
The average top 1,000 web page has grown 150% in three years - sebg
http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/11/26/web-page-growth-151-percent/
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daviddaviddavid
The explosion in use of web fonts is something I find a bit mystifying.
There's nothing more jarring than watching the font of a web page change at
load time. It's hard for me to imagine that the positives outweigh this one
potential negative. It's like watching someone put their wig on in the
morning.

I'm sure that there are tons of sites using webfonts in a way such that load
time isn't visually compromised. However, I've seen the "font flip" at sites
such as nytimes.com which I assume pay great attention to performance.

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lignuist
Using web fonts is one of the most annoying web design trends. My browser
sometimes loads the wrong font for some reason, which for example leads to
news rendered with a unreadable baroque typeface.

I would prefer to have them disabled completely, but didn't find an easy way
to achieve this.

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nacs
Since most fonts are loaded from Typekit and such, you can use something like
Ghostery or Adblock to blacklist those domains (Ghostery actually blocks
Typekit by default).

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kevincennis
It would be interesting to know what the median has done.

The average doesn't really tell much of a story, since there's a lower bound
at 0MB but no real upper bound. My guess would be that a certain subset of
sites have gotten _a lot_ bigger and pulled the average up, while the
remainder have seen more modest growth.

Anecdotally, it definitely seems like news sites and blogs have seen a pretty
staggering increase in page weight in the past few years. It's not uncommon to
see a ridiculous number of resources loaded from 30+ domains on a single site
anymore (CNN.com, I'm looking at you).

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ams6110
Advertising and linking to every social network under the sun. As well as a
lot of gratuitous javascript dancing baloney.

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onion2k
Is 'page size' alone enough to worry about this sort of thing? We don't
download all the assets used every time we load a page.

Just a thought, but the total size of assets on the page ignores the use of
caches and CDNs for common assets - if I visit 100 websites that all use
Google's CDN to deliver jQuery I'll download a few hundred kbs and do 99 HTTP
requests that return just a "nothing changed" header. The fact that those 100
websites are all a few hundred kb bigger than they were a few years ago means
very little.

If I visit the same website every day for 100 days straight I'll probably only
download jQuery once even if it's hosting the file itself because of my
browser cache.

 _Obviously_ it's preferable if a site optimises things where it can, but I
don't think a 150% increase in total page size equates directly to a 150%
increase in data usage. It might for archive.org, but they're pretty atypical
web users.

tl;dr Overall page size is less important than setting caching headers
properly.

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pwnna
I don't usually like to host my JavaScript elsewhere such as on the Google
CDN. Are there any web standards in the works where you can specify a hash of
a file to be cached regardless where it is?

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alanctgardner2
Why, pray tell? Isn't the Google CDN:

\- faster for people in different geographic areas

\- at least as reliable as your infrastructure

\- already cached (this would be nullified by your proposal)

I ask because normally I wouldn't think twice about using the Google CDN
libraries.

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jol
you are right about first, but >\- at least as reliable as your infrastructure
this doesn't mean that Google CDN is down the same times that your server is,
thus it adds downtime (or time when something is broken in the site), i.e. if
your server doesn't work, nothing works, if your server works but CDN doesn't,
again something is broken and if this time doesn't overlap, it is just
additional risk, even if tiny one. Also, what happens when Google decides to
charge for use of the CDN?

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estel
Ignoring the last point, this is probably why the HTML5BP loads from the CDN
but fallsback to a local version if the CDN can't be reached.

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Joeri
I wonder how much of this growth is due to retina images. A consequence of the
page bloat is that the ipad 1 has become almost unusable to browse the web
because it has only 256 mb ram. If the current page doesn't fit in ram, safari
closes down. I remember at one point that browsing slashdot and amazon on a
machine with 128 mb ram worked just fine. There's no reason for the current
bloat aside from simply not caring about efficiency.

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Ensorceled
I'm guessing this is due to the current trend towards "infinite" scrolling
pages with lots of images instead of the old "everything above the fold"
school of design.

Much of this is being driven by mobile devices forcing users to become used to
scrolling anyways, may as well take advantage of that.

For mobile surfing, I'm much happier with one large slow page than trying to
navigate a bunch of smaller sub pages, each of which is also slow and hard to
get to.

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crayola
Two remarks:

\- Median would be nice to have as well, as it is more robust to outliers.

\- I would like to know whether this is driven by big new pages receiving many
visits (changes in user behaviour), or by existing pages becoming bigger over
time (changes in web practices).

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jayhuang
I think many of us expected this. In previous years, much of the discussion
and knowledge-sharing among web developers has been about ways to minimize
page-loads, and about flash dying.

