Example: The Verge. Chrome reports theverge.com as making 118 requests with 2.62MB transferred, taking 11.04s (onload: 6.42s, DOMContentLoaded: 3.32s). Kotaku: 234 requests, 1.35MB transferred, 11.93s (onload: 10.91s, DOMContentLoaded: 4.28s).
I tested this on a maxed out 2010 MacBook Air, and that's with AdBlock Plus and ScriptNo.
The Verge is basically unusable while it loads and Chrome struggles to render it after it has loaded while scrolling on my machine. This is all-too-common these days.
I'm probably going to offend a few people here, but creating a website without or with minimal performance optimization is just plain sloppy and uncraftmanshiplike work. Get your act together, or get a different job.
I, too, really enjoy performance optimization but that's an area that is especially hard to break into because many times the client wants something that just works. In my experience as a consultant it's rare that you get a client that cares about performance much unless it's a company like Apple that has a crazy amount of money to spend on making everything perfect (where 'perfect' isn't literal perfection but surely of a much higher caliber than the competition in many regards).
http://diveintoaccessibility.info/day_11_skipping_over_navig...
35 seconds and 6.50MB transferred !
Loads the front page in about 5 seconds on a 24 Kbit/s connection in the UK.
They could include a 'skip to content' link for those using text or audio interfaces, because the entire navigation stricture of the site appears to be included on every page. They also could make comments available in a way that makes them visible to a basic http client. Two minor mods like that would mean fast access to their reading material for cli nerds
It's amazing but many mobile editions same to only be designed to make a screenshot to demonstrate to management that the site team did something mobile. Doesn't anybody ever actually try out these sites?
You don't want to use full site because it has too many features and have, therefore, too big size.
You also don't want to use mobile site because it doesn't have all the bells and whistles.
Chose one :) ... or use Opera Mini and/or ziproxy on your server
I got theverge.com in ~3 seconds from first click Using Chrome on a 40MB FIOS connection i7 2500k @ 3.6ghz w SSD & 16GB RAM on windows 7 without add-block or no script.
My PC is over a year old so it's probably the internet connection and then again the CPU is also 2-3+x as fast.
This might be something that NoScript's Surrogate Script feature could handle - it was originally developed to allow blocking Google Analytics without breaking sites that expected it to be loaded, and now includes surrogates for a lot of other junk.
I believe that out-of-date software and slow connections are highly correlated. New hardware and fast connections are the most expensive part of computing. Old (or very low cost) hardware doesn't run up-to-date software. So there you have the reason for that correlation.
Cannot upvote this comment enough.
I find that tools that localhost various ad servers help, and other tools that load the crap but keep it off the page help like adblock plus, but even more so, adblock plus' filters that let me shitcan all the crap.
One of these days I want to write an extension similar to adblock plus that seeks out and removes jquery crap. A lot of the reasons I can't read pages anymore seems to be jquery slideshows, jquery toolbars, jquery popups and the like.
I am pretty sure that graphing this out and we find the end of the web occurs sometime in 2018 when page designers and their bosses and engineers and marketing pukes have so larded down pages that the net runs out of available bandwidth and any page takes 4:33 to load.