Submitted 1 year ago by Khalmoon@lemm.ee to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
I grew up during the dial up era of internet and remember how insane it was each time the technology improved, broadband, dsl, fiber etc.
I wouldn’t expect pages to instantly load, but I have to imagine all the data farming is causing sites to be extremely bogged down.
Lets put it this way: A typical news page pulls a few megabytes of HTML, CSS, their own images, web framework scripts, advertising, etc. For showing about 500-1000 bytes of actual text.
Worse still, a lot of "modern" designs don't even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you've got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.
I'm not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it's becoming more and more common.
I've always vaguely assumed it's just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their "perfect" local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you're out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.
Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).
You WILL watch this flashy, totally necessary popup video on 4G and you WILL like it!
Other than a couple of top-tier ad companies like Google and FB, ad companies tend to have really bad technology. They can’t attract the best engineering talent because everyone hates ads and they are a mess to work with. As a result, advertising code is garbage and runs like shit. News sites who are not primarily tech companies are at the mercy of ad companies to run their advertising and they end up piled down with third party crap. Most small ad companies are smash-and-grab efforts by a few ruthless entrepreneurs to vampire away small sites’ revenue or steal a bunch of user data and sell it. They all want to be acquired by a bigger company and walk away with some cash. No one is working on solving problems long term.
Fuck it. Might start an ad running business to draw in people who want to run ads and then mysteriously have a severe server fire.
Worse still, a lot of "modern" designs don't even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you've got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.
I'm not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it's becoming more and more common.
I've always vaguely assumed it's just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their "perfect" local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you're out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.
Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).
Web pages of today have so much added on nonsense. It’s not necessarily data farming, but also the frameworks used to develop the website themselves. Modern websites are basically entire software running in the browser even when it is used to run a simple seemingly static page. The purpose of these frameworks is to make complex things more simple for developers to make, but then people end up using them in situations that might not call for it. I think there is a general belief that since computers keep getting more powerful that it is fine to keep making software bigger and less efficient.
That last sentence is so damned true.
Run ublock origin and turn off all the ads and trackers. Then you can see for yourself how much faster it is.
The answer is… not much. Because most of those things load in after the page is up anyway.
I have been using uBlock for an extremely long time now and sites seem to become faster over time even though I have never upgraded my laptop all these years.
When I tried to disable uBlock for a day, my laptop forcefully shut down after 30 minutes.
Software optimization over time improves performance but is outweighted by the tracking crap they put in there.
It is not entirely data farming, a lot of this is due to use of heavy assets like fonts, frameworks, images, videos, etc. A lot of that is downloaded as part of loading the site initially and then the browser has to render/compute the site’s use of JavaScript, CSS, etc.
Fonts and some JS assets are cached by the browsers and CDN to try to minimize redownloading it but it doesn’t change the fact that average websites today are much heavier than it was back in 90s.
See how fast this site loads: text.npr.org
Or tildes.net compared to Reddit.
Most of that stuff is async so probably not a lot. Like, you load the page and it sends a request off to pendo, but the page doesn’t wait for that to finish before doing the next thing.
There are a lot of ways to make pages perform badly, though, especially as they get more dynamic.
At my job the home page was loading extremely slowly for a while until we realized a refactor had made the query backing it extremely stupid. Like it accidentally was doing a separate query for every user associated with every post you could see, and then not even using the results. Oops. Fixed that and got a huge performance increase, but it had nothing to do with data tracking.
Probably not. I think the timeouts are set up differently. Back in the day even if you had 1.2kb/s dial up internet, you could reliably loaf webpages if you were patient. Nowadays, if your internet speed dips by even a half percent, everything stops working and bring patient only results on error screens
shnurr@fludiblu.xyz 1 year ago
Well if you just try to load a news website with and without an ad blocker you will usually notice a huge difference. So yes.
But also, technology has become much more complex compare to the beginning of the internet. So every piece of software is more bloated than it used to be, sometimes for a good reason, sometimes less so.
Khalmoon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Thank you, I wasn’t sure if I was just getting impatient with websites and not appreciating how far we’ve come since DSL. It’s made sense in my head but it always felt like a mildy dumb question