is not performance. It says nothing about their ability to write performant code. It says nothing about whether that performant code is even possible in a browser while meeting the approval of the dozens of people with their own agendas. It says everything about where you work.
We always have discussions here about how you have to learn to talk to communicate your value to clients in a language they understand. Same goes for internal communications.
Software development isn't factory work. And factory workers are expected to notice problems and escalate them.
Anyway, they're paying me far too much to have me turn off my brain and just check the boxes they want checked in all situations. Sometimes, checking boxes because they need to be checked is the thing to do, but usually it's not.
We're definitely way past the point where there is a singular definition of what "software development" is supposed to mean.
I also didn't describe anything like factory work.
If a bridge engineer is asked to build a bridge that would collapse under its own weight, they will refuse. Why should it be different for software engineers?
You're not even arguing with me BTW. You're arguing against the entire premise of running a business. Priorities are not going to necessarily be what you value most.
I’ve seen a lot of times where “business people” ask for a feature that sounds good but isn’t technically viable for any number of reasons. The devs not doing pushback would lead to similarly non-functional/broken stuff getting shipped.
The pushback doesn’t even need to be adversarial, just do some requirements engineering, figure out what they want and go “Okay, to implement X in the best possible way, we should do Y and avoid Z because of W.”
In the bridge analogy, the people who are asking for a specific design might not know that it’d collapse under its own weight and the engineers should look for the best solution.
There are environments where devs can't do that sort of requirements engineering and those are generally pretty dysfunctional - obviously you don't need that for every feature request, but it's nice to have that ability be available when needed.
On those sites you’re right: the approach was different, but not necessarily better. Tracking library bloat and marketing-driven design were reduced. But insane “security” constraints (e.g. “you have to stay on outdated revisions of this library” or “containers are not allowed on the backend, only bare metal”, no joke—constraints that led to significant increased security risk) and extremely user-hostile design practices increased, as well as there being an exceedingly long hurry-up-and-wait turnaround time for shipping important fixes/improvements.
Working on a safety/state-critical site isn’t a panacea, in other words.
> From the perspective of the devs, they expect that the infrastructure can handle what the business wanted. If you have a problem you really should punch up, not down.
this belittles the intelligence of the dev team. they should know better. it's like validating saying "i really thought i could pour vodka in the fuel tank of this porsche and everything would function correctly. must be porsche's fault."
Oh, and the rest of the business doesn't even know what a car or gasoline are!
Developers often do push back and warn against ideas that have too many compromises, but cannot outright say no just because of that. There are too many other people involved.
You seem to think that any one person/group has/wants/should have full control when deemed necessary. That doesn't make sense unless either the success criteria are lacking (you call the shots alone and probably miss a ton of opportunities), or the requirements are so constrained that all the work is just optimizing the implementation (someone else already called the shots without you).
If your work is either of those situations it means the business plan sucks. AI is the least of your worries.
If you lack the ability to say no to objectively bad ideas, you have very little value as a developer. Anyone can code a feature just because someone said to code it (Claude builds trivial objects for me every day when I know what I want but can't remember the specific syntax or pattern to do it). It takes actual skill and expertise to both recognize bad ideas, and convince people they're bad ideas.
> You seem to think that any one person/group has/wants/should have full control when deemed necessary.
No, I think subject matter experts should function as experts and should have decision-making power within their scope of expertise - if they're unable to convince others, then they are ineffective and should be replaced by SMEs who are effective.
I don't understand why you think a committee approach and implementation of bad ideas, regardless of what the experts in the room think, is an optimal business pattern.
There are good reasons to have a small cheap development staging server, as the rate-limited connection implicitly trains people what not to include. =3
I'm so happy to have seen their web site that I want to do business with them, even though I have no business to be done.
Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.
I naturally assumed that it was my code that was the problem (because I'm often the programmer equivalent of the Seinfeld hipster doofus) and spent the next few hours optimizing the hell out of it. It turned out to be unnecessary but I'm kind of glad it forced me into that "profiling" mindset.
Edit: Ah, this was it: https://mightyapp.webflow.io/
Developers really ought to test such things better.
Alternatively, run uBlock Origin and NoScript and you probably won't need it.
You can make it look like any feature in any UI is hidden by choosing the longest path to reach it, using many words to describe it despite the target audience already knowing this stuff, and making your windows as small as possible.
Moreover, that a developer tool is a bit hidden in submenus in a UI designed for nontechnical users is fair game.
Even considering this, right click > inspect or Ctrl+shift+k also gets you the web developer tools. Not that hidden.
