the world is bloated

I didn’t really care to pay attention to this for the longest time. However, since moving over to Linux, I’ve become more aware on what I would consider to be bloat. This doesn’t just apply to using Linux. This applies to all OSes around the world, running any web-browser available. The web is bloated, and it’s really annoying. But what does it mean when a website is bloated?

my definition

My definition comes from the perspective of someone who’s taken some intro to cs classes, has lived mainly with dogwater computers, and is interested in optimizations in any way. This is to say I am not educated, nor do I have a formal background with a bachelors in computer science. I am just a guy who has spent some time in a terminal.

My definition therefore comes from a naive perspective; if a website makes my fans go wild upon opening it, it’s bloated. Obviously, this definition in of itself is very subjective.

“Why would this matter?”, you may be asking yourself. I don’t think there’s any fucking reason for my computer fans to ramp up when I am opening LinkedIn, or Microsoft Outlook (required for my university). The fact that they’re taking up that much performance and resources is concerning, considering that a lot of students don’t have the most powerful hardware. We’ve evolved in an age where extracting from libraries is really easy and convenient for developers, but it gets unbearable for the user when you’re loading so much at once on a single website to the point of decreased performance

not every is rich

There are a lot of people on this world that come from various backgrounds. Having websites that lag or push cores to 100% usage is a nightmare. I am currently using an i5-6300U in my Thinkpad T460s, but I’ve had similar but not as noticeable experiences on higher-end hardware. So the question I’m reaching at is: is the modern web heading in a direction where we’re going to get hardware-gapped? Are we going to start needing more storage, even more ram, and better CPUs just to run gmail, facebook, or wikipedia? I personally don’t want to upgrade the hardware I am using because of some glorified electron application eating my resources, or some overly-bloated website hogging system resources.

We live in a world where buying the next cool thing is the norm, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to “upgrade” to something new. This is a huge problem with phones. So then, what do we do for those who don’t upgrade, or don’t want to upgrade? What if they want a new battery? Or what if they are content with what they have? Is the incentive of getting a new phone going to shift towards how well you can run the browser?

my clear bias

I am more of a fan of minimal web. I hate the massive amount of advertiser bloat that we see on the modern day web. I know that most people use an adblocker (myself included), which makes this a non-problem for the most part. However, this isn’t always useful, as in the case of a lot of articles online. A large example of this is medium and their paid service, and hundreds of other websites that also detect adblock and restrict content for it. The reason for this is (unsurprisingly) advertisers. We get to use the internet (mostly) for free! That’s great! Except it isn’t really free, because nothing in this world is free.

advertisers

Advertisers see how big websites are, and pay to have ad space on the site in order to generate some sort of brand awareness and revenue. The average consumer doesn’t want to deal with bloated websites that spam your screen with intrusive advertisements, worsening the user experience. That drives people away from the website. Ads inherently slow down the user experience, especially on lower-end hardware. Even on better hardware, ads slow everything down.

If we’re being punished for using adblockers and blocking trackers running in the background at all time, we end up losing power on the web. We lose control of what we want to see and what we want to not see. We lose the ability to choose whether or not we want to give our data to big companies that sell it off, money that we never end up seeing and will most-likely never be compensated for. I don’t like that reality, even though I have opted into it whether I’d have liked to or not.

reality

The harsh reality is most people typically don’t give as shit about their browser performance. They don’t care if they lose some time loading something because they don’t care about it. This micro-adjustment isn’t anything to them, even if they would benefit immensely from it or not. Their priorities are elsewhere. Intrusive ads, bloated libraries, messy codebases, and electron (god i hate electron) are all raising the ceiling for what kind of performance we want out of our machines. This is honestly me ranting about not wanting to upgrade anything, but I think this general idea applies everywhere. It’s like a sneakier version of planned obsolescence. We use websites more than anything in our day-to-day lives, and the heavier websites get, the sooner the days of your devices being labelled as “obsolete” arrive.

As far as I know, there’s no real way around this, but if you have an idea then feel free to lmk.