Nowadays with the proliferation of JS MV*, Node on the server-side, HTML5
games in JS, much of the focus and attention has been about how to find better
performance in our JS code, how to more efficiently deal with the DOM and re-
paints, how to get JS to a state where we can have a lot more complex games
inside the browser. Also has to do with the nature of putting everyone on the
client-side and the increased amounts of libraries being used (many of which
are probably in the user's browser cache already).

That said, I'm not sure if it's the change in focus alone, or if it's also
because many of the new-er web developers haven't yet been working for the web
back when the discussion was about page-loads and when people cared more about
supporting legacy-legacy-legacy browsers (I'm glad we're slowly letting that
go...).

Regarding web fonts, well I guess it has to do with our obsession with pretty
apps and thus, pretty fonts too.

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TimPC
I think the problem is in part due to looking at raw data. In economics, any
serious data set for analysis needs to be adjusted for inflation. When talking
about bandwidth usage we need to do the same: how do the increases in data
compare relative to the increases in bandwidth. Perhaps several graphs (one
for mobile and one for desktop infrastructure). I suspect the growth in
inflation adjusted terms is probably still significant, but if we're looking
at a time period where many users have gone from 3G to 4G on mobile. I suspect
the custom font behaviour is driven in part by how easy/inexpensive custom
fonts are on native platforms and the fact that brands now try and associate a
font as part of their identity in technology. We saw this with Helvetica and
other fonts as an expression of corporate identity in the real world in a time
period where conformity was more valued, but now the culture is everyone
trying to be unique, so it's not surprising to see resources spent on
different custom fonts.

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gravedave
While the initial chart is telling, I find the subsequent analysis
disappointing.

* It's not all about raw data amounts. Sure, images are the biggest share of traffic, but their size "only" doubled in the last 3y (according to my eyeing the article's chart).

* On the other hand, scripts seem to have tripled or quadrupled in size.

* The "Other" content also looks significant enough to warrant a deeper look, since it currently seems to be bigger than Flash, HTML and CSS combined, and has also grown most significantly. What's this "Other" content, and in what amounts? Web fonts? XML? JSON?

* The pie chart under #2 of the article is horrible.

* How do CDNs and caching factor into all this? How much of the shown amounts must really be downloaded every time?

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tux
.. and yet I hardly see any speed difference on cable, because many websites
use CDN/Cache. Also many users switched from heavy websites to green sites.
Very light and fast. Using alternative DNS like OpenBSD helps ^_^

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paaaaaaaaaa
I think a chart of average load times would be a lot more interesting.

If they are getting slower than us web developers are doing it wrong.

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mavhc
How does this affect un-upgradable computers like ultrabooks? Can't even add
more RAM to them

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coldtea
Not much.

In the current market, you're supposed to upgrade your laptop every 3-4 years
anyway.

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mavhc
That's not going to happen, once you put an SSD in your old laptop the only
advantage on a new one is the battery lasts a bit longer.

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coldtea
Depends on what you do. If all you do is programming, mail and web surfing,
maybe.

For anything that's not 1998 level technology though, you'll want something
new after 3-4 years.

Stuff such as: video editing, digital audio, photography, multimedia etc (oh,
and games). Even casually editing 24 megapixel RAW images as a hobbyist is not
that comfortable, even with a state of the art machine.

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iaskwhy
I would find it interesting to know how the average height changed over time.
It seems now it's much more acceptable to have really tall pages unlike the
above-the-fold way of thinking of the previous years.

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adventured
The title is very misleading, I'd argue that it's link-bait.

The average is for only the top 1,000 sites.

I expected a large scale study of the Web. The top 1,000 sites are a very poor
representation for the wider Web.

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netrus
Yet, they represent a overwhelming part of the site-loads users experience
(certainly >50%, at least for people from big countries).

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mtkd
What's the benefit of using src='data:image for the images?

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pastr
You save an http request

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mtkd
But the browser won't cache the image?

Also, you can't post the page to Google+ and have the image show in the post
or post a link to the image direct etc.

I only noticed because I couldn't post it.

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GigabyteCoin
Am I the only one here who thinks a 151% increase in 3 years is modest at
best?

If I am not mistaken, the cost of wholesale bandwidth continues to drop at a
near exponential rate year after year.

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ubercow13
What about the speed of home connections?

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purephase
In my experience, design/UX needs will always trump dev/ops. I don't see this
changing in the near future. I think we need to figure out ways to make
browsers and/or delivery improve instead.

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youngtaff
Performance __is all about __User Experience

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eonil
I believe most of those Flashes are Ad or Youtube link.