And then usually the network tab is visible immediately, it is one of the first tabs unless you moved it towards the end (even then, usually all the tabs are visible; but it's nice you can order the tabs as you want, and that a scroll button exists for when your window is too small -- and if the web developer panel is too small because it's docked at the left you can resize it, dock it to bottom or undock it).
This stuff is pretty standard across browsers, it's not like Firefox's UI is specifically weird for this. I don't have ideas for improving this a lot, it looks quite well designed and optimized to me already.
And then no, ublock Origin and No Script can't help you optimize the size of the web page you are working on. You ought to unblock everything to do this. They are a solution for end users, who have very few reasons to use the throttle feature. And unfortunately for end users, blocking scripts actually breaks too much to be a good, general workaround against web pages being too heavy. I know, I browse the web like this.
Any web developer knows how to find the network tab of the web developer tools
I see this mistake very often from people whose UI learnings came via Visual Studio, because it didn't have a separate UI element named "dropdown menu" or similar. You instead had to add a combobox and configure an option to turn it into a plain drodown list (e.g. set editable to false in VB6, or change dropDownStyle in VB.net).
I had a fairly large supplier that was so proud that they implemented a functionality that deliberately (in their JS) slows down reactions from http responses. So that they can showcase all the UI touches like progress bars and spinning circles. It was an option in system settings you could turn on globally.
My mind was blown, are they not aware of F12 in any major browser? They were not, it seems. After I quietly asked about that, they removed the whole thing equally quietly and never spoke of it again. It's still in release notes, though.
It was like 2 years ago, so browsers could do that for 10-14 years (depending how you count).
I guarantee with 100% satisfaction that my O(n^n) code will allow visitors sufficient time to fully appreciate the artistic glory of all the progress bars and spinners.
We have some egregious slowness in our app that only shows up for our largest customers in production but none of our organizations in development have that much data. I created a load testing organization and keep considering adding management to it so they implicitly get the idea that fixing the slowness is important.
Bitlbee saved (and still saves) my ass with tons of the protocols available via IRC using nearly nil data to connect. Also you can connect with any IRC client since early 90's.
Not just web developers. Electron lovers should be trottled with 2GB of RAM machines and some older Celeron/Core Duo machine with a GL 2.1 compatible video card. It it desktop 'app' smooth on that machine, your project it's ready.
>I used the text web (https://text.npr.org and the like) thru Lyx
maybe you mean Linx or Links insted Lyx?
Marketing dept. too. They're the primary culprits in all the tracking scripts.
Marketing and managers should be restricted as well, because managers set the priorities.
I recently had to clean up a mess and after days asking what’s in use and what’s not, turns out nothing is really needed, and 80 tracking pixels were added “because that’s how we do it”.
You're describing the web developers again. (Or, if UX has the power to demand this from software engineering, then the problem is not the UX designers.)
But sure, the current state of brokenness is a result of a combination of overambitious designs and poor programming. When I worked as a web developer I was often tasked with making elements behave in some bespoke way that was contrary to the default browser behavior. This is not only surprising to the user, but makes the implementation error prone.
One example is making a form autosubmit or jump to a different field once a text field has reached a certain length, or dividing a pin/validation code entry fields into multiple text fields, one for each character. This is stupidity at the UX level which causes bugs downstream because the default operation implemented by the browser isn't designed to be idiotic. Then you have to go out of your way to make it stupid enough for the design spec, and some sizeable subset of webpages that do this will predictably end up with bugs related to copying and pasting or autofilling.
Recently had to put so many huge blurs that there was screen tearing like effect whenver you srcolled a table. AND No i was not allowed to use prebake-blurs because they wouldnt resize "responsively"
Less useless shit popping up (with ad block so I mean just the cookies, store location etc harassments) Store selector didn't request new pages every time I do anything; resulting in all the popups again. (just download our spyware and all these popups will go away!) Somehow my page loads are snappier than local stores despite being across the planet.
Not saying it's a good site. It's almost the same as Home Depot. Just slightly better. I mean there's an AI button for searching for a product so you can do agentic shopping with a superintelligence on your side.
I was asked to look at the site when it was already live, and some VP of the parent company decided to visit the site from their phone at home.
The single-line change of adding loading=lazy to the <img> elements wouldn’t fix everything, but it would make the page at least basically usable.
"Why do you want 64 GB RAM in your laptop?"
"I need that to load the gallery"
I wouldn't even guarantee it's developers adding it. I'm sure they have some sort of content management system for doing article and ad layout.
