But comparing the size of a website with an early 90's videogame is a little bit pointless when technology, and specially consumer demands, grow.
Back in the very early 90's DOOM didn't use shaders, neither it required a 1080Ti or a Ryzen to render properly. A 486 with the math coprocessor addon might suffice for that.
But (unfortunately) this is not the 90's anymore and we have more advanced hardware and infrastructures. Try to play the new DOOM with a 486, see what happens. And nobody complains about that!
Websites nowadays weighting 10Mb or more is not that alarming considering that the web is more than 25 years old and that most of the resources (leaving the true bloat away) are high resolution images, videos and even fonts.
@proxeus I get what you're saying, and that 25MB might be justified if it actually did anything, but in the majority of cases they're entire javascript libraries from which the website calls only a couple functions. I don't think that people care about the size of the bloat itself, so much that the bloat doesn't do anything.
This is because companies and people want their sites cheap and we don't want to spend time reinventing the wheel for them. So we do it, or we try to do it, in the easiest and cheapest way possible.
This is when things like bootstrap or jquery (for browser compatibility) come in handy, at the expense of increasing the size of a site.
Add it to the fact that companies are constantly data mining their visitors for maximum profitability and there you have your bloat.
@proxeus I agree with you on that. However, I do think that part of the reason we got to this point is because most of the flashy things that companies want for their site just can't be done easily with bare HTML/CSS/JS and no libraries. If the protocol simply included all these things that all these frameworks provide and that practically every site uses then we wouldn't be having this debate.
@proxeus But then again people would probably just complain more about browser specs being bloated.
@proxeus Personally I think that it would be better to go in the other direction and have an extremely limited protocol with homogenous styling like gopher, because in the majority of cases the main content of a webpage is non interactive. Everything else could be a desktop app.
@proxeus Yeah that's a good point, it would be great to see something like qt become more common in the mobile ecosystem.
jquery minified is about 100KB. If you talk about fonts, like fontawesome, or other libraries that are used for transferring data using ajax or something, I don't know. Maybe. But that's because they transfer that data.
The problem is when you use too many of these in the same site. If each one of your scripts weight around 100KB and you depend on many of these, it's true that your site is going to go around the 2.5MB mark really easily.
One of the most bloated sites I know, which is a national diary, weights only about 5MB, and I tell you this one is bloated to hell with all that stuff. And some of the scripts weight around 100-120KB. In total, all these increase the size way more than it should. Yes, it's bloated. This is real bloat.
So yes, as I said, I can't ignore this problem.
However, blaming JavaScript or the protocol, like most people does, is not the solution.