Technology

42650 readers

426 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

The 49MB Web Page (thatshubham.com)

submitted 5 days ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] limerod@reddthat.com 27 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Stupid stuff like this is the reason I use Ublock-Origin. Before that I used to use Umatrix when it was maintained. I blocked just about everything and had countless rules for my most visited websites so idiotic stuff wouldn't load.

Nowaways, I block 3rd party frames and call it a day. If my connection is slow I can block pictures, javascript and 3rd party bloat to reduce bandwidth and browse basic sites.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There was a scene in Law & Order decades ago where Jerry Orbach's character, investigating a murder scene, makes the wry comment, "Oh, suspenders and a belt" after noting a diaphragm and condom wrapper on the nightstand.

uBO is great, but it's not a complete prophylactic. NoScript also ends endless ads loading. A pihole can handle things at the network level. There are numerous ways to maintain internet hygiene that most people don't realize exist, because it's not profitable to give people control over their own devices, so those of us on Firefox (or a derivative) and several extensions are characterized as "crooks who want to steal the internet."

As with politicians, each accusation is an admission.

Ad companies: "I want to use the vast majority of the data allocation you pay for."

Me: "No."

Ad companies: "THIEF!!!!!!!!!!!!"

[–] Redjard@reddthat.com 3 points 4 days ago

ubo has a button to disable javascript. For news pages that tends to be the easiest way to make them barely usable.