This is weird. In Chrome incognito, I get ~400 requests (without scrolling), and in Firefox private browsing, I get ~120 requests before scrolling, and ~190 after. What in the world? I disabled all the extensions in Firefox too.

Doesn't Firefox private browsing has a tracking blocklist active by default?

Wow, I didn't know that! I thought the tracking protection was just about the DNT header and I didn't expect that to make much difference here. However, even disabling that, I only get ~200 requests. There's still a lot missing... is it still blocking things under the hood?

It may also be that different resources are loaded based on browser agent to track the user in different ways/display the page correctly on different browsers/polyfill javascript differences

I just re-ran it in Chrome ingongito mode to get the following:

  - 400 requests (adds about 1 per second after that)
  - 6.8 MB transferred
  - 6.1 seconds

Then I ran it AGAIN, and got this:

  - 307 requests
  - 4.6 MB
  - 9.03 seconds

You're right - it is WEIRD!

"Install our app!"

Try dailytelegraph.com.au for a good shock!

On mobile, but last I checked was around 700 HTTP requests on a desktop without adblock.

Checked it on Pingdom, from Melbourne, it failed after one minute of trying to load, with 585 requests and 3.4mb.

I always find it difficult to imagine what kind of process leads to that result. The developers can't be happy about it, surely. It has to be a case where management and everyone else throws things they want into the project, a big concensus party, and you end up with a bloated monster at the end.

In my experience this often means that management is not measuring the right things or that the engineering team is super junior and not empowered to influence strategy.

That's truly incredible. It took several long seconds on a usually very quick internet connection. At least they made the page reflow nicely as it loads but it's still ridiculous