My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.
At the time, a few of my friends were getting cable internet. It was remarkable seeing the same pages load in just a few seconds, and I remember thinking about the kinds of the possibilities that would open up as the web kept getting faster.
And faster it got, of course. When I moved into my own apartment several years ago, I got to pick my plan and chose a massive fifty megabit per second broadband connection, which I have since upgraded.
So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web. pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
Yes, the mainstream web is bulllshit. The silver lining is that, aside from internet banking, we're not beholden to it in order to live in modern society. You have the power to block out the majority of the RCE on the modern web. Of course, we didn't have to a decade ago because it didn't exist, but now that it exists we have to power to block it, so it's a zero-sum game.
There is still non-mainstream internet which is fine. How long did Zig Forums take to load? I didn't have to wait for an open phone line to post this. I don't have to pay by the hour/minute to check for a response. We've moved forward and we've moved back.
Everything is terrible, so make the best of it.
Jace Watson
Article is a nice read. I didn't know about amp yet, but is seems like yet another instance of google being assholes.
On the plus side, I was visiting some webstore the other day and it was amazing. Just one domain, no -static -img -content addresses that stuff gets pulled in from. Nothing at all. Imagine visiting store.com and not needing to mess with your umatrix. It even worked more or less without javascript iirc. Miracles happen.
Henry Watson
Well written article, kudos to author.
Jeremiah Young
AMP is everywhere if you are a web developer. Google is pushing it hard.
Really like this OP. Think about what it is nowadays. 50 Mbit/s is 3 orders of magnitude faster than 56 Kbps of dialup modems, yet websites take several seconds or even minutes for some to load. It just goes to show how faster hardware leads to more bloat; however, the bloat in this case is entirely centered around providing advertising networks with information. If websites would get rid of this third-party javascript then their sites would load instantly for people. There is no need to wait a minute to load a sub MB jpg.
Nathan Hughes
Not just ads. Modern dev even outside webdev is filled with bloat. Just press ctrl+f on any modern site and watch the page reload all the fonts. This happens even with JS disabled. Have you tried Gnome in the last 10 years? It's kill.
Cameron Scott
You don't need internet banking, I set up a new bank account today and explicitly said I didn't want internet banking.
Camden Harris
A guy who worked on one of the first "proper" e-banking systems used to be one of my compsci professor, he said he wouldn't touch that shit with a 10ft yard stick. Read the ToS, it has botnet engraved in it.
Christopher Scott
mind shilling for it? i'd love to see if you're larping or that site is actually how you saw it
Aiden Rodriguez
I have built a few fully featured web applications. I usually opt for a combination of server side templating mixed with a simple API that is called from writing very simple JS fetch calls. The calls are added to event listeners on DOM elements so if you disable JS no big deal you just lose some interaction. We used to call this progressive enhancement and it was seen as a virtue. It is so fucking easy to keep it simple and extremely fast if you know how the web is actually designed and how HTTP works as a protocol.
People are going to look back at React/Vue as huge mistakes. Take the new Reddit redesign. That shit is the canonical example of React being total and utter shit.
Austin White
The new reddit is cancer within cancer, but the old reddit design was cancer as well.
Carter Wright
This article is late to the party, and not nearly as good as the article I suspect it cribbed from:
at least old reddit is a fast cancer. new reddit is slow as hit cancer.
Carter Brooks
Old Reddit scored low in usability, but it worked without JS and that's all that matters,
Lincoln Watson
Think about where the speed bottleneck is in this system. Hint: it isn't in the cables; electrons traveling down copper wires and photons traveling in fiberglass cables go nearly the same speed. But signals in copper cables are direct current (DC) rather than AC so they drop their voltage over large distances and need to get amplified at voltage boosting stations every couple miles. You lose a few milliseconds of ping at every voltage boosting station, so you get faster download times if you live close to the servers of the website you're accessing. The actual speed bottleneck in the system is at the hard drives of the cloud computer where the website's files are stored. The problem is specifically at the read/write arm inside the hard drive. Computer engineers have been able to increase the speed the hard drive's record platter spins at from 5400RPM to 7200RPM, but they haven't been able to increase the speed at which the stylus arm swings. Websites nowadays have a lot more images and videos and fonts than they did in the 90s, and each one of those many files is on a different location on the record platter. The hard drive's stylus arm has to swing to the correct position of the platter, read that data, then return to its neutral position and seek where the next file is. The process has to be repeated a second time inside your own computer, so that further slows down the process.
The funny thing is that webdev is often considered "n00b programming" compared to other programming fields, yet I find it much harder, but for the wrong reasons. I just can't keep track of a million frameworks and libraries just to perform some shitty animations that use half your RAM and don't add any actual content. At the moment, I work mainly in scientific computing, and boy is it so much better. Yes, it's probably *harder* in the sense that it requires good mathematical skills and actual computer science knowledge, but at least everything makes sense and is consistent. Not the bullshit million frameworks you seem to need to do pointless kiddy stuff.
Jose Gomez
Stopped reading there. The part about HDDs is bullshit too.
William Reyes
Yeah, electrons travel about half the speed of light in copper.
