Average Web Page Approaches 1MB 319
MrSeb writes "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet's most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes, up more than 30% from last year's average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive's recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts." If you have a personal home page, how big is it?
Please remember the dial-up users... (Score:5, Informative)
and the 3G users, and the satellite users, and everyone else that has a low-bandwidth and/or high cost per byte connection.
My parents can't get DSL or cable. They're stuck with 22k dial-up, and use AdBlock Plus, NoFlash, and Propel accelerator with compression set to the point where you can barely recognize photos, and it still takes 2 minutes for a reasonably normal page (CNN, MSNBC) to load, much less anything with a ton of Javascript or Flash.
Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?
Oh, and Propel, please move to JPEG2000 and XZ compression. Some people need every byte they can get.
Re:can't wait to see these on my phone! (Score:4, Informative)
The browser on my phone crashes on pages that size, including most articles on slashdot, so the data it uses is somewhat self limiting.
Too much Javascript for non-interactive content (Score:4, Informative)
Some sites use Javascript to display what is semi-static data that should be assembled on the server side before transmitting to the user. For example, a news site where the stories are loaded by Javascript.
Some sites even have pages that are entirely blank if Javascript is turned off. It seems that some of these "web programmers" don't even know how to dynamically build a page with server-side scripting instead of Javascript.
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Informative)
Yup. Google helps us out here. [google.com] If we're using offsite resources like that, there's a fair likelihood that it's cached in the user's browser even if it's the first time they've visited the site.
Well, mine is... (Score:2, Informative)
The "home" page at our home web server is 9.5kB, including some Javascript, but it will load about 80kB of Logos from various FOSS sites (Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape, SciLab, etc.). Most of the index pages in different areas are also rather less than 10kB in size, but some of them link to pages containing albums of photos and videos. The entire site contains 15.6 GB of files which can be served up, mostly in these albums.
Re:How Big? (Score:4, Informative)
With a good caching engine, dynamically generated webpages should be nearly as fast as a static page - the page it's self is parsed and cached, then only re-parsed if the input changes.
The Linux kernel can take a file and put it on the socket without Apache loading it even partially into memory. *This* is fast.