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.
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.
Websites using ‘tech stacks’ and AWS services to serve up what should be static html is the crime of the decade.
…of the decade?..of the past two decades, methinks…
What do you mean? AWS only started getting popular around 2005, just over one decade ago…
Oh wow. Seeing your name pop up with a comment like this is gold. You genuinely are smooth brained. You can have this much more of time to let you know youre an idiot. You think from 2005 to 2026 is ONE decade? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
sigh
I thought this joke was overdone enough that it didn’t need a disclaimer.
See what happens when YOU think?
Chill out
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.
or billions of redirects. I am looking at you, SAP.
Satan’s Accounting Program? Stop All Production?
I concur
Jesus doesn’t, therefore this is not consensusual
Sanduhr Anzeige Programm
So nämlich!
Dial up was offering you something you might not have ever seen before.
Not loading your page full of ads while you try to pay a utility bill.
Ads? What are they?
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.
/300MB of trackers
Yea JavaScript.
Afterwards they let you pick which of them they should run, ignore your choice, upload your drive to Google and install a crypto miner.
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.
Absolutely. I remember when Google Chrome started to be a thing, they had an actual video ad showing that it could load and render the Google homepage in like 100 ms. And so we all switched from Firefox, which had become large and bloated.
Now Chrome is full of a ton of useless crap, most web pages are painful without ad blockers, and there is pretty much zero effort put into efficient web design.
I remember Opera parodying that ad.
I moved back to Firefox soon after, and after the ad blocker ban I’m glad I made the switch back then
I remember the early 2000s internet, playing Ogame, trolling RP internet forums, browsing illegal pornography on 4chan with WT Snacks, damn, that was the real wild west of the internet…
Pepperidge Farms remembers!
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
Ironic
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.
What do you mean soon?
Nowadays I ragequit every site that doesn’t have a “reject all cookies” option.
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.
Yup, it all exists to create employment because we still have an economic model that was around since we burned wood.
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.
I mean this is true of MPAs that care about load times as well. Use server side rendering to send the initial HTML structure and then load only the JS that’s needed to interact with the current page state.
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
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).
I mean 56/8 = 7 kB/s, 50/7 = 7.x, just add a bit of latency here and there, not really a surprise if it takes 10 seconds
Yes that’s why I said 10 seconds. I looked up the webpage on way back and divided it by 56kbs.
My grandparents still had dialup in the 2010s. I can remember in the early 2000s waiting 20-30 minutes for a Strong Bad Email to start playing so I could show my cousins.
Flash is what really changed things.
There was a noticeably bigger lag if it was across an ocean.
Wow only $5000 to own that domain! What a bargen.
It was owned/run by a teen that was signed up as a customer on my ISP. He got a legal letter from Paramount and gave it up.
