We had decent video, CSS, page update, notifications, unicode support and the like 10 years ago. We didn't gain that much since then. But the page load time took a X5 hit.
Yeah some UI is nicer, and we do have better completion, real time is snappier and all.
But hell.
We lost most pagination, pages feels slow, there are so many, sharing informations went down the toilet in exchange for big echo chambers.
The only thing that are clearly better is my hardware and bandwidth, both on mobile and computer, and professional service quality that went up in quality a lot.
The web itself, the medium, feels more sluggish than it should be given the power horse of infrastructure I got to access it.
Pages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels slower despite my phone and connection being much faster. It seems web developers have stopped caring at all about performance.
If you look at where the bloat went, it's mostly three things:
- Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests)
Most likely culprits are retina class graphics and "hero graphic" designs.
- Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled
Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies.
- video
Now that flash has disappeared, it got replaced by auto-playing video, which is even worse as far as page bloat is concerned.
> - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests)
For some reason, around the time "digital native" design and designers got big, it suddenly became OK to include giant design-only images (not content, not a logo, not even a fancy button, just because the designer wanted a giant image) in web pages, which before was one of those things you Just Didn't Do in proper web design. It's gotten so bad that now it's done with videos. Web old-timers find this to be in shockingly poor taste, but that's where we are. Bring back the "bad" print-background designers, I say.
This didn't just happen by accident. It happened because the market demanded it. At a previous company I was at, we A/B tested this, and an image-heavy design did better on every relevant metric we could think of (and I assume many others have done the same).
A particular hatred of mine are "load-under" images. You know, the ones designed to look like a cutaway into the page, so you load 1000 pixels of height, but see a sliding 400 pixels of the image as you scroll.
It's like a microcosm of everything wrong with modern web design. It's wasteful on data, wasteful on memory, obscures useful information (like the actual picture), and actively distracts from the surrounding text. But it looks fancy, so it's not going anywhere.
Certainly adtech is evil, but even surfing with it aggressively disabled has gotten worse. Crank everything you can down to zero, and you'll still find bizarre multiple-source loads that won't draw anything useful until the entire page is loaded.
We had decent video, CSS, page update, notifications, unicode support and the like 10 years ago. We didn't gain that much since then. But the page load time took a X5 hit.
Yeah some UI is nicer, and we do have better completion, real time is snappier and all.
But hell.
We lost most pagination, pages feels slow, there are so many, sharing informations went down the toilet in exchange for big echo chambers.
The only thing that are clearly better is my hardware and bandwidth, both on mobile and computer, and professional service quality that went up in quality a lot.
The web itself, the medium, feels more sluggish than it should be given the power horse of infrastructure I got to access it.