I chewed through 7Gb of data in about 30 minutes while working tethered to my phone.
This breaks my brain..."run around 750MB" "per website" "open once".
Do you mean your company had several websites (as in unique websites), and each had 750MB? Or the transferred data volume of each was 750MB? Or just the first page? Or the source code?
And do you mean "open once", as in "once upon a time", or if you open the website one time? Or did your developers open and shut websites, and the open ones had 750MB? Or one time when you entered your developer's office space, you saw they had opened several websites on their computers, random ones, and by coincidence you saw the network tabs and each was 750MB data transferred?
Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people.
Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine.
Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod without telling developers, and without thinking twice about impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads.
(It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing developers can do about those requests, they're under full the control of all those 3rd-parties.)
Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do you mean, performance decreased when we added more tracking?")
I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”.
This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.
The law is just an annoying thing getting in the way of our profits.
GDPR-compliance is the first thing that goes out of the window, and with that conforming to the law, when in the EU. Ethics fly out of the window at the same time, or just slightly afterwards, when they add tracking, that no one agreed to, or when they forget to ask for consent, or when they have a "consent" popup, that employs dark pattern, or when they outsource consent to a third party tool, that informed visitors don't want anything to do with.
I've had recently a case at work, while filling a contact form to add a new party there were 300+ calls to the validation service to validate email and phones. Three calls per every character entered to every text input!
The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.
No worries if not :)
I'll see if an avg version is viable in the future.
Btw. was the writing assisted by AI or is it all you?
Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.
I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images.
My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click).
I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.)
Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data.
Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.
And yes, riots can be caused by other things too - e.g. religious riots. But whatever it is, people have to care a lot about it, enough so to be willing to put their own life and limb on the line. This is not one of those cases.
Only several days ago I watched the presenter of RobWords whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many more people just watch his presentations than watch and also subscribe.
The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al with high ranking commercial content are the millions of small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want to tell the world at large their particular stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.
They are also not averse to using legal means to block them. For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone, Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to remove it from the store: https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...
Another quick point: my observation is that the worse the ad problem the lower quality the content is. Cory Doctorow's "enshitification" encapsulates the problems in a nutshell.
News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.
That website is loaded with too many ads, I left it and am not going back.
Not
That website has too many ads, I'm getting an ad blocker and going back.
No.
"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.
Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
NYT's revenue and subscription base are both increasing quite well.
Ad revenue was up 20%, and profit was up 26% in Q4. Revenue was over $700,000,000. 12,300,000 people pay for the New York Times.
Moreover, daily newspapers (the ones that have survived) are only about a third (or even less) as thick as they used to be in the 1990s, their classified ads are now almost nonexistent. And broadsheet format newspapers were kill off at the same time for the same reasons.
The internet has been devastating for the industry, ipso facto, the loss of revenues - both for physical print and online - has resulted lower journalistic standards hence the shithouse mess the publications industry is in today.
You can download the homepage html see the style block.
In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years
Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it
It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year
Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again
If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives.
I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.
Don't worry, it'll be just like the real Fox news after the Paramount merger.
They also compress the hell out of the images, so it all loads shockingly well on poor connections.
They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.
Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.
I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.
Dead trees FTW.
I'm lucky enough to live somewhere that gets dead trees for NYT, WSJ, local rag, and more. I value news, so I pay for it, and it's still less than I spend on coffee each month.
The best part: The newspaper ends. No everscroll zombie addiction.
For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.
Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.
Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.
This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).
In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!
In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.
Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.
In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).
So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).
What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).
That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.
The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.
In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.
It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.
Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.
For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.
Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).
I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.
Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.
That's not true I had a subscription for multiple years. I canceled it because they
A. Kept trying to show me bullshit ads, B. The overall deterioration of the quality of the content especially the opinion section.
It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription conversion, it's under 1%.
It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the internet is full of children, even grown children now in their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea that ad blocking will save the internet.
Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.
Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.
The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on.
The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product.
The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.
Yes it does, from nytimes actual earning release for Q 2025:
1. The Company added approximately 450,000 net digital-only subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2025, bringing the total number of subscribers to 12.78 million.
2. Total digital-only average revenue per user (“ARPU”) increased 0.7 percent year-over-year to $9.72
2025 subscription revenue was 1.950 billion dollars. Advertising was 565 million that includes 155 million dollars worth of print advertising.
Sure operating profit is only 550 million very close to the advertising revenue, but the bulk of their income is subscriptions, they could make it work if they had to. My suspicion is that if they dropped all the google ads they could have better subscription retention and conversion rates as well.
