

The Web Is Getting Slower, at Least in How We All Experience It - doctorshady
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/the-web-is-getting-slower/

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Animats
It's the bloat. I loaded the Wired page linked above with Firefox network
logging enabled. Things start out reasonably, with multiple images loading in
parallel. Then there's a request to "[http://api-us-east.zqtk.net/conde-
nast?callback=gotSegmentDa...](http://api-us-east.zqtk.net/conde-
nast?callback=gotSegmentData...") which takes 932ms. A lot of stuff waits for
that to complete. Then about 30 images load, all with content irrelevant to
the article. Another 1.2 seconds are required to load some Facebook stuff.
Then Disqus starts to load, requiring about 3 seconds. So it takes about 6
seconds to load the page over a reasonably fast DSL connection.

This is with Ghostery blocking 23 (!) trackers and ad services. With Ghostery
re-enabled, it takes 56 seconds before page load is completed, and over 6MB of
stuff has been loaded via 266 HTTP requests.

 _That 's_ why the web is slowing down. Any questions?

~~~
vdaniuk
>reasonably fast DSL connection

Yeah, I have a question. What's your definition of reasonably fast?

In Romania, on average connection, the Wired page would load during 1
second.[0] That is my definition of reasonably fast.

The monopoly of ISPs is why the web is slowing down.

Oh, and I have another question. Why don't you consider caching of resources
that will make every consequent Wired page load much faster?

[0][http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/](http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/)

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pervycreeper
It's not surprising, considering how the way ordinary people habitually use
networks has changed. What was once the province of only geeks is now
commonplace.

Not to mention (what I perceive to be) a tremendous increase in bloat on the
web. We have designers going overboard with HTML5 canvas gee whiz effects,
infinite scroll, everything requiring javascript when it really shouldn't, and
pages with actual content on the order of kilobytes being delivered hidden
among tens of megabytes of data.

Added to that, the telecom monopolies have little incentive to improve their
infrastructure. It's consequently little wonder that "the web is slow"

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CoolGuySteve
I'll save you some time. Mobile is over slower links. That's pretty much all
he says.

I was expecting something about all those pop overs with weird close buttons,
quizzes greying out content, and content waiting for ad networks before
loading.

The WWW is getting incredibly slow, but it's because of publishers trying to
invent the next pop up more than anything. All we need now is the next blink
tag and we've come full circle.

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honksillet
The best thing about this article is the comments. Here is my favorite
comment...

> This page... 95 external javascript requests, 8 different style sheets (all
> of which are filled with vestigial gunk accumulated over time), 10 different
> background images. There's 150 lines of commented-out ASCII graphics in the
> leader... probably more graphics gunk than content. And the javascript is
> all at the top, killing page rendering. Web pages have become wastelands
> full of bloat.

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increment_i
What I've noticed personally is a lot of sites using absolutely horrible,
broken mobile frameworks that seem to be designed with the singular goal of
frustrating and annoying the user. I can only imagine the dollar amount sunk
into these awful mobile experiences, no doubt implemented by some clueless
middle manager scrambling for a "mobile strategy". I literally have seen
websites instruct me to "rotate your device" so that I can be shown an ad,
only to be rewarded with a completely broken and unresponsive layout
afterward.

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SoftwareMaven
Not a chance. To check my email in the past, I would have had to _find_ a
desktop. Now, I pull out my phone. No matter how slow the connection is, it's
still going to be orders of magnitude faster than a desktop in many
situations.

We've gotten so accustomed to having ubiquitous access, people have forgotten
it wasn't always there.

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jarnix
Although I agree with the author, in my opinion, the web is getting slower
because of all the retargetting/advertising/tracking/social networking/etc
javascripts included on every web page (mobile or web). Some trackers are even
running sending a request every second.

