SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
chromas
on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:44AM
from the free-content-is-paid-for-by-wasting-your-life-on-loading-times dept.
from the free-content-is-paid-for-by-wasting-your-life-on-loading-times dept.
BBC:
Ads are responsible for making webpages slow to a crawl, suggests analysis of the most popular one million websites.
The research by developer Patrick Hulce looked at which chunks of code take longest to load.
About 60% of the total loading time of a page was caused by scripts that place adverts or analyse what users do, he found.
Not news for most Soylentils, but in case anyone needs to cite the performance hit (to convince PHBs)...
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Ad Code 'Slows Down' Browsing Speeds
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 31 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:12AM (6 children)
It's way WAY more than 60%.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:22AM (4 children)
For someone like me, who reads more text than anything else, yes - it's way more than 60%. For people who do little more than watch videos and listen to music, it's probably a lot less than 60%. I can only presume that the researchers averaged for all of us.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:14PM (3 children)
Same here. Way back in the day (20 years ago-ish), dialup modems, etc., I quickly found Opera browser which let me turn OFF javascript, images, and plugins. It had per-site control of javascript, image loading, plugins (Flash), and site blocking. You could right-click an image placeholder and load it if wanted. I still use "Old Opera" for much browsing for the above reasons, much faster browsing, etc. Ever since then I've been stunned that the tech community didn't latch on to and promote Opera. I used to try to encourage people to use it, including on a certain greenish site, but to little avail. Sigh.
Ads pay for much of our Internet, sites, etc., and I'm okay with some ads just like free TV. But the ads have gone way beyond reasonable. They're very clever, finding ways around ad and popup blockers, etc. They're certainly driven by greed, but some of the programming tech. reminds me of malware evil.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:31PM (2 children)
Sadly, Opera has been sold [digitaltrends.com]. (I would have linked to the story atengadget [engadget.com], but seeing how their awful site breaks without javascript, I thought a different site would be better with this article.
However, their is a spirtual successor to Opera, Vivaldi [vivaldi.com].
Sadly, like everything else (except firefox), it is a chromium based browser. Which is going to end up being as ugly as the IE6 domination of the web 2 decades ago.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Saturday February 16 2019, @06:58PM (1 child)
Thanks. I quite agree about the newer "Opera". I specified "Old Opera", which is a fairly commonly used designation for up to version 12.18, based on the "Presto" rendering engine. 12.18 is great for most websites. Some with horrific code errors (as per validator.w3.org) can freeze it up, or just not render things the way they were intended to look, but overall it's still my main browser.
In fact, I'm writing this using Vivaldi and have been for 2+ years (IIRC). It's much much better than Chrome (ugh). We have the per-site javascript, etc. settings, but it's overall responsiveness is slowwww (on the same hardware as Opera 12.18 which is snappy).
Blockers are our friends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @08:33PM
Just so you know, Chromium's core has per-site control over all of that too, it is just hidden by default in the settings. Vivaldi and Chrome use the same control interface to disable that stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:16PM
Indeed, 60% seems like the lower limit of the loading time increase...
My Local newspaper's website, the index page is 316 KB, of that, 300 KB is a wankfest of mostly ad and tracking JavaScript..and this script has the further audacity to load even more obfuscated javascript shitfuckwankery off the developer's own poxy little site...I reckon all that accounts for between 80-90% of that page's loading time...and then it falls over and dies unless you've a multicore CPU and several gig of ram..
The recent El Reg redesign has seriously increased their page loading time, I think there's 200K of javascript on their index page (cant check, am using a shitty old ipad at present) and when it does eventually sort of load, the site is almost unusable on older browsers/hardware which rendered their old site design without issue..