With dial up, it felt like it was working. It was trying its best.

Now it feels like it's bogged down with ads and tracking and bots.

Back then if it took more then that to load it was because you picked on a piece of media not the homepage.

Nowadays it's them making you download 300MB of JS so they can make images rotate in a gallery.

Remember early 2000s when one of the metrics to be a good website was how many milliseconds it took to load?

If your site had 120ms of overhead, it wasn't professional.

Ironic

Nowadays I ragequit every site that doesn't have a "reject all cookies" option.

Part of good website design back then was to set up the webpage so it shows the structure first, then fills in over the rest of the time, and also why interlacing was used a lot for images, so you could see the image gradually form over the load time vs. top to bottom or nothing at all until the end.

If you're really old enough, you remember being able to read the BBS text as it came in.

If you’re that old, you earned instant webpage load times.

Because most dial up website pages took 5 seconds or less to load.

I found one of the most graphic heavy websites from 1998, sttng.com and it was 50KB. That's 10 seconds to load on a 56kbs modem (you'd never actually get 56kbs).

The fun thing here is that pages actually loaded faster back then when internet access was via modem.

If you analyze a modern web page, e.g. an article from a newspaper, you usually download 20, 50, or even more megabytes in total: frameworks, tracking, and, worst of all, advertizing. All for maybe 2 kilobytes of text, and maybe 50 kilobytes of article-related picture.

All that junk did not exist back then. You only got a logo, and maybe the name of the paper as b&w image resembling the printed version, and a line of links for navigation as the only overhead. And the logo and title would be in the cache after the first load, and would be reused everywhere on the site without reloading from the net.

Websites using 'tech stacks' and AWS services to serve up what should be static html is the crime of the decade.

I remember when we were told every millisecond made sites lose users, and nowadays they download an entire OS worth of spyware without consequences. So we are going back to dial up load times soon enough.

If it takes 5 seconds to load the website it’s not going to finish. That’s usually an issue at the other end of the intertube.

Modern websites are bloated trash, so many advertisements and trackers and stupid JavaScript packages to build a shitty UI full of unnecessary animations and shit that adds nothing

Because we don't have dial-up anymore, so if it takes that long it's because someone made a shit website. See: every newspaper site that is like two paragraphs of text interspersed with 15 skyscraper listicle ads.

Feels the contrary as a frontend dev. Young ppl can stand with weird web design and carefully find out where to click in like GitHub or Gmail but old fella rage quit unfriendly desktop GUIs.

Which is why net neutrality is such a big issue. And, why the billionaires don't want it:

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/03/nx-s1-5247840/net-neutrality-fcc-struck

When an image is hosted by someone using quokk.au, this happens to me. I don't know what it is, but something about that instance just won't load sometimes.

If it only takes five seconds to rage quit, you've got issues.

Just use curl ¯\_(ツ)_/¯