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Re:In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds... by kevincox on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @01:22PM (#24052263)
Do you know why modern sites are slow? Because time isn't invested in making them faster. It isn't a technical problem, people take shortcuts that affect the speed. They will continue to do so unless the website operators decide that it is unacceptable. If some news website decided that their page needed to load in 1s on a 256Mbps+10ms connection they would achieve that, with external ads and more. However they haven't decided that it is a priority, so they keep adding more junk to achieve other goals.

It's simply Parkinson's Law

Re:In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds... by cuddlybacon on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @03:29PM (#24053614)
And they aren't going to decide this is a problem that needs to be fixed since people will keep using it anyways.
Re:In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds... by euske on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @12:00AM (#24057147)
Exactly this, and it's happening everywhere in the software world.

Why bother writing binary search? Linear search is fast enough. Why bother sharing pointers? Copy all the strings. Easy. Data compression? Forget it. Deleting files is totally irrelevant, etc, etc.

Re:In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds... by ehsankia on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @01:50AM (#24057635)
Here's another way of looking at it. As long as you're below a certain threshold, users would much rather you implement 5 new features than spend that time squeezing 100ms on the load time.

Another related side-reason why it's slow is we use higher and higher levels of abstraction, exactly to increase development velocity and be able to add more features quicker. I could write a native app in pure assembly and have it be blazing app, or I can write a webapp on top of web frameworks running in Electron, but in a fraction of the time. As long as my app is usable, I'll get all the user while the other person is still trying to finish their app.

Re:In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds... by wrycoder on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @02:01PM (#24052665)
lol. How about a 1.5 mbit per sec DSL line?
Re:In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds... by kevincox on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @04:37PM (#24054245)
Might have to cut some features but the point is the same. Companies will build sites to the level of slowness that they think is tolerable. If their user's internet connection gets better that means that they can be less efficient and add more features.