Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

Not just load time, but &quot;time to read content&quot; has exploded. Once the webapp has downloaded and it can start doing REST like requests for the actual content, it also needs to start loading pop-ups and the &quot;continue reading&quot;-button, that can hide the content after it is loaded.<p>So once all that is done, the user needs to click away cookie consent banner, newsletter sign-up and the continue reading button. And only now can we stop the clock on &quot;time to read content&quot;.<p>This is a big reason why I read comments first. I click and get straight to content.<p>EDIT: I just realized that the &quot;time to ...&quot;-moniker works really bad in my phrasing here. Maybe &quot;time to start reading&quot; would have been better.

I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents.<p>Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we&#x27;ll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the clicking for us, and summarize the results in a much simpler UI designed to actually be fast and useful, vs. designed to optimize the business metrics of some company as interpreted by a gaggle of product managers.<p>This isn&#x27;t unprecedented. Plaid screen scrapes terrible bank websites and turns them into APIs, though without AI. Google Duplex uses AI to turn restaurant phone numbers into an API for making reservations. DeepMind&#x27;s Sparrow[1], just announced today, answers factual questions posed in plain English by performing Google searches and summarizing the results. But it&#x27;s going to be a revolution when it becomes much more general and able to take actions rather than just summarize information. It isn&#x27;t far off! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adept.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adept.ai</a> is pretty much exactly what I&#x27;m talking about, and I expect there are a lot more people working on similar things that are still in stealth mode.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepmind.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;building-safer-dialogue-agents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepmind.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;building-safer-dialogue-agents</a>

We can wish that crappy websites didn’t get more bloated every year, but as long as they still load fast enough most people don’t know the difference or care. Everything has an opportunity cost, so once things are good enough the resources that could be spent optimizing will be spent elsewhere instead, and bloat that can be added to solve other business goals will be added.<p>It’s understandable to get frustrated by this, but at some point you realize it’s pointless.<p>This is true in many, many facets of life. Household possessions tend to expand to fill the available square footage. Cities sprawl haphazardly until commute times become unbearable. Irrigation expands until the rivers are depleted. Life expands to the limit, always.

See also Induced demand&#x2F;traffic: building more roads&#x2F;adding lanes to roads increases congestion rather than decreasing it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bettertransport.org.uk&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;trunk-roads-traffic-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bettertransport.org.uk&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;trunk-roa...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Induced_demand" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Induced_demand</a>

Throughput of networks is increasing but latency doesn’t improve as much (although 5G wireless is a big improvement over 4G LTE). Also TCP slow-start limits how fast an HTTP connection can go, and most are short-lived so the connection is still ramping up when it is closed. That’s one of the supposed benefits of QUIC a.k.a. HTTP&#x2F;3.<p>And then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays.

Desktop bandwidth is improving over time, but as I understand HTTP Archive is still using a 5 Mbps cable connection.<p>From their FAQ&#x2F;changelog [1]:<p>&gt; 19 Mar 2013: The default connection speed was increased from DSL (1.5 mbps) to Cable (5.0 mbps). This only affects IE (not iPhone).<p>There was another popular article on HN a while ago [2], claiming mobile websites had gotten slower since 2011. But actually HTTP Archive just started using a slower mobile connection in 2013. I wrote more about that issue with the HTTP Archive data at the time [3].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;httparchive.org&#x2F;faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;httparchive.org&#x2F;faq</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-need-for-speed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-need-for-speed&#x2F;</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debugbear.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;is-the-web-getting-slower" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debugbear.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;is-the-web-getting-slower</a>

Despite faster computers every year, my computers don&#x27;t seem to run any faster, either

This website loads an exceptional amount of data for what it is, at least for me. On my browser it makes calls to a site called streamlitapp.com every 100 ms. It appears to be using about 100MB of bandwidth every 10 seconds from what I can see

&gt; <i>With home broadband reaching 70 Mbps globally</i><p>The source for that is some stats from speedtest.net, which I assume is calculated from the users who used their speed test? So it&#x27;s probably heavily skewed towards power users who have a fast connection and want to check if they are really getting what they are paying for. Most &quot;casual&quot; users with shitty DSL connections are happy if &quot;the internet&quot; works at all and are pretty unlikely to ever use this service...