But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads).
So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content. One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an editorial issue, not an engineering issue.
It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play.
But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.
It would have been so much better if we had simply decided back in the ’90s that executable programs and HTML don’t belong together. The world would be so much better today.
I didn’t bother validating this, but I’m sure they wouldn’t lie or misinterpret!!
A couple of years ago they redeveloped it as a SPA app.
The original server-rendered version of it worked just fine, but it "had" to be made into an interactive client-side monstrosity that loads many times slower for "reasons".
It doesn't even load successfully about a quarter of the time. It shows items in reverse order (entries from 2013 first), which is some sort of async loading bug. They will never fix this. It's been there for two years already, it'll be there for a decade more, mark my words.
Then, it takes about a minute to load sometimes on a poor connection.
The links are JavaScript and don't allow "open in new tab".
Etc...
All of this to enable client-side filtering, which is a non-feature nobody ever wanted. A simple server-side filter capability would do the same thing, faster.
And anyway, the filtering is broken! If click the "New or updated" filter, it drops down an empty selection with no options. Clicking anything else doesn't change what is shown!
While developing this over-engineered monstrosity, they took the original site offline for "maintenance!"
Hilariously, despite Azure having multiple CDN products, the Azure Updates page doesn't correctly use their own CDN and marks almost everything as "no-cache; no-store" causing 2.5 MB (after compression) to be re-transferred every time, despite using unique signed URLs with SHA256 hashes in them!
This is the state of web-dev in the 2020s: A multi-trillion-dollar software company can't hire developers that know anything else other than SPA web app development!
This commonly used page has spectacularly poor web engineering, and this is from a company that sells a web app platform, a CDN, and the ASP.NET web app development framework!
If they can't get it right, who can!?
If they can't get it right, who can!?
Berkshire Hathaway, apparently: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
Pure content, not fluff, and even has a small but unobtrusive ad.
Though I agree today's Github is awful slow, JS is required to see issues, …
The 49MB webpage just shows what our priorities are. It shows the target audience has fast internet that can load this without issues. On my average home connection in Australia, I can download a 49MB page in 0.3 seconds. We spend time optimising for what matters to the end user.
Would've been cool if we could know if site X served the same JS as before. Like a system (maybe even decentralized) where people could upload hashes of the JS files for a site. Someone could even review them and post their opinions. But mainly you'll know you're getting the same JS as before - that the site hasn't been hacked or that you're not being targeted personally. If a file needs to update, the site could say in the changelog something like "updated the JS file used for collapsing comments to fix a bug". This could be pushed by the users to the system.
Especially important for banking sites and webmail.
JavaScript and WebAssembly programs are always executed in a sandboxed VM, without read access to the host OS files (unless, of course, you grant it).
Enabling scripting was a necessary step for interactive websites. Without it, a full page load would be required every time you upvote a Hacker News comment. In my opinion, the real problem is that browsers allow too many connections to third-party domains, which are mostly ads and trackers. Those should require user-approved permissions instead of being the default.
Modern CSS (and some newer HTML features) also reduces the need for scripting.
I very much doubt that "Enabling scripting was a necessary step for interactive websites." (emphasis added). It may well have been the most convenient and fastest way to get the functionality to the most users. With Javascript each website could provide functionality without waiting for such to be implemented by all browsers.
However distribution of power also leads to more complex trust relationships (even if one is confident that sandboxing is effective). Independent implementation also leads to more complexity overall.
While this article focuses on ads, it's worth noting that sites have had ads for a long time, but it's their obnoxiousness and resource usage that's increased wildly over time. I wouldn't mind small sponsored links and (non-animated!) banners, but the moment I enable JS to read an article and it results in a flurry of shit flying all over the page and trying to get my attention, I leave promptly.
Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth it?
I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don’t give a shit
I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I’m in my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a result, I’ve never had a tolerance for anything but the most reasonable advertisements
I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it isn’t
A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages: https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html
Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site: https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html
I've tried all of the auto discard type extensions but yeah back on CPU usage is crazy
How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders?
Or for developers to pad their CV.
Loudly oppose the trendchasing devs who have been brainwashed into the "newer is better" mindset by Big Tech. I'm sure the shareholders would want to reduce the amount they spend on server/bandwidth costs and doing "development and maintenance" too.
Simple HTML forms can already make for a very usable and cheap site, yet a whole generation of developers have been fed propaganda about how they need to use JS for everything.
