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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Programmer Drew DeVault writes a blog post about conservative web development [drewdevault.com] 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.

[Ed: Opponents to javascript are often wrongfully framed as luddites. However, I invite readers to connect the dots:
Exploiting Speculative Execution (Meltdown/Spectre) via JavaScript [react-etc.net]
Web cache poisoning just got real: How to fling evil code at victims [theregister.co.uk]
Rowhammer.js Is the Most Ingenious Hack I've Ever Seen [vice.com] + Oh, great, now there's a SECOND remote Rowhammer exploit [theregister.co.uk]
]

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