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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

As long as there has been an internet, people have been complaining about bloat. I remember articles like these in the 90s. They do absolutely nothing to improve the situation or stop the growth.

We need to accept that web pages will be even larger in the future, and start pushing the technology required to deliver those pages in a reasonable amount of time.

That means HTTP2, QUIC, zero-RTT TLS handshakes (in quic and tls 1.3), and other new technologies. CDNs certainly play a role here too with dynamic acceleration, better caching, and networking. (disclaimer: I'm working that last bit at NuevoCloud CDN)

That and improvements in connectivity are the only real ways to solve this issue.

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Are you familiar with induced demand?[0] That would only encourage the problem to get worse.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

absolutely.. but web pages are going to grow anyway. take a look at this chart covering 1995-2014: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-p...

In just the past 3 years, the average size has more than doubled.

Which may well be a consequence of lazy developers taking advantage of faster internet. I'd bet if internet speed were to stop increasing today it would be more likely to solve the bloat problem, since developers would eventually realize they were ruining their UX with load times. It's the same with processor improvements in that they allow developers to write more inefficient code since their time is prioritized over CPU time.

this

Improving the network technologies is important but the people who build on top of them need to make an effort, too. Otherwise the Internet's pipes will be forever filled to bursting with sloppy code.

The problem is that web pages aren't growing larger for no reason. Web pages are larger because audiences are responding to richer graphics; because of business requirements (ie: ads); and because of js frameworks and other libs that decrease the labor required to create web pages.

Those are hard things to change. How can a business giving up its income; or making it's website worse for visitors (by removing graphics)... possibly be a solution?

Certainly there are legitimate reasons for sites to get larger. But too often it's because of poorly compressed media and poor library/framework choices.

For businesses, it does come down to time and resources. If the users don't complain about the browsing experience then it's good enough.

Trouble is that most user never complain, they just leave and never come back (unless you're a major news outlet).

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