The 49MB web page

tech
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One of the symptoms of enshittification is bloated web pages.

Thatshubham is writing about The 49MB Web Page:

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.

This article made some rounds. It gives you an analysis of the bloat of web pages in the mainstream web publications.

Why should you load 49MB of content for 1 article of a new paper? It’s like it is a photo gallery. Not to sound old. by my fist computer could store 49MB on disk, even less into memory. This bloat falls into multiple categories:

  • code for tracking (about 5MB)
  • code for ad bidding (that will also churn your CPU for a bid)
  • the ad themselves
  • the code to ask consent for the above, thanks the EU

All of this seems to fit the law.

And then the result is the reader being overhelmed by ads when the actual content occupies a ridiculously small amount of the screen real estate after possibly popover nagware.

Webpages used to be simple. And we can make them simple again.