Because of “designers” and their related pharisees, myrmidons and sycophants jacking around with frameworks and 10MB javascript libraries that load afresh every two seconds, web pages are now as slow as they were back in 1996 when I was still using dial-up and every so-called web master in existence thought it was totally neato to embed a five megabyte Java crapplet in each page.
This slowness is true over even a gigabit connection.
You know if design had anything at all to do with users, this would not be the result. But modern design has nothing at all to do with users.
It has to do with what is stylish and with what makes the internet more like cable television, and whatever the latest buzzword fad is that pleases technically-clueless executives in charge now of the direction of most everything on the web.
I really miss the wild west, individualist and exuberantly silly days of the early web where people were trying new things and even in spite of the 5MB Java downloads over dial-up. Then it was a rare arena where the corporate mindset hadn’t yet infected and ruined it all.
Now, it is another vast wasteland.
What websites are you trying to visit that are that jacked up? What connection did you have in 1996? You could go brew a cup of coffee, sip it leisurely and come back in the time it took to load one image, never mind one page.
None of the websites I visit have this problem. All of the problems I have are with my stupid wifi adapter not picking up the faster network and dropping the signal and my browser eating all of the memory and crashing Shockwave. That’s not website design though.
I’ll agree that the website layouts are fug and stupid but that has nothing to do with download speed.
I was exaggerating a bit, but NBCnews.com, Google Maps, CNN.com and Wunderground are particularly slow. I used Wunderground during the 90s on dial-up and it loads more slowly now over a gigabit connection than it did during the 90s over 33.6k dial-up.
Pretty sad state of affairs.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and of course a video is worth a thousand pictures. The question for me is, does the text content say anything substantial on its own? If so, I can take or leave the picture. The only appropriate place for a multi-megapixel picture is a page intended to showcase art or photography. For illustrations or diagrams in support of text content, I’ve taken a liking to SVG, even though there’s some older-browser discrimination there, partly because it’s almost always smaller than the equivalent raster, and partly because SVG easily embeds into HTML, sparing us the File|Save As issues with file pointers and the like.
Strange to praise IE6, but I miss IE6’s offline mode where you could browse cached webpages with no internet connection.
That’s not really possible now for a variety of reasons, not without using complex and privacy-invading 3rd-party tools.
In many ways, I’d prefer just plain HTML for 99% of things. No JS, no frameworks, no extreme slowness.
Data shows that my perception is not just subjective — the web is actually getting slower.
I just now visited thehill.com and Ghostery counts no less than 42 separate trackers. I don’t know how to get a readout of total page payload in bytes.
Lori, if you use Firefox regularly, this add-on will show you the download size of all requests on a page.