I was really surprised when I went to book a flight on Frontier (don't judge me!) and a request from analytics.tiktok.com loaded. I have a lot of discomfort about that. Bloat and surveillance go hand in hand.

Let's play a fun prediction: I ask HN readers what will be the page size of NYTimes.com in 10 years? Or 20 years?

Want to bet 100 MB? 1 GB? Is it unthinkable?

20 years ago, a 49 MB home page was unthinkable.

rule #1 is to always give your js devs only core 2 quad cpus + 16GB of RAM

they won't be able to complain about low memory but their experience will be terrible every time they try to shove something horrible into the codebase

This site more or less practices what it preaches. `newsbanner.webp` is 87.1KB (downloaded and saved; the Network tab in Firefox may report a few times that and I don't know why); the total image size is less than a meg and then there's just 65.6KB of HTML and 15.5 of CSS.

And it works without JavaScript... but there does appear to be some tracking stuff. A deferred call out to Cloudflare, a hit counter I think? and some inline stuff at the bottom that defers some local CDN thing the old-fashioned way. Noscript catches all of this and I didn't feel like allowing it in order to weigh it.

Its a crazy goal , amazing , congrats. Its vanilla stack?

Only major media can get away with this kind of bloat. For the normal website, Google would never include you in the SERPs even if your page is a fraction of that size.

Removing the round navbar in the other pages is unsettling.

and the NYT web team was praised as one of the best in the world some (many?) years ago.

I hate this trend of active distraction. Most blogs have a popup asking you to subscribe as soon as you start scrolling.

It’s as if everyone designed their website around the KPI of irritating your visitors and getting them to leave ASAP.

49mb web page? Try a 45mb graphql response.