Thomas Gutierrez
Consistency hurts. Every fucking week there's some new bullshit framework or the browsers are start playing Game of Thrones with eachother over CSS standards.
Alexander Morris
I freelance so I get to see everyone's shit. Mathfag code is by far the worst code out there, it's yanderedev tier scrawl with variables named a, b, c, d, e, etc.. They usually have very little to do structurally, it's all just some script glue around a core of passing data to a number crunching library, so is very light on 'programming'. Webdev code is a test of how many things can be ducttaped together before it all falls apart and most code they write is trying to smooth over the problems this causes. It's the same kind of layered death spiral Java went through. Those who fail to learn from the past, etc.. Gamedev code (at least for Unity) is what webdev code used to be. They're all terrified of datastructures and either iterate over all objects in a collection or put them in Unity's version of the DOM. These are literally the only two search algorithms they will use, like a webdev with jquery. I assume Unreal projects have more competent devs but I haven't worked on one. Systemsfags are where I feel the most comfortable and code quality is infinitely better, but autism is a problem. If lead autist feels threatened he will defend the most stupid, obviously wrong shit with his life and will never ever let it be changed.
Josiah Nguyen
Electrons travel slower than that in copper. Depending on the current, wire diameter and other factors they travel on order of 1 mm/s. Yes it seems counter intuitive, but that's not the speed of signal. If you push one electron in a pipe full of electrons another will exit on the other side "instantly", in case of copper more than half the speed of light 80-90% depending on parameters of the cable.
Camden Perry
Electrons travel something on the order of several centimeters per second in copper wire. The thing traveling at half the speed of light is the electric field inside of the wire. The electric field just happens to drag some electrons lazily along with it.
Jordan Jenkins
people are designing shit tier sites clogged with videos, scripts and images for even the most basic conveyance of information to the consumer.
poorly embedded tweets (*buzzfeed and metro*), a series of 2 meg plus photos which comprise half of the article (no names here *vice.com*), three thousand links (*daily mail*),useless disqus troll comments feed (*torrentfreak*) to name a few. its awwful.
seriously just disable images,90 percent of the time they are unnessecary anyway.
Matthew Lee
but that is the way most shopping is headed,some banks only operate online and most government services can only be applied for online along with jobs. so yeah we are slaves on the digital plantation. we do not NEED to be but that is the reality unless the governments of the world revert to the 1970s which they will not unless they have to.
Asher Campbell
old news but it breaks the scripts of many sites in a seriously noticeable way.
Ian Garcia
Since 1998 everything related to computers has become shit.
That's the kind of shit I was talking about. Everything is way too complex and overengineered, all of which is made more funny by the fact that the ultimate goal of all this crap is a couple shitty useless animations and sounds. These two websites: motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ clearly illustrate the issue. You can build websites that work fine and also look good with some CSS without even writing a line of JavaScript. From the first link:
Daniel Ramirez
This is wrong in so many different ways
Wyatt Murphy
That's not a website. That's a text file. You could read that text file in Microsoft Word. Websites are interactive and provide more than plaintext content. Websites generate content and dynamically display that content based on user interaction. You can't view a website in Microsoft Word because it's more than a text file.
No, simple websites that you could print on paper are what the web was originally meant to be. What you're describing is a corrupted abomination of the original idea.
Owen Hill
Yes that was the original design of the web. Things have changed over time. It's obvious by the people who implement the web browsers that users of the web browsers are demanding something different. What we have today is different from what was there originally because users of the web want it like that.
James Rivera
Dead wrong. 99% of the users of the web don't know what they want, they merely accept whatever is shoved in their face. Companies started adding shitty scripts for tracking and surveillance, then shitty useless animations and heavyweight pages came all because of marketing. A flashy responsive page grabs more attention than a simple, static page. Not to mention the literal malware contained in ad scripts: blocking them is pretty much mandatory nowadays to have a usable web. The web nowadays is fucked. Yes, things have changed over time, but for the worse.
Brandon Butler
The users of the web are the ones paying the bills to hire web programmers and web infrastructure. They changed the web because they wanted it that way.
You can actually get the web back to how it was in the past. Step 1: Disable Javascript Step 2: Disable CSS
David Gomez
That's a pretty warped and retarded definition of "the users of the web"
Adam Diaz
Web is a package manager for javascript applications.
Samuel James
Isn't that what you wanted? A static website that shows black and white or just white because everything is printed with Javascript?
Eli Baker
Some won't even work without cookies enabled. Both could be fixable depending on the methods used with a userscript, but it's usually more effort than it's worth.
Christian Foster
I get you're retarded, but at least try not to look like it.
Charles Ward
no u
Daniel Rivera
...
Andrew Sullivan
I lost at least 10 IQ points while reading this
Carson Hall
those embedded tweets are the worst shit. they could not have fucked up harder. they even look like shit despite the ultra UX engineering that anything related to twitter's ilk most likely has
James Cook
1. You don't need Microsoft Word to view a text file. 2. 99% of websites are just a bunch of 1 paragraph articles which require no interactive content at all but load a bunch of bullshit. you could scrape it and view it about 100 million times before the page loads
those websites are designed by people in the SF Haxor scene and are still bloated and then at the end he says: so in other words, you site should have only 10MB of JS instead of 20MB
