Have websites gotten slower? or are web designers shit now?

I grew up in the 90s and watched the internet grow. I remember waiting ages for websites to load on older computers or dial up. But computers are fast as shit now, and broadband is the norm at the very least. We've also made the jump from flash content to mostly html5 to my knowledge.

There was a point probably between 2003-2007 where the internet seemed to be at its height. Websites loaded fast and smoothly on good machines for that time. Now years later I'm using an even better machine and websites seem slower over all.

Why is that? are sites just poorly optimized now due to incompetent developers in the industry? or is the new architecture not all its cracked up to be?

Other urls found in this thread:

werc.cat-v.org/
tilde.club
danluu.com/web-bloat/
yahoo.co.jp/
yahoo.com/
forum.dlang.org/
plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
vitanuova.com/inferno/
cat-v.org/
awwwards.com/awards-of-the-day/
vimeo.com/147806338
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Most websites are full of code for tracking users and displaying ads, which takes forever to process.

Javascript

1. It's your computer/bandwith
2. It's websites with JavaScript that prevent the site from fully rendering before it's done with it's tasks (like fetching ads or posting analytics)

youre full of nostalgia.
internet was fucking slow compared to today. todays internet is fucking fast and if a webpage doesnt load instantly, people start crying about it on Sup Forums and whish they were living again in the dial-up past. hore shit.

No, he's right. Mid/late 2000's was the high mark. Web has been steadily getting slower since then.

>pajeet
>fuckton of ad content
>ad trackers
>meme js library of the week on top of meme js library of last week on top of....

Main reason for that - WebFrameworks, second reason - AJax.
It's faster to download all content at once.

Botnet and ads and tracking scripts etc require both bandwidth and computational resources.

People refuse to substitute JavaScript for assembly, that's the problem.

the latency never improved

>Have websites gotten slower? or are web designers shit now?
yes

Not only that but for a lot of people it's gotten so bad that any apparent improvements in technology are not felt, despite the improvement to infrastructure.

So do 90% of sites use javascript then? I mean java has been around for a long time. Has it always been used in web development? or is that the portion that's gotten worse with age?

google analytics and their ilk have become numerous over the years and plugged into everything. Does google analytics even have a competitor? or is every website ever essentially integrated with google now? I ask about this all the time but never find more information since everyone seems to love google and thinks they're the future rather than jews profiting from our web history. I'm curious if there are any organized groups that oppose google or have an umbrella for websites that don't want to be part of the google network.

It's everywhere. Even here.

theres tons of competators/alternatives/framework with build in analytics... or you roll your own.

yahoo small business (aabaco) tags their own analytics onto your site (I use both this and google analytics) and it captures almost all the same information.

The main weakness of GA is the sheer volume of russians trying to fuck with your shit it takes an hour to filter out their horseshit for every page

Properly used AJAX is great. It means you don't have to re-download an entire page at once, and the experience is closer to a desktop app.

Note the key word "properly".

Can you site an example of a production website that is too slow for your ultra-boutique tastes?

back then we had websites.

Now we have Javascript webapps, delivered using HTTP/HTTPS and ran by our browsers.

What is Ajax? a framework for webpages? I'd love to just download whole pages before viewing them if that's an option.

How can you be emotional about something you have no fundamental grasp of?

I'm not surprised. This has been a shithole for years. I don't come here often, but Sup Forums gives me a little bit of hope since some of you are actually educated. Other boards are a lost cause. I kind of want Sup Forums to implode and get replaced just to see what crops up instead.

The internet and advertising used to be like the wild west. I never paid much attention to laws and international meddling years ago. Are companies still on the same footing in terms of the money they can make without google? or is their infrastructure so huge that it's like shooting yourself in the foot.

I find it so weird that there's so few competitors or new services actively coming out to replace existing ones. Like Facebook, Twitter, Twitch TV, youtube, etc are all hugely popular and widely used, but I never even see alternatives anymore. Years ago there was opposition coming out every month.

>waiting for doubclick.net
yeah its always been shit when sites use external content, just that more do it now.

Because I can picture an ideal situation in my mind that achieving would make happy.

web fuckers are shit tier when it comes of making something functional and clean and not relying on a framework or some shit that will take forever loadin javascript crap that mostly shows one or two lame effects and keeps track of you

For me this is not true.

And I know why. Because internet speed in my country has grown faster than the webpages loaded content.

So, for me, websites are loading much faster now, when they have more content, than back in the early 00s, when they were mostly made of text and small images.

It really is your internet connection. Assuming that you're not using a PC older than 5 years.

>more content

Content or "content"?

> when they were mostly made of text and small images

I'd call that content, and more worthy content than the trash that infests the web now.

I actually like the state of the internet right now and it's getting better.

I used to have that negative attitude too, when I had an old piece of crap computer (Core solo, 512MB ram, hdd).

Now I have an i5, 16GB ram, an SSD and a connection of 300Mbps (dl) / 150Mbps (ul), and everything runs smooth and fast. And that negative, hateful attitude is gone.

The demands and expectations of websites have changed drastically since the web's inception, so of course they've gotten "slower" as they grew heavier. The age of purely static, shittily designed web pages is over, and it was trash anyway, only looked fondly upon by millennials nostalgic for a time they never endured, who throw a tantrum if a page takes longer than two seconds to load.

But web developers have also grown shittier over the years relying too much on shitty one-size-fits-all frameworks, external content and automation to produce shitty, though conveniently generated web pages.

javascript != java

>search web how to do a for/next loop in language x
>search engine first 2k hits returns youtube 1h30m shiling pajeets tutorials
>mfw

>10 megs of le ebin awesome.js xD
>1 meg of.css

This. Sites that don't have a hojillion lines of JavaScript and analytics and dozens of database calls tend to load at lightspeed nowadays. You could host a simple static site on an RPi3 and handle the entire world knocking on your door at once, and there are some great static site generators nowadays.

I find it strange that later millenials would feel nostalgia for a time they never experienced or lived through. but maybe its the usual trend of following eceleb musings.

I enjoyed simplicity. An article was just text with a couple of images relevant to the subject matter. while ads were opened mostly in seperate webpages and easily dismissed. Now you get articles framed by ads and anti adblocker notifications, only to get halfway into the article to find out its an ad itself endorsing specific products or software.

Are there any examples of current era webpages that are hyper efficiently programmed?

Could I get some more information? When you say lack of database calls what do you mean? I don't know much about web development.

Also in terms having lots of site traffic, running out of bandwidth always seemed like the biggest problem. Has the price of bandwidth skyrocketed in recent years? or gotten cheaper?

and when I say that, I mean also taking into account how much data usage itself has increased.

All I'm saying is toastytech loads orders of magnitude faster than the vast majority of other websites

I'm a Millennial and I remember using dial up, Windows 9x, and browsing shit like Yahooligans.

I'm seriously wondering how old you fucks are.

toastytech on the right, my homegrown website on the left.

Apart from bootstrap and jquery all of the content on my website its static, all the data its loaded through Ajax after the site its loaded by requesting a php page with the functions of the page, i find this way of development quite efficient because the main piece of the site loads just as fast as toastytech and its only loaded once, the rest of the time php and javascript does their magic to interact with the user.

The problem with modern websites its that all of the content its dynamic then they throw Ajax on top to load the php servers even more.

>Are there any examples of current era webpages that are hyper efficiently programmed?

There needs to be an old timey web ring for sites like these. An oasis.

Not only that the libs are all stored on a million different servers at google and facebook and then you have the 50 ad requests per page. Webshitters are so awful that the speed of light is literally a meaningful factor in their page loads.

They changed the definition of Millenial to include people in the early 2000s as well I think. I was born in 89, but I just happened to spend a lot of time on an old windows 3.1 computer from around age 5-6 onward. We got dial up fairly early.

That's what I'm saying too. I've just been trying to make lists of old sites that aren't part of the regular popular google curriculum. I feel like this stuff must exist somewhere and I'm just uninformed.

>there are some great static site generators nowadays
please name them.

> werc.cat-v.org/

>Years ago there was opposition coming out every month.
VC money tightened up ever since the SEC informally warned them in 2013 to audit their funds better.

Gone are the days of mom-and-pop websites. Nowadays only money can get you on the front page.

its slow because botnet, ads, ISP jewery, javascript, and shitty pajeet web developers. ad blocker should help

front page of what? if you want to make a mom and pop website, nothing is stopping you. make it, put your content on it, and spread the link around. you might not get rich, but if your stuff is good, some people will look at it

what do you guys think of sites like
tilde.club

shared server space run off a low end UNIX machine where hundreds of people are hosting lightweight sites off of, resulting in a little webring subculture. Sup Forums could have one

It's because of all the ads, tracking and web 2.0 shit.

>The age of purely static, shittily designed web pages is over, and it was trash anyway, only looked fondly upon by millennials nostalgic for a time they never endured
I beg to differ. I was born in 1994 and I'm pretty sure I remember already using websites in the '90s, even though I was so little. We had a Gateway computer in the house already by the time I was born.

Install a Javascript blocker and watch how fast websites load.

The difference is insane when you aren't loading 50 MB of scripts that proceed to download 100MB of ads and tracking bullshit on top of whatever flavor the month framework the avant garde designer decided to use to actually build the site.

Overall I'd say it's about 50% management bullshit telling devs to shit up their otherwise fine website designs with ads and tracking, and 50% incompetent devs jerking themselves off over making the site look "pretty."

I was born in 1995 and my first computer was an IBM PC/AT. I learned how to use DOS on this thing.

Because some gay faggot business owner says to some gay faggot web designer "hey, make me a gay faggot website so I can appeal to my gay faggot customers". The gay faggot web designer goes off and makes his gay faggot website and comes back. The business owner is all like "no, this gay faggot website is too straight, I want it to have flashing videos everywhere and lots of tracking so we can appease our gay faggot audience". The web designer goes off again and adds some more gay fag shit until it's bloated. Then some gay fag children on their gay faggot macbooks go online and browse and don't care about efficiency because they never experienced a time before fucking animations and scripting fucking everywhere on their gay faggot hangouts.

Playing microsoft solitaire on the desktop is not the same thing as visiting a web-site, kid.

>Sup Forums could have one
Great idea. What should the logo be?

Dude, I was never into Solitaire. For a good portion of my life my computer use was websites and WordPerfect.

Oh, and American Greetings Create-a-Card Manager.

Webdevs have no idea how to write optimized code.

i was fond of the black and white gateway cow packaging.

poo in loos program things now

They don't know how to write much code period, they use frameworks and use as much plug and go stuff as they can.

to be fair "Full stack" webdev becomes a tangly mess very quickly for even simple applications.

the frameworks are so people can churn shit out as fast as possible.

This thread has been pretty educational so far.

How do I learn to be a webdev that can optimize?

>Install noscript
>visit my usual news site
>37 scripts blocked
>page loads lightning fast

wow

You don't, you just be a basic bitch average shit drone like all the others.

>300Mbps (dl) / 150Mbps (ul)
heh, not even my VPS in my country has that kind of internet speed

>visit website on desktop
>works well, loads fast
>visit website on phone
>takes ages to load, full of ads and popups
I hate it.

first ajax, then asynchronous json, then the current abortion of react/vue/how-it's-called.js
you got a spare petabyte?

I don't hate flashy sites and other high-bandwidth content. Even back in the days of ANSI art there were people showing off.

What I dislike is how those same conventions are applied to sites where they have no place. News sites, e-mail, forums, etc. Things where the actual function of the site hasn't changed since they first went online should not fall prey to this.

To me it just seems so insular. Having entire regions of the web totally unusable due to a lack of system resources or infrastructure just seems so counter to the ideals of the World-Wide Web. I guess I'm too much of an idealist for my own good.

danluu.com/web-bloat/

Also a lot of people have fucky DNS resolution for many reasons (incompetence, ISPs, malware, shit OS, etc), when the webpage has to resolve 50 different domains it doesn't matter how "fast" your connection or computer is if the ISP is trying to inject advertising into your advertising so you can be spied on while you get spied on

Firefox has its own DNS prefetching thing by default, too. Goes and resolves links and shit in the background. Alllll kinds of 3rd party slowdown on so many layers.

In the beggining the browser was just a text formated document render, knowadeys is something like a virtual machine were you can run entire applications in javascript

>full of ads and pop-ups
>current_year
>not using Adguar
I hated you

And it's no wonder it does the job so poorly when its having to do so much complex stuff.

I can't think of anything I can do on the web today that I couldn't do with a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64, so yes.

>shittily designed web pages is over
The internet wasn't your geocities site user. Making your site more difficult to navigate by hiding your sites contents under layers upon layers of menus is not good design.

Below are two modern sites; one site has an older aesthetic design, and the other one has a more modern one. The first site is faster, and lays out all options clearly. The other is bogged down with bloat. You can use modern standards to build a good site, but modern design aesthetics are inherently trash as they make your site worse.

yahoo.co.jp/
yahoo.com/

MUCH slower

You want a fucking fight mate?
forum.dlang.org/
plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
vitanuova.com/inferno/
cat-v.org/
This is how fast sites were before shit was stuffed full of tracking crap.

Am I the only one who finds something strangely appealing about the design aesthetics of Japanese web pages?

Mind you both of these sites have way too much dynamic content. This is just an example on what simply not using shitty meme aesthetics can do.

Not shocking. Their aesthetics are very similar to our early-mid 00's aesthetics, just with more features.

yea dude im 21 and i very distinctly remember being at my cousins house, and he had dial up. It took like fifteen fucking minutes to load up gamespot.com homepGe so we could get Grand theft auto cheatz

This should answer your question, this site highlights what webshits think are good websites. Prepare for next level bloat.

awwwards.com/awards-of-the-day/

> vimeo.com/147806338

>Adguard
>not a hosts-file adblocker

fuck, and I wondered why does my dns hiccups on firefox from time to time
one evening i was surprised by how much faster internet explorer was than firefox (even without addons)
]i should probably disable that shit

>cat-v.org/
well Sup Forums is not that far off

also be sure to kill their constant disk writing bullshit which murders SSDs.

What thing?

sessionstore something. by default it like dumps your session every 10-15 seconds straight to disk.

How much of the disk does it use?

dunno, but writing TO disk is incredibly slow and hurts performance in the browser generally.

Sup Forums is heavily bloated for a site that has had near enough the same function for well over a decade.

Wikipedia has the same aesthetics and type of content that yahoo.jp, but it takes 3 times more to load and it weights more than 4 times, no wonder they ask for donations all the time, their site its shit.

The web has always been shit, for different reasons.

I saw the whole thing happen, I was born in '74 and had a ring side view.

It should never have been commercialized.

>stallman was right about everything.

Google fonts is unironically the biggest reason why my website slows down.

So surveillance and dangerous malware vector AND performance decrease! Huzzah.

>yahoo japan
>200kb
>yahoo america
>2.6mb

japan's still cool with early/mid-2000's style websites, so they're nice a lean

Metabo law.