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)...
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Ad Code 'Slows Down' Browsing Speeds
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:45AM (11 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ritZxM_uejA [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:03AM (10 children)
I agree with the "no shit". The thing is, you can't tell the common fool with a smart phone anything. You can't even tell the common fool with a desktop about bandwidth, tracking, surveillance. They don't know, don't care, and can't be bothered. All they care about is, "Ohhh, SHINY!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:05AM (8 children)
This isn't on the users, it's on the web developers and their bosses.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:13AM (4 children)
It's on the users for not crying to the high heavens about the bloated shit the web has become if you try to use it without ad- & script blockers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:30AM (1 child)
Maybe they just buy a new system whenever things seem to get slower (or they clog it with worse stuff like BonziBuddy viruses)?
I have a 7.5 year old laptop. If I upgraded to 2019 or 2020 hardware it might load those ads like a champ. For a while.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:35AM
Oh, BonziBuddy brings back memories, lol.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:40AM (1 child)
What will they do if Chrome and Firefox block adblocker plugins?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:12PM
Use a fork, such as Palemoon or Basilisk.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:19AM (1 child)
To some extent, it is on the users. There are all manner of browser addons, hosts files, and router configurations that will block the bullshit. If users were to be outraged by what is going on, and just block it all, the web would work a helluva lot better for all of us. The point at which the data mining assholes start losing money, instead of making money, we'll see a lot of it just disappear.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:52AM
FTFY
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Saturday February 16 2019, @07:10AM
I can't really make my mind up on this. I think I agree, mostly. I also think it's up to the users to learn a little bit about the methods used to exploit them so that they may avoid being exploited if they choose to. They don't have to become experts. However, like everything else in life, it's worth paying attention enough to learn how you are being manipulated and exploited, by whom, and to resist it. It's probably too much to ask though. Half the time I can't be bothered either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @02:50PM
that's not entirely true. most people that fall under your categories care more about what they are doing is actually working. sites load, pages open, computer doesnt crash and application doesnt fail.
shiny has little to do with it on the desktop -- consider how people got the free upgrade for windows 10 on old hardware, and pcs remain a hard sell to people.
its easy to just lump them into the Other group and wall them off and say bad things about them, though, even if it doesnt do anything to solve the real problem.
(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..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:37AM (6 children)
For this reason, and others, it is an ethical responsibility to block ads, encourage others to block ads, and install ad blocking software on as many computes as you have legal access to.
In addition to being a drag on resources and an invasion of privacy, the ad-networks don’t seem interested in making sure their clients only submit non-malicious content to be distributed. The only acceptable amount of malicious code to broadcast to users is zero. Human review might be able to achieve that, let’s be charitable and say that it can. This would make the entire ad-economy collapse. They couldn’t exist if you forced them to review all the code, or made them financially liable when malicious software is distributed. Their margins are too thin. Automation is the only way the industry can exist.
So it shouldn’t.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday February 16 2019, @06:14AM (5 children)
What I find interesting is that so many ads include privacy busting tracking that installing Privacy Badger is nearly the same as installing an ad-blocker these days.
That gives me an extra cynical laugh when a website soaks it's crying towel because I'm running an "ad blocker" when I would see all of the ads if they were actually just trying to show me ads rather than darting and tagging me like a bear.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday February 16 2019, @06:27AM (3 children)
I don't think I've used Privacy Badger in the absence of an adblocker and a scriptblocker. Sounds like an interesting experiment.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Sunday February 17 2019, @11:24PM (1 child)
I've used Firefox's built-in tracking protection alone before, and a lot of sites ended up confusing it with an ad blocker. Some sites, such as MIT Technology Review and The Atlantic, deliberately block users of tracking blockers. MIT Technology Review blocks users of tracking blockers because tracking blockers circumvent its metered paywall, and the help article in The Atlantic insistently refers to "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath. In theory, sites like these could displaly publisher-hosted ads instead if tracking protection causes an ad to fail to load. But I'm of the opinion that they deliberately lack such a fallback because ads based on tracking draw three times the revenue compared to ads not based on tracking (Beales and Eisenach 2014 [politico.com]).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday February 17 2019, @11:27PM
First they killed Aaron Swartz, then they blocked the blockers. For shame, MIT.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday February 19 2019, @01:48AM
I tried it based on the idea that I didn't want to prevent ad-funded sites from being funded, but tracking isn't part of that bargain (certainly I have yet to see a site that asks permission to track). Then there was no real urge to add ad-blocking since so many ads were already blocked for tracking and the most obnoxious ads all seem to get blocked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:18PM
I've been using Privacy Badger for years, without any other ad blocking. Very few problems, a few times I've had to adjust the PB sliders to allow a page to work correctly. Go EFF!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:41AM
We need more ads and bigger! More flashier, more pop-uppier and definitely more audio and autoplay video! Think of the loading time we can gain!
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday February 16 2019, @01:11PM (2 children)
When loading a page have a status line showing what percentage is what you want to see, what percentage is ads, and what percentage is tracking. Grandma might not understand things like ublock origin, but she'll surely notice numbers showing half her load time is stuff she doesn't want.
Percentage of what, you ask? I can think of a few: bytes coming down the pipe, run time, wait time......
And I apologize to you grandmas here that do understand things like ublock origin :)
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:03PM (1 child)
Didn't Opera browser used to do something along these lines?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Sunday February 17 2019, @01:56AM
I know this is off topic and a bit antisocial, but when I see your posted email address, I want to register the domain SPAMsoylentnews.org and setup a mail server just to forward all the email addressed to the user takyonNO to you. It's not just you, it's the same for any other users using NO@SPAM in their email addresses. It makes me feel like I'm letting the messages complete their journey, and then I realize that it's only spam and I would be trolling. Besides, April 1st is still several weeks out.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @07:47PM
are those most able to afford the offerings of ads also the most capable of blocking ads?