> However, we now live in the era where a 3MB payload is considered acceptable, if not the average, to deliver fundamentally text-based web-pages.
The web today is terrible. For general browsing speed, I think the web peaked for me in 2001 or so. I had a 300 MHz PII, connected via 256 kbps SDSL. It flew! (Especially in BeOS.) Now, I have a 2x10-core 3.6 GHz Xeon, connected by 2 gbps fiber. It lags! Text pops in after the page has seemingly loaded, like some circa 1998 3D game. I miss click things because the page reflows after I've lined up what I want to click on. And these days, you can't even disable all that JavaScript garbage, because sites just won't work.
And the terribly disappointing thing is that it's not any better. It's not like Engadget is taking up 375MB of memory (six times what I had in my PII) because its review of the new Surface tablet includes interactive holograms. It's fundamentally just text and pictures, same as 2001. We will look back on this era of the web the way we look back on 1970s cars, with V8s getting 12 miles per gallon making just 130 horsepower.
Well in 2001 you had 1+ Ghz CPUs at the high end being pretty popular with 1600x1200 resolution. If you were using a 300 MHz PII I'm guessing you had a 800x600 monitor attached to it as well (if that). Today, monitors that are ~1900x1200 are common (if not more - 4k & multi-monitor is also really popular). So for one you're looking at ~5x more memory required for graphical assets. Probably closer to 6x-9x since 16-bit displays were more common for the machines your talking about.
The web back then was also a wasteland of bad graphics & terrible UX (things aren't universally better but they are vastly better). Those all take advantage of the more compute/memory available today.
Finally, the features available on the web today weren't possible for the web in 2001. E-commerce is now a given rather than an obscure thing geeks do. Interactive media/video, video chat, etc are all things that are possible.
Additionally, security has costs. The OS you were running on your 300 MHz PII was faster because it wasn't properly isolating processes from each other.
You can complain all you want of course but the complaints are pretty "why can't things stay the way they were" rather than a recognition that advancement has tradeoffs (e.g. cars are more polluting than horses but it's revolutionized & democratized travel & made it orders of magnitude more efficient in a way not possible before).
> Well in 2001 you had 1+ Ghz CPUs at the high end being pretty popular with 1600x1200 resolution. If you were using a 300 MHz PII I'm guessing you had a 800x600 monitor attached to it as well (if that). Today, monitors that are ~1900x1200 are common (if not more - 4k & multi-monitor is also really popular).
Your history is off. The PII came out in late 1997. Mine came with a Riva 128, which did 32-bit color in 3D. I ran it at 1152x864x32-bit. Typical resolution back then was 1024x768 (for 15" or 17" monitor) to 1600x1200 (for 21") in True Color. Full HD, which is probably the most common resolution today (especially because laptops are more common than desktops now), takes only twice as much memory. And of course, JPG was a thing back then too, and the size of a JPG increases sub-linearly with resolution/color depth.
> The web back then was also a wasteland of bad graphics & terrible UX (things aren't universally better but they are vastly better).
Precisely the opposite. This was the New York Times home page in 2001: http://www.versionmuseum.com/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_Ti.... Look how easy it was to find where everything was! (Hey, remember when websites were so deferential to native UI guidelines that they used native widgets for check boxes and radio buttons? Pepperidge Farm remembers!) The current website is pretty good, but strictly worse. For example, instead of distinctly colored, clearly visible section headers as in 2001 ("Inside," "Reader's Opinion"), today's site ditches the header background color and uses text that's smaller than the headline text. That makes the page seem like a sea of headlines with no obvious section groupings.
HN/Wikipedia is way easier to browse than your typical site today. That's what the whole web was like back then--just links, text, and images. Maybe some native text-entry boxes, radio buttons, etc. Not all of this garbage where stuff is hidden and then suddenly pops up or is behind a hamburger menu, scrolling is broken by custom JS, text is all replaced with inscrutable icons, texture/borders/outlines are dropped so groupings can't be identified, etc.
> E-commerce is now a given rather than an obscure thing geeks do. Interactive media/video, video chat, etc are all things that are possible.
In 2001, we had Amazon.
The website was better than today, with color-contrasting tabs and headings everywhere. (I'd link a picture, but "copy link to image" doesn't actually work anymore--another way the web is broken today.) Yes, fewer people used Amazon back then. That's the result of manufacturing technology making computers more affordable, not changes in web design.
> Additionally, security has costs. The OS you were running on your 300 MHz PII was faster because it wasn't properly isolating processes from each other.
Again, your history is off. Even Windows 9x ran most apps in protected mode. (There were loopholes for compatibility, but those didn't help performance.) And by 2001, I was running BeOS/Windows 2k on that machine. Windows 2k is still the best OS Microsoft has ever made.
> You can complain all you want of course but the complaints are pretty "why can't things stay the way they were" rather than a recognition that advancement has tradeoffs (e.g. cars are more polluting than horses but it's revolutionized & democratized travel & made it orders of magnitude more efficient in a way not possible before).
Right. Except the modern web isn't a car. It's a horse in drag. Almost all of the "revolution" has come not from changes in web technology, but (1) manufacturing advances making computers cheaper/smaller/faster; and (2) advances in broadband and wireless making connectivity ubiquitous.
RTT is much higher now for me than it was in 2002. Back then we had a T-1 from UUNet that gave us 29ms RTT to major web properties hosted in the Bay Area. Today our connection from CableCo has 200X the download throughput but RTT to major properties (even with a supposedly GeoAware CDN) is around 100ms.
This is a bit of a meta comment (not commenting on the content of the article but the tech that the website is built on):
http://txti.es seems to have similar goals to https://itty.bitty.site but the former appears to use a database that may or may not delete content. The latter does not store content so it could potentially live longer.
The web today is terrible. For general browsing speed, I think the web peaked for me in 2001 or so. I had a 300 MHz PII, connected via 256 kbps SDSL. It flew! (Especially in BeOS.) Now, I have a 2x10-core 3.6 GHz Xeon, connected by 2 gbps fiber. It lags! Text pops in after the page has seemingly loaded, like some circa 1998 3D game. I miss click things because the page reflows after I've lined up what I want to click on. And these days, you can't even disable all that JavaScript garbage, because sites just won't work.
And the terribly disappointing thing is that it's not any better. It's not like Engadget is taking up 375MB of memory (six times what I had in my PII) because its review of the new Surface tablet includes interactive holograms. It's fundamentally just text and pictures, same as 2001. We will look back on this era of the web the way we look back on 1970s cars, with V8s getting 12 miles per gallon making just 130 horsepower.