Remember when 3G was the latest greatest mobile network upgrade? I do. It was like a bazillion times faster than my current “data service”. It wasn’t even that long ago (otherwise it would have already been flushed from my aging brain cells like so many other memories). Now, 3G seems closer to no internet at all. I can’t help but cringe every time the LTE icon on my phone is replaced with the dreaded 3G symbol. Even the rotating circle of the icon seems to move at a snail’s pace. What the heck happened? Glad you asked!

The size and complexity of websites and applications is spiraling out of control. It’s a silent epidemic in my not so humble opinion. Probably because the ones it really affects can’t get a contact form to load so they can complain. Seriously people, the amount of junk packed into a single webpage request is off the charts, as demonstrated below:

If that very convincing metric I just made up and spent less than 2 minutes slapping into a chart is not enough proof for you, let’s try some real world tests. First, let’s check 3 websites the kids all love and break ’em down using the chromium web developer console to take a peek under the sheets. Then let’s compare that to Cypht, since everything I write on this blog is really just a pathetic attempt to shill for my Open Source project.

251 KB transferred with 11 requests. I guess that is “good” by today’s standards. It’s Google so it has to be good, right?

I don’t Facebook (thank god), and I die a little inside when I use the word Facebook as a verb, but I know all the kids are staring at it when they impolitely tread across my lawn, so let’s check it out! The un-cached and logged out homepage is something to behold:

902 KB, 31 requests. Ouch! Almost 1 MB of data to display a LOGGED OUT HOMEPAGE? I need to get into the web-hosting biz STAT!

It’s my understanding kids today are not taught how to read in school anymore, so they are only capable of using a crippling subset of standard language skills to find the only type of media they are prepared to consume – short videos. From what I have observed, The Youtubes is popular with these creatures. Wonder how it fares?

OK, I can cut Youtube some slack, it’s a video site after all, but holy Bos Taurus: 3.6 MB and 136 requests is pretty insanely high for … pretty much anything.

Finally, let’s take a look at the lovingly handcrafted pages of Cypht, my Open Source webmail project. I will even tilt the scales against it by using a LOGGED IN page since the logged out homepage of the application, and the cypht.org site, are so incredibly minimal that comparing them to the behemoths above is at a scale difficult for human intelligence to grasp.

Hmm…. 30.2 KB transferred with 3 requests. Contrary to what I have been told throughout my life *ehem*, maybe size does matter?