> keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency.
Users do care about data size since there are still a lot of people on data limited contracts even in the UK which has a fairly healthy mobile market.
What people don't necessarily realise is the connection between the two, I'd quite like it if the mobile browsers had a running total of the total amount of data transferred in that tab on each new visit/refresh.
I'm a programmer and I still don't know which pages are heavy or not (given fixed bandwidth the time to interaction would be a clue but mobile internet latency is all over the map so you can't tell if it's a big site/page or just the mobile internet shitting the bed).
When on mobile, I don't actually passively browse. I only browse when I need something specific (e.g., directions, movie start time, etc.). To that end, I've used less than 100MB in the last month.
It would also be nice if we could have browsers restrict page size. That is, "hey, server, I'll only accept your page if it's less than X size." That'd be nice because then developers could get some actual feedback.
As a predominantly frontend developer, I sometimes (just for giggles) check to see the page load of pages I visit. It always dismays me to see a site's own resources only take 200-500kb of bandwidth... and then all the ads and associated requests take another 25MB. It's quite common and I keep thinking there must be a better way..
You really start to feel just how huge and bloated a lot of web pages have become when you get a mobile broadband dongle and are charged £15 per GB by Vodafone. One popular British forum site has some pages weighing in at upwards of 1MB each!
Opera 10 attempts to remedy this with its "Turbo" function - if you've used Opera Mini on a mobile phone, it's basically this for the desktop browser, going through a proxy to shrink images and strip out unnecessary stuff. It's worth having Opera installed on your laptop just for this - on average, it's been shrinking pages by around 3x for me. A brilliant and unique feature.
Would love to see websites start optimizing for low-bandwidth high-latency connections. Page sizes have continue to increase even with the increase in usage of [typically] slower mobile connections, so I'm not holding my breath.
What is the obsession with xKB? With tracking, analytics, monitoring and gazillions other external, I'd wager average webpage size is probably closer to 1MB.
Checked some of the popular sites (caching enabled)-
In case you aren't just being argumentative, using bandwidth as the metric of choice when discussing lightbox-style page elements is sub-optimal. Or when discussing business models of websites that use those page elements.
A better metric is some sort of pageviews / site visitors / uniques / etc.
A decade ago, I remember buying 500MB or 1GB of mobile internet credit and burning through that in an evening just reading news and stuff. Today, with uBlock Origin and NoScript, I can buy the same amount of mobile internet and it lasts me quite a while. I therefore concluded that, while website bloat does exist, what really consumes bandwidth is advertising, and that can be avoided. Moreover, a decade ago lazy loading of images was not common, but now the respective CSS tag exists, is supported by browsers, and widely implemented by CMSs like Wordpress.
Just as web pages are adapted according to browser capabilities and existing mobile/desktop standards, sites can be adapted to very low bandwidth users. Not all of them, but many.
There's no point in Google Maps trying to send a VLB continuously updated set of map tiles, but an interface for the travel directions system can fit in a 4KB page - about 4 seconds of 9600bps usage. Get the weather, read the news, read and write blogs stripped of JavaScript and images, send and receive enough email to run your errands -- all these things are very high value for people who don't otherwise have connectivity, and very cheap to provide for them.
How do you know the percentage. Some stuff you may just never know. I very consciously avoid websites I know use a lot of JS or are bloated on mobile. Mostly news websites.
I often read in subway, where I need to load the page in 3-4 seconds or I'm in the tunnel again without the signal. In some stations I only get 50kbit/s or so.
Most websites don't cut it so I don't even bother. Those who cut it though, I get engaged with more, because I can't go anywhere else without a signal.
In a nice world I would write a scrapper + alternate website that hosts only the content and some simple navigation over plain HTML, preferably with as little CSS as possible. There's the annoyance of copyright though, so no way of making this public.
I wish every browser does that! Web site has no business storing data on my computer more than 4093 bytes (that is already too much) per domain in my computer just because I visited a web page. 10 MB - 10GB of data is too much.
Apparently, my website's heaviest page costs 0 to 1 cent. Smaller pages are a fifth of the size.
It bothers me that many similar websites (i.e. text content) load 2-5 MB of data for just text on a page. Pretty much everything past the first few kilobytes are useless to the reader.
These websites fall apart when you're not on a recent Macbook with a wired gigabit connection. Developers forget that people browse the web in the subway, on intercity trains and on crappy hotel/airport internet.
I'm not taking a side, just trying to add some numbers. Let's ignore the privacy/uptime concerns for the sake of this comment.
If every site you visit has 350kb of stuff that would benefit from a CDN JS but also some CSS and fonts (google fonts, bootstrap, etc.) If you visit 50 pages a day in a 30 day month, that's a little over 500mb of data.
.35mb x 50sites x 30days = 525mb
That would be a ton of easily avoidable data in regards to mobile plans depending on where you are. This number isn't 100% accurate though, many "normal" (read - not techy hackernews readers) might only visit say a dozen sites a day or less (let's ignore apps like facebook/snapchat/etc). Even that might be a stretch.
Then again students and other "savy" users might be going across hundreds of new sites a day.
For you the host? Unless you're a massive beast, most of us "hobbiests" fit within the free bandwidth of 5$ vps services anyway.
In terms of saving on data, I think Opera Mini [0] is a good compromise. They compress the hell out of the page and images (there's even an option to strip images away), but they don't mess with the layout.
Is there a mobile browser that tracks bandwidth used, and can tell me how much money I'm spending on bandwidth per domain?
I'd like to know which sites are parsimonious about page size. Then I'll limit my mobile browsing to those and ditch the ones that don't care.
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