It’s easy to forget that the web has not only gotten bigger, but the stuff on it is bigger, too. Videos are high-definition, images are fatter, heck, even text is chunkier, thanks to custom fonts. So it should come as no surprise that as of April 2016, the average web page (yes, page) is about as big as the zip file for the shareware version of Doom.
Ronan over at mobiForge has all the numbers — and graphs featuring those numbers. Back in July, it looked like we were on track for the magic Doom figure of 2.25MB, having already surpassed Wolfenstein 3D and SimCity 2000.
Now, in April, it’s finally happened:
We’ve made it! Doom-sized web pages are now merely average. https://t.co/U6oXQhCsms pic.twitter.com/PNrq3jdSiF
— ronan cremin (@xbs) April 19, 2016
Is this a good thing? Well, no one is keen to download more than they have to, or wait for a page to load, so we should be aiming for smaller, not bigger. It puts it into perspective when you compare it to the size of entire software titles we were sucking down on the old 56K.
Image: id Software / Doom Wiki
This post was originally published on Gizmodo Australia.
Comments
8 responses to “The Average Web Page Is Now The Same Size As Doom”
glorious 2kb/sec download for 56k
i was luckly, i would download at 5.7kb on my 56k modem. i still remember upgrading from a 28k modem to a 56k modem. was like night and day, then i upgraded to an ISDN connection which was even better then finally got ADSL2
I remember when you had to wait for the mail to arrive…. for floppy discs…..
You did a decent job of covering the novelty of this statistic, but this quote seems like a strange thing to say. You could also say “Horses move slower when the cart is more heavily loaded and no one is keen to spend more time getting produce to the market, so we should be aiming for smaller loads in the cart”.
Or you could try loading a few dozen cartloads of produce into a truck that not only carries more but gets to the market faster too. Technology has changed a lot in the 23 years since Doom came out, we can deliver a 2MB page to most people faster now than we could deliver a 50KB page back in 1993.
It’s even more amusing when you find out this page is 3.8 MB in size (sans ads and dynamic data), well over the 2.25MB “magic size”. I agree that the statement sounds like the typical user response of “It’s too big? Just make it smaller then.” To which a developer would respond, “Well, get rid of your images, your scripts, your advertising, side bars, headers, footers and any dynamically loaded data.” Sometimes I miss the days when a page could be loaded in Lynx without any problems.
I remember a time when Kotaku was really into posting gif heavy pages that were 30 or 40 times the size of DOOM (A couple of pages even went as far as 50 to 60 times). I was super happy the day someone implemented the on demand gif loading so page sizes became a little more sensible.
2.2mb is big for a page, considering a page like this one only has text, a couple images and a youtube imbed (which doesnt count ).
This page was 10.2MB when I hit it just now to reply to you. That includes 10MB of images, 124KB of fonts, 100KB of JavaScript. The HTML and CSS alone totals just over 60KB. If you removed the two GIFs that make up the bulk of the total size, you’re still looking at 2.2MB.