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Programmer Drew DeVault writes a blog post about conservative web development after poking at a few popular sites and finding that only 8% of the data downloaded among the megabytes of advertisements, scripts, and third-party scripts is actually related to content. This represents several usability problems. After walking through some of the more problematic symptoms he proposes several steps which can remediate the state of the web.
Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 pixels tall, placed before even the title of the article. As I scrolled down, more and more requests were made, downloading a total of 2.8 MB of data with 748 HTTP requests. An article was weaved between a grand total of 1419 vertical pixels of ad space, greater than the vertical resolution of my display. Another 153-pixel ad is shown at the bottom, after the article. Four of the ads were identical.
Aside: Opponents to javascript are often wrongfully framed as Luddites. However, I invite readers to connect the dots; see:
Exploiting Speculative Execution (Meltdown/Spectre) via JavaScript
Web cache poisoning just got real: How to fling evil code at victims
Rowhammer.js Is the Most Ingenious Hack I've Ever Seen and
Oh, great, now there's a SECOND remote Rowhammer exploit
[Ed note: SoylentNews is designed to use no Javascript for normal user interactions. (There are a few staff-accessible pages requiring it, such as the Story Editing page.) I don't know of anyone on staff who would seriously consider changing that. When this site was initially rolling out, we actually tested to make sure it would work on a text-only browser (Lynx) and even Mosaic! So, please enjoy your light-weight, performant web pages here!]
[TMB note: Except the "collapse/expand this whole damned thread" button.]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:22PM (4 children)
Most websites are set up primarily to make money. This may or may not involve providing useful information to users, and a lot of the things that make money are downright hostile to informing users. Throwing in as many ads as possible, and nowadays as many tracking scripts as possible, has been par for the course since the late 1990's at least.
There is one relatively recent cause for increased JS bloat, though: cryptocurrency mining. I remember noticing a very substantial drop in CPU usage after installing NoCoin List [github.com] in my ad blocker. And that was on mainstream sites, I might mention, not fly-by-night or borderline-criminal sites.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
Most mainstream sites are borderline-criminal. They are stalking you.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:54PM
But they also have enough clout to write the laws so that stalking you isn't illegal.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:18PM
I wish there was a way to make those adscripts shove their heads up their own rectums. Let them burn their cycles.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:01PM
I for one think if you're using a blacklist on the internet you're doing it wrong.