To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album’s worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.
If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?
There was a scene in Law & Order decades ago where Jerry Orbach’s character, investigating a murder scene, makes the wry comment, “Oh, suspenders and a belt” after noting a diaphragm and condom wrapper on the nightstand.
uBO is great, but it’s not a complete prophylactic. NoScript also ends endless ads loading. A pihole can handle things at the network level. There are numerous ways to maintain internet hygiene that most people don’t realize exist, because it’s not profitable to give people control over their own devices, so those of us on Firefox (or a derivative) and several extensions are characterized as “crooks who want to steal the internet.”
As with politicians, each accusation is an admission.
Ad companies: “I want to use the vast majority of the data allocation you pay for.”
Me: “No.”
Ad companies: “THIEF!!!”