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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:55AM
I'm in the net since 1990s. This marketing websites appearing everywhere is not so old. I always used Google to find useful information. Now it tries to sell me a stuff I don't need. This happened slowly in recent decade, starting from a result here or there, but now it jumped to entire search results pages. Looking for expansion board "pinout" loads me tons of totally unneeded e-shopping crap because if you change letters in board's name it'll fit the query, while the "pinout" sits in the fourth page. Sorry for quotes in a pinout word, that's a habit now, "I" "have" "to" "write" "everything" "in" "quotes" to make G show me less crap, but even it doesn't work now.
This needs some anarchy-related freaks to make a completely human-reviewed non-commercial content search engine. Only moderator's delusio... sorry paradigms :) should be compatible with web's primary goal as it was.
And for videos - no, our technology is not mature enough for it. It's not easily searchable nor skippable as textual/image information. Modern video-oriented web is the same as TV - to place-in and advertise products. Give users an interface to make query in videos and it will not be a step back.