Slashdot Mirror
Average Web Page Approaches 1MB
MrSeb writes "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet's most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes, up more than 30% from last year's average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive's recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts." If you have a personal home page, how big is it?
That's rather personal.
It's a good thing phone carriers don't limit your data consumption....
oh wait..
With the growth of Javascript libraries like JQuery for more UI features, more images, I can see it reaching that high.
Meanwhile, web developers don't care because more and more people are getting faster and faster broadband speeds. So as long as the page-load metric works OK on their rig or perhaps what the envision most of their viewers have... they think it's all OK.
Average information content - does a page view give me more insight as a user now than it did 10 years ago?
and the 3G users, and the satellite users, and everyone else that has a low-bandwidth and/or high cost per byte connection.
My parents can't get DSL or cable. They're stuck with 22k dial-up, and use AdBlock Plus, NoFlash, and Propel accelerator with compression set to the point where you can barely recognize photos, and it still takes 2 minutes for a reasonably normal page (CNN, MSNBC) to load, much less anything with a ton of Javascript or Flash.
Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?
Oh, and Propel, please move to JPEG2000 and XZ compression. Some people need every byte they can get.
It's not the size of the home page, it's the motion of the .GIF
And.... when running AdBlock Plus, this figure goes down to 100kB. I run AdBlock mostly for the massive speed increase that comes with it.
And Less Content. .
I remeber the days when a site would include an 10 paragraph article on one page - Not 10 pages with a paragraph on each.
. .
This only matters if people go to the first page, and never go to any additional ones.
For most websites these days, you'll take the initial hit from javascript and the 'branding' images when you first get to the site ... but the changing content per page is much lower.
If websites are using standard javascript libraries being served by Google's CDN, then it's possible that someone visiting your page already has jquery, mootools or similar cached and doesn't need to load yet another copy.
I also didn't see if they had any comparison between transferred size vs. used size. (eg, javascript that's sent compressed) ... and as this is from an new archive ... does anyone know if Archive.org could analyze their holdings to see what the longer term trends are?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
My home page remains where it has been since 1993 at the Calgary Unix Users Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr ...clocks in at 9.2K, plus a 15K GIF and a 9.1K JPG (if you "turn on images" in your browser - remember when it was a realistic option not to?)
I have held the line, while Viewing With Alarm (VWA) the growth of web pages for the entire 18 years since. I wrote Bob Metcalfe when he had a column at InfoWorld 15 years back, and he was Viewing With Alarm the exponential growth in Internet traffic and predicting the "collapse of the Internet" (had to eat those words - literally) because of it. My letter pointed out that his column constituted 2K of text - that was all the generated content that was bringing in the readers, (unless you count the 10K gif of Bob Metcalfe, and I don't), and the page had an additional 100K of framing and advertising-related image GIFs. His reply was somewhat defensive.
This last year, I had occasion to travel on the Queen Mary 2, where all internet is via satellite at a minimum of 34 cents per minute with their bulk plan. How quickly I grew to resent the giant Flash blobs that would be automatically downloaded with every page of a newspaper so I wouldn't miss the animated ads for the latest in car buys. At QM2 speeds, I'd have to wait about two minutes before I even had an "X" mark to click on to dismiss the ad. I was rather quickly cured of almost any interest in the Internet content at ALL, I did my E-mail, checked the google news headlines (fewest high-byte ads), and logged off.
My point: 90% of mail is spam. So are 90% of web page bytes. We just don't call it spam. We call it "the whole outside frame around the news page that we try not to see, but keeps jumping around into our field of view".
There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts.
No, it's not about HTML 5. A lot of it is about bloated content management systems and templates.
I was looking at a Wall Street Journal page recently, and I brought it into an HTML editor so I could eliminate all non-story content. The story required an HTML page with only 72 lines. The original page was over 4000 lines. It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.
On top of that, there are content management systems which create a custom CSS page for each content page. So there's no useful caching in the browser.
Remember those people who said CSS was going to make web pages shorter? They were wrong. Look at Slashdot - bloated, slow pages that don't do much, yet consume CPU time when idle.
My webpage is just about 1k. But you have you watch a 30 sec. interlaced Bluray quality ad before you can see it.
That's still too much flash for me
Sent from my iPhone
10 years ago online video was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist it was never larger than 320x240.
And now it is ubiquitous, HD and largely devoted to pointless things that would be skimmed over and disregarded in a fraction of the load time if left to text and still images.
That's what she said!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
http://www.the5k.org/
It seemed so long ago. Didn't /. have an entry as well?
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
It's not the size of your homepage, it's how you use it.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Yes, compression helps (and is generally done automatically in any good Apache configuration). What helps even more from a user's perspective is combining files; basically, in the backend we combine all our Javascript and CSS (or as much as is reasonable) into one file instead of serving it as multiple, separate files linked to the current page. This cuts down on HTTP requests massively and speeds site loading from a user's perspective. Yahoo has a great list of best practices for speeding up sites if you're interested.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs