The Web2.0 Bloat!

Back in the early days of the interweb, when people used dial up modems, bloated large websites were frowned upon and the main criteria in their design was size and therefore speed.

Computers at that time were underpowered and would often fall over when confronted with graphic heavy sites and on-line video was often the preserve of the very wealthy who could afford the CPU, graphic card, memory and time for it to load!

Unfortunately as computers became more powerful, modems got quicker, telephone calls and ISP costs got cheaper there was a natural tendency for the page sizes to creep upward as graphics and multimedia were introduced. I am sure this was sometimes aggravated by spoiled designers with powerful machines at the end of leased lines or ISDN connection. The worst case of this was the completely unnecessary obligatory Adobe Flash 'please click to enter site' page which often took minutes to load.

Now as broadband becomes more prevalent the bloat has continued fuelled by the Web2.0 explosion. This bloat is often offset by the connection speed and the power of the computer. However I have noticed that on some of my older computers ( 1GHz of less, with modest memory and Windows 2000) that some sites now cause similar problems to the bad old days, unstable browsers, constant disk thrashing as the virtual memory systems struggles to cope leading to sluggish performance and navigation. I am sure that people still on dial-up have become increasingly disadvantaged.

Now research by WebsiteOptimization.com has put a figure on the flab as modern websites feed on their diet of Web2.0 lard.

The report states that the mean size of a web page has more than trebled since 2003 from 97.3KB to more than 312KB. The mean number of objects per page has meanwhile near-doubled from 25.7 to 49.9. The authors blame external objects for the majority of delays experienced by web browsers.

Last year saw websites really pack on the data poundage with widgets, gadgets, embedded video and other mashtastic tinsel (thanks to theregister report for that particular phrase). The average page swelled by more than 60KB to 312KB by the end of December and projections put next new year's figure at 385KB.

There's plenty of evidence in the report for the views of ISPs and other industry insiders claiming that the online video boom risks breaking the internet and net neutrality. The authors of the report claim that ten per cent of YouTube videos account for 80 per cent of streaming traffic, and use it to suggest that cached content delivery networks (as being considered by the BBC for iPlayer) are becoming an increasingly appealing proposition to improve performance.

Another interesting fact is that the increase in mean length of web video means more users are experiencing frustrations with re-buffering. According to the report, 87 % of web video streaming sessions are abandoned in the first ten seconds, but how much is due to that, or the fact that 87% of on-line video isn't worth watching?

Talking of the old days, I fondly remember getting a 14.4 modem running on Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which involved installing a third party WinSock (a TCP/IP protocol stack) Trumpet Winsock in my case!