<story><title>Google can&apos;t pass its own page speed test</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ns4t1z/oc_google_cant_pass_its_own_page_speed_test/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eric__cartman</author><text>The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I&amp;#x27;m a zoomer and wasn&amp;#x27;t even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept.  But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites.&lt;p&gt;This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that&amp;#x27;s not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.</text></item><item><author>alpaca128</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s causing a fair amount of panic, because 96% of sites fail the test.&lt;p&gt;Good. That sounds like a realistic estimation of the number of slow and bloated websites. What good are nice animations and designs when they destroy the UX?&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ll never see someone gaming in 4k with hardware that can&amp;#x27;t render it with more than 15FPS. Yet we see that kind of &amp;quot;tradeoff&amp;quot; every time we browse the web. Users get loading times for the site itself, then processing of JS to redundantly do the browser&amp;#x27;s job of arranging the 20 layers of &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;s, then loading animations for the actual contents, and then a couple seconds after that you might get the first thumbnails.&lt;p&gt;And I&amp;#x27;m absolutely not surprised Google&amp;#x27;s pages fail this test as well; Everything from Google Images to YouTube got increasingly worse with every new design iteration, with both slower loading times as well as an increase in breakage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dale_glass</author><text>The memory requirements for graphics changed dramatically.&lt;p&gt;A screen at 1024x768, 16 bit color is 1.5 MB.&lt;p&gt;A screen at 3840x2160, 24 bit color is  24 MB. 32 MB if using 32 bit color.&lt;p&gt;Add to it that graphics became more plentiful with increased bandwidth, and low color GIFs are out of fashion, and you very easily see the memory usage grow by several times just from that fact alone.&lt;p&gt;Older operating systems also didn&amp;#x27;t have a compositor. They told the application: &amp;quot;this part of your window has just been damaged by the user dragging another window over it, redraw it&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Modern operating systems use a compositor. Every window is rendered in memory then composed as needed. This makes for a much nicer experience, but the memory cost of that is quite significant.&lt;p&gt;Take a webpage, and just give the mouse wheel a good spin. It should render lightning fast, which probably means the browser has a good chunk if not all of the page pre-rendered and ready to put on the screen in a few milliseconds. This also is going to take a lot of memory.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google can&apos;t pass its own page speed test</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ns4t1z/oc_google_cant_pass_its_own_page_speed_test/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eric__cartman</author><text>The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I&amp;#x27;m a zoomer and wasn&amp;#x27;t even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept.  But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites.&lt;p&gt;This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that&amp;#x27;s not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.</text></item><item><author>alpaca128</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s causing a fair amount of panic, because 96% of sites fail the test.&lt;p&gt;Good. That sounds like a realistic estimation of the number of slow and bloated websites. What good are nice animations and designs when they destroy the UX?&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ll never see someone gaming in 4k with hardware that can&amp;#x27;t render it with more than 15FPS. Yet we see that kind of &amp;quot;tradeoff&amp;quot; every time we browse the web. Users get loading times for the site itself, then processing of JS to redundantly do the browser&amp;#x27;s job of arranging the 20 layers of &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;s, then loading animations for the actual contents, and then a couple seconds after that you might get the first thumbnails.&lt;p&gt;And I&amp;#x27;m absolutely not surprised Google&amp;#x27;s pages fail this test as well; Everything from Google Images to YouTube got increasingly worse with every new design iteration, with both slower loading times as well as an increase in breakage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>john-doe</author><text>An empty Google Docs document (read-only) is 6.5MB, making 187 requests…</text></comment>