I grew up during the dial up era of internet and remember how insane it was each time the technology improved, broadband, dsl, fiber etc.

I wouldn’t expect pages to instantly load, but I have to imagine all the data farming is causing sites to be extremely bogged down.

  • shnurr@fludiblu.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Well if you just try to load a news website with and without an ad blocker you will usually notice a huge difference. So yes.

    But also, technology has become much more complex compare to the beginning of the internet. So every piece of software is more bloated than it used to be, sometimes for a good reason, sometimes less so.

    • Khalmoon@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      Thank you, I wasn’t sure if I was just getting impatient with websites and not appreciating how far we’ve come since DSL. It’s made sense in my head but it always felt like a mildy dumb question

  • Izzy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Web pages of today have so much added on nonsense. It’s not necessarily data farming, but also the frameworks used to develop the website themselves. Modern websites are basically entire software running in the browser even when it is used to run a simple seemingly static page. The purpose of these frameworks is to make complex things more simple for developers to make, but then people end up using them in situations that might not call for it. I think there is a general belief that since computers keep getting more powerful that it is fine to keep making software bigger and less efficient.

  • zik@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Run ublock origin and turn off all the ads and trackers. Then you can see for yourself how much faster it is.

    The answer is… it depends on the page but in some cases a lot, in other cases not much.

    • IverCoder@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I have been using uBlock for an extremely long time now and sites seem to become faster over time even though I have never upgraded my laptop all these years.

      When I tried to disable uBlock for a day, my laptop forcefully shut down after 30 minutes.

      Software optimization over time improves performance but is outweighted by the tracking crap they put in there.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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      1 year ago

      It looks like they’re making a separate call for each user avatar in the comments, for example.

      The browser does that. How would you expect to get the images except for one by one? It has always been the case for as long as images have been supported.

  • MikeT@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It is not entirely data farming, a lot of this is due to use of heavy assets like fonts, frameworks, images, videos, etc. A lot of that is downloaded as part of loading the site initially and then the browser has to render/compute the site’s use of JavaScript, CSS, etc.

    Fonts and some JS assets are cached by the browsers and CDN to try to minimize redownloading it but it doesn’t change the fact that average websites today are much heavier than it was back in 90s.

    See how fast this site loads: https://text.npr.org/

    Or https://tildes.net/ compared to Reddit.

    • TrenchcoatFullOfBats@belfry.rip
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      1 year ago

      And install the NoScript extension and see exactly how many additional companies are getting your data when you just want to learn 15 fascinating facts about frogs.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    Most of that stuff is async so probably not a lot. Like, you load the page and it sends a request off to pendo, but the page doesn’t wait for that to finish before doing the next thing.

    There are a lot of ways to make pages perform badly, though, especially as they get more dynamic.

    At my job the home page was loading extremely slowly for a while until we realized a refactor had made the query backing it extremely stupid. Like it accidentally was doing a separate query for every user associated with every post you could see, and then not even using the results. Oops. Fixed that and got a huge performance increase, but it had nothing to do with data tracking.

  • PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Probably not. I think the timeouts are set up differently or something. Back in the day even if you had 1.2kb/s dial up internet, you could reliably load webpages and all their css if you were patient. Nowadays, if your internet speed dips by even a little bit, everything stops working and being patient about it only results in error screens.