The irony of this post is that the single heaviest resource loaded by this page is a 750kb image used only for the meta tags as a sharing image which most people consuming and downloading the page will never see.<p>What&#x27;s baffling to me is how people love to spend seemingly infinite time playing with tech stacks and what not but then pay very little attention to basic details like what to load and how many resources do they really need.

I maintain that &quot;booting a Mac, loading Chrome, loading Google Docs, and getting ready to type&quot;, takes as long as &quot;booting DOS, starting Windows 3.1, loading Word for Windows 2.0&quot;, takes as long as &quot;loading GEOS from floppy disk on a C64, loading geoWrite&quot;, and so on, and so forth.

Speaking from experience, at shipping time of a new site performance testing is done, and the developers are asked to improve performance until it is just good enough. So it doesn’t matter how big or small the site is, unless by shipping time it is already faster than desired it will only get optimized to run as fast as every other site, but no faster.

This would seem to be Myhrvold&#x27;s first law in action.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;software-its-a-gas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;software-its-a-gas&#x2F;</a>

I got a new M2 Macbook and it&#x27;s astonishing how much faster the web is. It seems a lot of the lag must just be javascript execution time and not content loading.

Idk about fast, but a broken back button is kind of a problem.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220923024040&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datafantic.com&#x2F;how-much-time-do-we-waste-waiting-for-websites-to-load&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220923024040&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dataf...</a><p>Do you think this is including ad loads? Ad networks run a real-time auction. It takes some time to collect bids so the highest can be chosen.

Jevon’s paradox: “…occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating reductions in resource use.”<p>Developers will therefore always maximize resource usage as more becomes available.

Before I upgraded my macbook air 2019 to an m1 I could barely visit most &quot;big&quot; websites. I remember a redesign of a specific store that went from &quot;perfectly usable albeit a bit outdated in term of design&quot; to &quot;10x slower, looks nicer but usability is dog shit&quot;

in my android and linux pc, firefox will refuse to display web pages which was fully downloaded couple hours before.<p>ff always ask for internet connection although all needed files are in the cache.<p>i&#x27;m on internet diet (disable wifi for hours long) so bad behaviors are apparent<p>those who always-on-24&#x2F;7 fiber may not notice

Well we could start here and now by reporting load sizes&#x2F;site footprint in bytes which wouldn&#x27;t look out of place on hn, along with badges for cookie consent dialogs, ga usage, non-responsive design, high energy consumption flags for sites that suck the last power out of your mobile, and other non-desiderata. Or just mark a site as requiring JavaScript so we can avoid it. DDG should be doing the same.

It is possible that website loading is bottlenecked by latency and an irreducible number of round trips needed. Bandwidth is not obviously a bottleneck.

It&#x27;d be interesting to know why load time hasn&#x27;t improved.<p>In the comments I mostly see &quot;because of js and adtech&quot;, but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency ? Is it a problem of latency or bandwidth ? What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Just wondering

Javascript and it&#x27;s consequences have been a disaster for the web.

In the past computers (incl. hard drives and CPUs) were orders of magnitude faster than the communication lines so it made sense to compress everything as hard as possible and cache that. Now I have a 10 Gbps line, a 1 Gbps network card (I don&#x27;t feel like I need a faster one), a 200 Mbps SSD and the CPU often is near-100%-loaded.

Making general software faster is saving the planet, both by saving human waiting time and carbon footprint on electricity. We are not measuring on this domain enough and we should start doing so. The added bonus is that faster software&#x2F;website makes better UX, and we saves time on doing &quot;UX research&quot; as well.

My boring html-only pages load pretty fast.

Good enough is good enough. Just like faster computers don’t make new apps any faster (even at the peak of scaling decades ago), they make sure we can write more complex apps without making them too slow, or equivalently, add more things to apps and sites if there is any performance headroom left.

