Comment by KernowRoger on 04/07/2020 at 17:41 UTC

26 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)

View submission: A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web

I really hate the internet nowadays. Some news articles take minutes to load what is essentially a few paragraphs of text. The vast majority of the bloat is styling that isn't needed for reading text at all. Some sites need it for functionality but a lot don't.

Replies

Comment by auntyblackchild at 04/07/2020 at 18:07 UTC

84 upvotes, 3 direct replies

The bloat isn’t from styles, it’s the megabytes of JavaScript for tracking, browser feature shims, and general wastefulness of web developers.

Comment by [deleted] at 04/07/2020 at 18:05 UTC

25 upvotes, 1 direct replies

It's not styling that causes that, the problem you are experiencing is that websites don't send an article to your browser, they are sending a whole application to read their api and display articles, downloading and initializing that takes up time in the critical path, styling can load after you can already see a document.

Comment by urquan at 05/07/2020 at 01:43 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The "old web" still exists! It's just drowned in a sea of sites bloated for the purpose of tracking and advertising. What would be nice is a no-bloat search engine, which would only index sites that don't require 25MB of JS and 425 requests to third-party domains to load.

Comment by Jugad at 05/07/2020 at 00:51 UTC*

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

This is what a typical website does today...

1. Get minimal html containing links to javascript package and styling.

2. Make request to get big javascript package.

3. Make request to get relatively small css styling.

4. Load and execute javascript package.

5. Javascript makes api calls to get page content.

6. Get content and populate page.

7. Page content contains links to images and tracking/advertisement scripts.

8. Make requests to get images and tracking/ad scripts.

9. Ad scripts make more requests to get images / gifs / movies, etc.

The majority of the slowness comes from steps 2,4,5,6,8,9

Blocking ads helps steps 8, 9. However, steps 2, 4, 5 and 6 are just in-fashion bad dev practices.

There is an on going movement towards making these steps faster.