The Modern Web Is Bloated
When I go to a URL linked to by my search engine or visit my usual websites that I have saved, it shouldn’t download over 15 MB before it starts to function or push my CPU usage to 100% when I look at htop.
A lot of websites today load a lot of things that users don’t want and ruin the experience of browsing the web. One major thing is trackers which I am not completely against but some websites go overboard and put me off going to their site. Advertisements sometimes take up a large portion of the web page too getting in the way and you have to scroll past a lot of unnecessary crap to get to the content you are interested in. Some websites are built very heavy using up your computer resources and may even use your CPU to mine crypto.
What Can I Do?
There are mitigation methods to all of these issues such as using adblockers, disabling scripts and using alternative front-ends for some services but none of these are a final solution. You may want to avoid websites that are just too bloated or switch to browsing the internet on a different protocol such as gemini.
based.cooking is a website I have used a few times for recipes and it works well. This is far better than a lot of recipe pages that never seem to finish loading. There are many alternatives in other areas too. All you have to do is search for them.
You may also switch to using terminal based browsers such as lynx or w3m which will make the experience easier but doesn’t work properly on some websites.
For news, you may want to (where available) follow a website’s RSS feed which can save a lot of time and energy. The new york times for example has various on their website.
Too Bloated For The World
A lot of people currently on the internet have much worse hardware and have much slower internet speeds than mine. With other things like high packet loss and latency, browsing the modern web for them must be difficult. I still remember being on a very slow and unreliable ADSL internet connection and trying to go to the websites of today back then wouldn’t be worth it.
This post was inspired by a post from danluu.