No website I use does take 6 seconds to load. And I have 50 Mbps downlink. Can anyone name a website that does take that long to load? Github for example does load in 4.37 seconds with cache disabled in developer tools. CNN does take 3.58 seconds.<p>But I&#x27;m using uBlock origin …

The slowdowns come from:<p>Latency: Part of the page loads, and then the page asks for more data. In some cases, (such as loading a page hosted on another continent,) this is bound by the speed of light.<p>Poor data access (database) code: Sometimes this is due to lazy or incompetent programmers, other times its due to the fact that &quot;not instant&quot; is &quot;good enough.&quot;<p>Writing a web page to load everything very quickly in a single request is surprisingly hard, and will often break modern and easily understood design patterns.

I wonder if it is time to explore alternative syntax parsers with a more generic API to accommodate other markup formats. At least initially this could be 1:1 with HTML but eventually could support new functions not limited by HTML itself so that the features and languages can move at separate paces.<p>Being able to render an enhanced markdown or JSON or YAML page in the browser without any generators would be phenomenal and resolve a lot of long-standing issues with structured data.

The title of this post is annoying: Typically we say &quot;faster broadband&quot;, when we talk about bandwidth, not about &quot;speed&quot; (which would be latency). So obviously, as long as your website is not larger than your bandwidth capacity, nothing is gonna get &quot;faster&quot;, when you upgrade your broadband bandwidth.<p>This is the same as saying &quot;Despite larger pipes every year, water still doesn&#x27;t reach your house any faster&quot;.

Sure. Again, the <i>basic</i> issue is that this is not optimized <i>for the user.</i> It&#x27;s optimized for whoever stands to make money from the pages.

You can make pages insanely fast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;car-safety&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;car-safety&#x2F;</a> for example, but you will notice it is very simple and lacks video&#x2F;ads.<p>This is not optimized for &quot;engagement&quot; or whatever proxy for &quot;money in my pocket&quot;, however, so it&#x27;s pretty rare.

Classic rebound effect. Same thing for cars.<p>&gt; Contrary to popular belief, the average car is not in fact that much more fuel-efficient than older cars. Still, to this day, the average vehicle has a range of between 20 and 30 miles per gallon; a stat which was very similar in the 1920s. But, why is this? Well, cars are a whole lot bigger.

I used to be bothered by this, but in reality it works like a filter. The crappier the website, the crappier the content.

Recently I&#x27;ve been wondering why my internet seems to be getting so slow. It then dawned on me that webpage bloat has progressed to the point that my 2015 MacBook (the small one with the rubbish processor) really struggles to load a typical webpage in a reasonable amount of time.

More bandwidth, more processing power, more browser APIs and support for shiny CSS effects:<p>More sites taking advantage of them at the same pace of technical development, cancelling them out.<p>Otherwise if we had a website from 10 years ago it <i>is</i> faster to load with today&#x27;s connections.

HackerNews loads pretty fast, and would be one of my favorite sites even if it didn&#x27;t.

On similar note: Despite faster hardware every year, laptops don&#x27;t perform any better, running applications.<p>Usage experience with typical specs of 2022 (500G SSD and 16G RAM) is as good or bad as ones from 20 years back (say, 20G HDD and 128M RAM).

My broadband speed hasn&#x27;t changed since I moved into my house 9 years ago. Just saying.

Since I started using the Adguard dns - it is surprising how much faster everything is. But still there is too much cruft in the most common sites.<p>A startup could probably nuke reddit in a month if they just concentrate on performance and usability.

Because that represents the patience of the typical user. For the most part, apps&#x2F;sites&#x2F;whatever have always hovered around such a limit. It takes that long not because of tech, but because of people.

Ironically this page loaded for me in about 500ms on my 1GB fiber connection.

&gt;&gt;&gt; Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don&#x27;t load any faster<p>I would rephrase it:<p><i>Because</i> faster broadband every year, web pages don&#x27;t load any faster

Sure they do. Just disable ads, and all 3rd party JS.

basically Jevons&#x27; paradox

1kb.club would like a word.

&quot;Grove giveth, Gates taketh away&quot;