Bloat

Charlie Stross spent some time calculating just how much bloat gets added to a typical commercial site’s web pages:

I stared at it for some time while it loaded over a 10mbps cable modem connection. Then I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit “reload”, and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files … and a bunch of other crap.

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Let me put this in perspective:

This is a novel in HTML, with three small image files (totaling about 10Kb). “Accelerando” runs to 145,000 words; it fits in about 400 pages, typeset as a book, using very small print. It is 949Kb in size, or about 10Kb larger than a Salon.com feature containing 950-odd words.

What bugs me the most is the way sites - and I’m not just talking about commercial sites here - pull in content from third party sites to fill their sidebar. I’ve lost count of the number of pages I see on a typical day where the page doesn’t finish loading for some thirty seconds after the main content has arrived because there’s some Flash widget or chart in the sidebar that is spinning its wheels, waiting for a response from Flickr or Last.fm or wherever. Drives me batty…