You can't beat China Southern . They have the most dog shit website I've ever seen. The flight was fine but I gave up doing online check in after 3 attempts. Never mind the bloat:
- required text fields with wrong or missing labels. One field was labeled "ticket no.". It kept getting rejected. I randomly tried passport number instead. It worked.
- sometimes fields only have a placeholder that you can't fully read because the field has not enough width ("Please enter the correct...") and the placeholder disappears once you start typing.
- date picker is randomly in Chinese
- makes you go through multi step seat selection process only to tell you at the end that seat selection is not possible anymore.
- signed up with email; logged out and went back to the SAME login page; now sign up via phone number is required!?
Hacker News still has a feed (that's the only reason why I saw this thread). And Reddit gives you a feed for your subscribed subreddits.
Google Reader was never the answer. It's such a shame that people even here don't realize that relying on Google for that had interests at odds - and you weren't part of the equation at all.
Well, except for your data. You didn't give them enough data. So they shut down shop. Gmail though, ammirite? :D
Yeah I wonder why gmail was not one of the shut down products /s
4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.
You have 20 ads scattered around, an autoplaying video of some random recipe/ad, 2-3 popups to subscribe, buy some affiliated product and then the author's life story and then a story ABOUT the recipe before I am able to see the detailed recipe in the proper format.
It's second nature to open all these websites in reader mode for me atp.
Running this on the dev console makes it snappy again:
let allElements = document.querySelectorAll('\*');
allElements.forEach(element => {
element.style.filter = 'none';
element.style.backdropFilter = 'none';
});I should really run some to tests to figure out how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter.
I also manually added some additional domains (mostly fonts by Google and Adobe) to further reduce load and improve privacy.
Not done any rigorous tests but my experience has been rhat it can be lower than a tenth.
Nice term!
> Or better yet, inject the newsletter signup as a styled, non-intrusive div between paragraphs 4 and 5. If the user has scrolled that far, they are engaged.
They're engaged with the content! There is no way to make some irrelevant signup "non-intrusive". It's similar to links to unrelated articles - do you want users to actually read the article or jump around reading headlines?
There have been countless businesses that have lost out on my money because I clicked on their ad (good job!), start reading the product info on their website as it loads (that's basically a sale), and then the page finished loading with a barrage of popups for cookie consent, newsletter signup for a discount code, special offers, special sale, spin the wheel for a prize, etc. That's when I close the tab and forget about it.
Luckily I use a proper content blocker (uBlock Origin in hard mode).
So much hostile user design.
Edit: NPR gets a little shout out for being able to close their annoying pop-ups by clicking anywhere that's not the notification. So it's still crappy that it hijacks the screen, but not awful I guess?
If people tune out only because how horrible the sites are, good.
Someone is serving this amount of data to every visitor. Even if you want to track the user as much as possible, wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to do that with the least amount of data transfer possible as that would dramatically reduce your operating cost?
Perhaps size optimization is the next frontier for these trackers.
they won't be able to complain about low memory but their experience will be terrible every time they try to shove something horrible into the codebase
Apps don't have adblockers.
And most people don't even use adblocker when browsing normal site. I kind of had to tech my surrounding people to use adblocker.
But running a browser that blocks ads like duckduckgos is super simple.
But yeah I am sure there are additional tracking and possibly retention benefits.
For every 1 engineer it seems like there are 5 PMs who need to improve KPIs somehow and thus decide auto playing video will improve metrics. It does. It also makes people hate using your website.
I would constantly try to push back against the bullshit they'd put on the page but no one really cares what a random engineer thinks.
I don't think there's any real way to solve this unless we either get less intrusive ad tech or news gets a better business model. Many sites don't even try with new business models, like local classifieds or local job boards. And good luck getting PMs to listen to an engineer talking about these things.
For now, the bloat remains.
The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.
And it works without JavaScript... but there does appear to be some tracking stuff. A deferred call out to Cloudflare, a hit counter I think? and some inline stuff at the bottom that defers some local CDN thing the old-fashioned way. Noscript catches all of this and I didn't feel like allowing it in order to weigh it.
So they could do exactly what they are doing on the web and may be even more but with Native code so it feels much faster.
I got to the point and wonder why cant all the tracking companies and ad network just all share and use the same library.
But on Web page bloat. Let's not forget Apps are insanely large as well. 300 - 700MB for Banking, Traveling or other Shopping App. Even if you cut 100MB on L10n they are still large just because of again tracking and other things.
Vote with your behavoir. Stop going to these sites!
Want to bet 100 MB? 1 GB? Is it unthinkable?
20 years ago, a 49 MB home page was unthinkable.
I think there'll continue to be growth in page sizes, but then maybe we'll consider efficiency, or the NYTimes shuts down and the 20MB page will be the liquidators selling the domain. Maybe we don't even use domains by then as everything is on an app.
> Today, there's ~30 times more js than html on homepages of websites (from a list of websites from 5 years ago).
It seems that this number only go up.
Maybe you'd need one chart for request counts (to make tracking stand out more) and another for amount of transferred data.
This site was created to give developers and pms some ammunition to work on improving load speed
[0]: https://svelte.dev/
The same phenomenon worsened during the DotCom Meltdown and the Great Financial Crisis. This accelerated desperation is a sign of the times; paying subscribers are likely cancelling due to current economic conditions.
Of course not. Its all about maximising shareholder value. The users aren't a consideration anymore
with almost all options and filters enables ofc
I am considering moving to technitium though, it seems better featured.
example 'sponsored listings' on amazon.
plenty of ad-networks that provide that 'native' experience
To make it somehow worse...when you scroll down, you think it would leave you as it leaves the viewport. No. It detaches, shrinks and pins itself to the bottom right of your screen and continues playing. It keeps the distraction going and as if teasing you, features a microscopic 'X' button with a tiny hit area (violating Fitts's Law)."
Is there not way to stop this? The do not autoplay videos option often does not work.
||primis.tech$domain=~primis.tech
It’s as if everyone designed their website around the KPI of irritating your visitors and getting them to leave ASAP.
They thing is, though... they _don't_ have to. It's been my standard practice for years to just tap ctrl-w the moment any web page pops up a model box. Some leeway is given to cookie dialogs _if_ they have a disagree/disable button _prominently_ visible, otherwise they're ctrl-w'd too.
"Newsletter..." ctrl-w.
"Please disable your..." ctrl-w.
"Subscribe to read..." ctr-w.
Ctrl-w is your friend.
They also have their own tiktok and AI slop that I never knew about.
I’m afraid someone who wants to support professional journalism and agrees to pay ~$300/yr for an NYT subscription still gets most (all?) of this nonsense?
We put up with the nonsense because we had to. But the irony is content creators are actively driving their audience away.
I see three options:
1. Show me reasonable ads and I will disable ad blocking
2. Do the crap described in this article and don't complain when I arm myself against it
3. Do a hard paywall and no ads; force me to pay to see your content
You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die with you.
Bear in mind that any cut that reduces their CPM or rate of conversation to paid will have to also include an equivalent reduction in their staff.
(Can @dang explain why he decided to rate-limit me now?)
Then the industry itself would not be very sustainable, wouldn't it? In that case, I would expect the industry to radically change or to disappear like many other industries whose expectations were made unsustainable by tech progress. For some reason, we're incredibly excited of it happening to coding, music, art, but not to journalism. Journalism must survive in its current form at all costs.
It only proves my point - if journalists really added value - like reporting on something that you can't just find out by browsing social media, maybe they would have a chance. But, what we see and have is only just sloppy reporting.
Here's one example:
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-fi...
Not all information is out there for free, monetarily and in terms of personal liberty. News articles frequently quote "sources inside" some three letter agencies or major corporations who will face consequences if they speak to the public under their real names, and will be rightfully dismissed if spoken anonymously without a journalist being able to ascertain their identity. There is also information that is only spread behind closed doors — trade shows, conferences, sometimes even governmental meetings — where the participants may not want the public to know what they are doing. Then there is the investigative digging, knowing who to ask questions and what questions to ask…
I understand you may think all journalism is just reddit and twitter compilations but it was not always the case. Most people, you likely included, do not even know what they are missing out when their local journalism collapses (again, due to loss of newspaper sell and classified ad revenues) and leaves everyone in the dark about what is going on in local politics.
Your argument just revolves around the edge cases of journalism and that's exactly my point. Many of the so-called "news" sites aren't that. They are just scraping off content on the internet and slapping ads over them. So many clones of Mashable, for instance.
>Most people, you likely included, do not even know what they are missing out when their local journalism collapses (again, due to loss of newspaper sell and classified ad revenues)
While there is some merit to this argument, not always. Most of what we read today are just the opinions of the news, rather than the actual news itself. The people giving their opinions on the news aren't even qualified in the subject matter to begin with. So, strictly speaking, if a news organization collapses - it's just survival of the fittest. It's a free market and if you don't add value, people will just move on.
I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.