The Web Is Getting Slower, at Least in How We All Experience It

It's the bloat. I loaded the Wired page linked above with Firefox network logging enabled. Things start out reasonably, with multiple images loading in parallel. Then there's a request to "http://api-us-east.zqtk.net/conde-nast?callback=gotSegmentDa... which takes 932ms. A lot of stuff waits for that to complete. Then about 30 images load, all with content irrelevant to the article. Another 1.2 seconds are required to load some Facebook stuff. Then Disqus starts to load, requiring about 3 seconds. So it takes about 6 seconds to load the page over a reasonably fast DSL connection.

This is with Ghostery blocking 23 (!) trackers and ad services. With Ghostery re-enabled, it takes 56 seconds before page load is completed, and over 6MB of stuff has been loaded via 266 HTTP requests.

That's why the web is slowing down. Any questions?

It's not surprising, considering how the way ordinary people habitually use networks has changed. What was once the province of only geeks is now commonplace.

Not to mention (what I perceive to be) a tremendous increase in bloat on the web. We have designers going overboard with HTML5 canvas gee whiz effects, infinite scroll, everything requiring javascript when it really shouldn't, and pages with actual content on the order of kilobytes being delivered hidden among tens of megabytes of data.

Added to that, the telecom monopolies have little incentive to improve their infrastructure. It's consequently little wonder that "the web is slow"

I'll save you some time. Mobile is over slower links. That's pretty much all he says.

I was expecting something about all those pop overs with weird close buttons, quizzes greying out content, and content waiting for ad networks before loading.

The WWW is getting incredibly slow, but it's because of publishers trying to invent the next pop up more than anything. All we need now is the next blink tag and we've come full circle.

The best thing about this article is the comments. Here is my favorite comment...

> This page... 95 external javascript requests, 8 different style sheets (all of which are filled with vestigial gunk accumulated over time), 10 different background images. There's 150 lines of commented-out ASCII graphics in the leader... probably more graphics gunk than content. And the javascript is all at the top, killing page rendering. Web pages have become wastelands full of bloat.

What I've noticed personally is a lot of sites using absolutely horrible, broken mobile frameworks that seem to be designed with the singular goal of frustrating and annoying the user. I can only imagine the dollar amount sunk into these awful mobile experiences, no doubt implemented by some clueless middle manager scrambling for a "mobile strategy". I literally have seen websites instruct me to "rotate your device" so that I can be shown an ad, only to be rewarded with a completely broken and unresponsive layout afterward.

Not a chance. To check my email in the past, I would have had to find a desktop. Now, I pull out my phone. No matter how slow the connection is, it's still going to be orders of magnitude faster than a desktop in many situations.

We've gotten so accustomed to having ubiquitous access, people have forgotten it wasn't always there.

Although I agree with the author, in my opinion, the web is getting slower because of all the retargetting/advertising/tracking/social networking/etc javascripts included on every web page (mobile or web). Some trackers are even running sending a request every second.