Website Obesity crisis going on and on: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Was here on HN several times, sadly still the case.

"I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible.

Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome. "

I don't know, we're currently rewriting our UI from the classic "PHP renders everything with almost zero JS" to the more modern "single page application with a crap ton of JS" and the new UI feels much faster to me. The old way was to resend and rerender everything on each click, which is problematic for complex UIs with a lot of data.

On a modest 3 year old phone running Firefox, such websites are excruciating.

What a false equivalence. You are comparing static sites of the past to dynamic sites of today. Apples to oranges.

The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.

[citation needed]

Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

Let’s look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core concept of it hasn’t changed, it still just has to display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML and a simple form POST. I don’t have the numbers for the page back then but I’d estimate it at 100KB - nowadays it’s a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails at its primary purpose of displaying a block of text with a stupid “something went wrong” message or endless spinner.

The “new” Reddit is also a good example. Even ignoring all the user-hostile functionality changes, the actual experience is still slower and less reliable.

And for proof that you can do better, Nitter is a better Twitter interface than Twitter is, and it's much lighter.

Reddit web is incredibly sluggish. I open the app to browse which is a smooth experience (putng aside dark patterns).

Same for Twitter. Maybe it's intentional to move users into the app, where ads are more likely to be actually seen (e.g. Many web users have ad blockers) and in app purchases are frictionless.

Just FYI, for Reddit there's an amazing third-party client called Apollo on iOS, and I'm sure there are others too, same on Android.

Yeah I have it. I actually made the in app purchase to support the developer.

I ended up going back to the official app which I think is nice, but also feel nice about financially supporting an indie developer who does a nice third party client for a (generally) awesome community.

Really ?

Take for instance news sites or blogs: When I read news article, what I want is mostly (there are some great interactive infographics, but those are tiny minority) text and few images, that are static.

And it's not like that as a consumer I get anything extra. The text and images are still static, for the most part. Except that now its makes 20 separate requests to load it all up. Hell, pages are usually even less dynamic, after comments fell out of favor.

What increased is number of extra stuff, that is mostly focused on selling me stuff, tracking every metrics possible, and trying to figure out somne clickbait I would click next for extra engagement.

But that's not content, content has largely stayed the same.

I don't believe the bloat of modern websites is because of ad-tech of dark patterns - all of these can still be done with an otherwise lightweight website. If anything, ads (excluding intentional resource usage such as crypto-miners) would be much lighter than what a typical SPA website like Reddit or Twitter is.

I believe what's happening is a broader trend in the industry of building engineering playgrounds and doing engineering purely for engineering's sake to benefit one's career - a positive feedback loop where not participating puts developers at a disadvantage as they won't gain over-engineering skills that companies now require (they require them because their developers or managers want them for the same reason).

Text-only NPR: https://text.npr.org/

I don't want my browser to be loading entire JS frameworks and trackers and whatever other crap just to read a bunch of text. That's absolutely nonsensical

I'm using two browsers, one with disabled JS (primary) and vanilla one. When and only WHEN page doesn't load on non-js browser (and if I really, really, reaaaally want that piece of content) then maybe I will use vanilla browser...

Browsing with js disabled is fast, pages load quickly, almost no trackers and there are "old" or "text" versions of sites still available... old.reddit, old.twitter or nitter instances...

Heck, even google has one...

To be honest, I just use dillo browser most of the time. Small, speedy and safer then most...

Edit: typo.

For the user's benefit, or for the dev's?

Or the advertises/whatever assholes profit of “engagement”?

When you replace one with the other and notice a substantial change in time-required-for-task, I think you can make comparisons.