The 49MB Web Page (↗)

From the blog of Shubham Bose:

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I’ve been a long-time user of 1Blocker, Hush, and Vinegar to help wrangle the madness of today’s internet.

Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there. And RSS feeds do too.

For the record, a typical post on this site (no images) weighs in as follows:

At just 23 KB, that’s roughly 2,000× lighter than the home page of the New York Times. This site is built to be fast and lean.²

Some supplementary (and seething) commentary from Daring Fireball:

Even websites from publishers who care about quality are doing things on the web that they would never do with their print editions.

[…]

The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it.

This post from Daring Fireball weighs in at a trim 157 KB, over half of which comes from the screenshot (an extremely rare inclusion on DF).

Back to Shubham Bose to close it out:

They built a system that treats your attention as an extractable resource. The most radical thing you can do is refuse to be extracted.