I must be older than thou, as I recall them as a single line of pixels (out of 480, and non-interlaced so it took twice as long) at a time. 
Not really. Had a 2400-baud modem at the time so I could only DREAM of such speed!
(looking at the pile of obsolete hardware to my left)
The several options do not bear immediate contemplation, though Mine Goodwife (she being of Puritan extraction) might object that she told me to “get rid of that shit years ago.”
Puritans are not what they once were.
I was watching some stuff on 4od a few weeks ago and one of their ads was borked. It took over 18 minutes to play a 40 second commercial.
They played this commercial 3 times during an hour long programme. I will now torrent before going back to that site.
Thank you. That loaded seamlessly into my Chrome browser.
I don’t usually go to ‘rich’ sites, but it is always useful to have the kind of gizmos in my utility belt.
With the ad-driven business as the primary method for commercial sites to exist, there isn’t much else than you can expect.
Other than the developers actually paying attention to the precaching and not using something like Dreamweaver and Fireworks to design your site for you.
Oh wait… hmmmm… I think I may on to something.
It’s not even the ads, it’s the combination of sloppy-assed web design and an almost pathological reliance on Flash/embedded shit that makes pages slow. My company intranet comes to me over a 1+GB connection, and has not one single ad - yet the home page takes nearly a minute to load due to them doing things like putting in a 35MB video in place of an animated GIF, or embedding 250MB videos of the CEO’s “message to the troops” on the page instead of having a link to “if you want to see this.” And the videos for some reason never seem to be cached. Plus people seem to be absolutely helpless with basic HTML, so a page which by all rights should only take 1kb of HTML takes 100kb of CSS and javascript crap - to basically announce a holiday party.
Finally, it seems that no one under the age of 30 understands that 1) a BMP is many times larger than a JPG, and 2) Taking a 4000x3000 pixel picture and forcing it to fit in a 400x300 pixel space is a fucking stupid way to do things, compared to resizing the picture offline and putting it in the web page as a 400x300 pixel image. I found one intranet page which did just that - it had a 12MB 4000x3000 pixel BMP dynamically re-sized into 400x300, which on a lark I turned into a 34kb JPG. :rolleyes:
All one has to do is read the colossally stupid spelling and grammar errors on even mainstream pages like CNN and BBC to know that in some cases the people designing these things are neither smart nor really thinking about doing a good job.
Thank you for this. I added it to my chrome and I’m sort of in love with it.
As in many things, blame Microsoft. Take a simple 20 line document, and save it as HTML in Word. Blammo - piles and piles of junk.
I’ve got one task where I get a Word document that I need to post as a web-page. I’ve gotten fairly good at using VIM to strip out 90% of the crap and still end up with a readable page.
That page took just under two seconds to load from the Great White North, give or take 10ths of a second.
I have a 2008 iMac (so no processor-cycle-stealing anti-virus software, if that’s relevant) with four gigs of RAM and a 2.66 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo, directly connected to the slower and cheaper “high-speed” cable-offered by Shaw. It’s running the most recent OS, 10.7.2.
I almost exclusively run Firefox (the most recent this week being 9.0.1) with, among other extensions that are not related to speed, Adblock Plus, Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus, Ghostery and Optimize Google. Popups and Java are turned off through the Prefbar extension (but in this case with JavaScript turned on through Prefbar). Tabs are turned off as are prefetching and pings. The page had not been cached; the disk cache is turned off, as well.
What kind of slow-as-shit internet do you guys have? The content of that page loads almost immediately with the ads taking a couple seconds longer.
Same with me. Certainly under 5 seconds, total.
In my experience, a netbook or old laptop can crawl when all the trackers and shit gets its hooks into you. I think it is a combination of mediocre DSL + Low End systems. Together they destroy a smooth browsing experience, and really it doesn’t have to be that way.
I have to also tip my hat to you. I added the plugin to Chrome and I get a little shiver of joy every time I see all that junk blocked. Ahhh, clean.
It took only 8 seconds for me to load from a relatively slow DSL connection and a 5 year-old laptop with only 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8 GHz CPU.
Before you complain about how long something takes to load, consider that some of us are still on dial up…
For some time I’ve been complaining that web design has gone back to the 90s, sprinkle as much flashing, jumping shiny shit around a page as you possibly can. At least now the autoplay background music sounds better than a MIDI.
Dial up? Luxury!
Try browsing the internet, way out in the boonies, with a EDGE dongle modem. It makes me staby, specially when the inevitable snob in some forum or another, when I complain about a web site being too bloated to work properly, tells me to get a better connection.
I shudder to recollect it. :eek:
I’d sympathise but I don’t know what that means!
I’m just too cheap to pay for anything else. And I travel enough that I can get wifi to get caught up on occasion.
Oh, you are Polish? Sorry, Wife once accused me of being a cheap Bohunk. I corrected her, saying, “We Bohunks are frugal. You Polacks are cheap.”
Ethnic slurs are okay between Slavs. 
No, I’m Irish. I dunno if being cheap is part of being Irish, but I am definitely cheap (which is beyond frugal).