Would the internet be significantly faster if there wasn't so much farming of metadata / cookies? - eviltoast

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.

  • 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.