Can you be specific - Which sites are you actually complaining about here?
This site, which we're on, delivers pages of comments (this very comment thread is around 50K of comment text) almost instantly.
The Washington Post homepage loads in 600ms for me. 20K of text. Images load within about another 500ms. Their lead article right now is one of those visual feature ones with animations that trigger on scroll, so after the text first appears after 600ms, it takes a second or so longer for the layout to finish. But a routine text article page, I have a scrollable, readable text view within 500ms.
CNN.com, a fraction slower, for a little less text, but a lot more pictures. When I click into one of their articles, within a few seconds, it starts streaming me 1080p video of their news coverage of the article. Imagine that on your 'fast functional 90s and early 00s' web.
Or let's pick a technical resource. go.dev's landing page? No noticeable delay in loading for me, and that page has an embedded form for trying out Go code.
Or reactjs.org, say? Loads up in 200ms for me, and then subsequent navigations on site among documentation pages take about 60ms.
How about a government resource? irs.gov? The homepage maybe loads a little slower than I'd like, but FAQ pages are pretty responsive for me, with text appearing almost as soon as I've clicked the link.
I'm not cherrypicking, these were the first few websites that came to mind to test to see if things are really as bad as you're portraying. And my impression is... you know? It's not that bad?
I am not arguing that there aren't bad sites out there, but we need to stop pretending that the entire world has gone to hell in a handcart and the kids building websites today don't care about optimization. Substantive websites deliver substantive content efficiently and effectively, with a level of functionality and visual flair that the 90s/00s web could only have dreamed of.
>Which sites are you actually complaining about here?
Every website which loads way more content than its use case justifies. If the high quality of my device and ubiquitous broadband is the only reason that something appears to be loading fast, that's not good.
>Or let's pick a technical resource. go.dev's landing page? No noticeable delay in loading for me
Among other things, that's because this is a website loading what it has to, instead of everything and the kitchen sink. 885kB in total, and most of that are the images of "companies using go".
But I just picked a few obvious high profile information-oriented sites and none of them had that problem. So… which websites are the bad ones?
Are you looking at the first site that comes up when you search for ‘chocolate chip cookie recipes’ and holding that up as an example that the web is a disaster area?
That’s like picking up a gossip magazine from the rack in the supermarket checkout line and complaining that American literature has really gone to the dogs.
This site, which we're on, delivers pages of comments (this very comment thread is around 50K of comment text) almost instantly.
The Washington Post homepage loads in 600ms for me. 20K of text. Images load within about another 500ms. Their lead article right now is one of those visual feature ones with animations that trigger on scroll, so after the text first appears after 600ms, it takes a second or so longer for the layout to finish. But a routine text article page, I have a scrollable, readable text view within 500ms.
CNN.com, a fraction slower, for a little less text, but a lot more pictures. When I click into one of their articles, within a few seconds, it starts streaming me 1080p video of their news coverage of the article. Imagine that on your 'fast functional 90s and early 00s' web.
Or let's pick a technical resource. go.dev's landing page? No noticeable delay in loading for me, and that page has an embedded form for trying out Go code.
Or reactjs.org, say? Loads up in 200ms for me, and then subsequent navigations on site among documentation pages take about 60ms.
How about a government resource? irs.gov? The homepage maybe loads a little slower than I'd like, but FAQ pages are pretty responsive for me, with text appearing almost as soon as I've clicked the link.
I'm not cherrypicking, these were the first few websites that came to mind to test to see if things are really as bad as you're portraying. And my impression is... you know? It's not that bad?
I am not arguing that there aren't bad sites out there, but we need to stop pretending that the entire world has gone to hell in a handcart and the kids building websites today don't care about optimization. Substantive websites deliver substantive content efficiently and effectively, with a level of functionality and visual flair that the 90s/00s web could only have dreamed of.