I would be happy with 20mb pages if more than 10% of those bytes actually made things better for me. As it is, my Adblock settings filter over 80% of total average http requests, and lots of the stuff I do retrieve is still junk.
Funny, the entire speedcurve.com domain is blocked by my ad-blocker, so I’m going to guess they don’t see 3Mb pages as a problem at all?
The important metric is how much of that size is real content versus advertising and tracking garbage or goofy JavaScript frameworks.
3Mb to watch a video, a photo gallery, a high resolution image, etc. is not a problem at all. On the other hand, 3Mb for a few pages of text is ridiculous.
I think a big part of this is how much of the 3MB is reusable after the first load. The main web app that I work on is about 2MB on initial load, but a combination of etagging, service workers, and other techniques means that subsequent loads are in the 2kb - 25kb range. Of course I always want initial page load to be better, but it’s certainly less of a concern when the cost is amortized over multiple uses of the site.
The Chrome team has shown how on mobile devices the cost of parsing all of that JavaScript is non-trivial and that has to happen even on repeat visits. If mobile doesn’t matter in your use, then you’re absolutely right that it’s not a big deal!
Laptops still have power constraints. A webpage should almost never cause any noticeable CPU load, but all too often they do. The author just had to add scroll animations or something.
I would be happy with 20mb pages if more than 10% of those bytes actually made things better for me. As it is, my Adblock settings filter over 80% of total average http requests, and lots of the stuff I do retrieve is still junk.
Funny, the entire speedcurve.com domain is blocked by my ad-blocker, so I’m going to guess they don’t see 3Mb pages as a problem at all?
The important metric is how much of that size is real content versus advertising and tracking garbage or goofy JavaScript frameworks.
3Mb to watch a video, a photo gallery, a high resolution image, etc. is not a problem at all. On the other hand, 3Mb for a few pages of text is ridiculous.
relevant (and funny!): http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
I think a big part of this is how much of the 3MB is reusable after the first load. The main web app that I work on is about 2MB on initial load, but a combination of etagging, service workers, and other techniques means that subsequent loads are in the 2kb - 25kb range. Of course I always want initial page load to be better, but it’s certainly less of a concern when the cost is amortized over multiple uses of the site.
The Chrome team has shown how on mobile devices the cost of parsing all of that JavaScript is non-trivial and that has to happen even on repeat visits. If mobile doesn’t matter in your use, then you’re absolutely right that it’s not a big deal!
Laptops still have power constraints. A webpage should almost never cause any noticeable CPU load, but all too often they do. The author just had to add scroll animations or something.