The Bloating of the Web Contributes to Global Warming and Causes Burnout (Slowdown, Hardware Erosion, Waste)
Like so many people who are "melting" (both indoors and outdoors) here in England this week, I habitually check the local weather. Sometimes I do so via Gemini Protocol, sometimes cURL (in the command line), sometimes The Weather Channel, and sometimes BillBC (they don't all use the same sources for their forecasting, so one can compare). To get this I apparently need to download megabytes of data:
This is sometimes passively left open (and 'running', as there are scripts) in a browser tab, which means the bloat is persistent. It adds up. It's terrible and costly in more than one way.
Up to 2MB of HTML to show the weather, not counting JavaScript trap and bloat:
The Weather Channel - likewise:
2.2MB of HTML:
Can anybody please explain or justify this? All the data on the page - the data that actually matters to the people (re)loading it - could be summed up in less than 2 kilobytes, i.e. it could be made 1,000+ times smaller.
Why is this so ironic? Weathermen rightly warn us about the consequences of global warming, their forecasting computer systems contribute a great deal to global warming, but worst of all... they are distributing to millions of people every day pages that require a lot of RAM, high CPU capacity, and a lot of bandwidth. One million people fetching 2MB twice each day is 4 TB of bandwidth. In a year it's over 1,000 TB. It's not cheap - not even for the site operators.
We may as well link to that old, informal survey about JavaScript (also in Gemini Protocol, where JavaScript is an impossibility).
This isn't just about bloat, it is also about security (which extends to the security of third-party domains). Bloat isn't the biggest risk factor. "There is also the matter of requiring the deployment of proprietary, unvetted code to the browser by arbitrary entities for a data payload measured in bytes," as an associate puts it, "not kB, MB, or GB -- plain old bytes."
When it comes to this trend, GNU's founder was right; he had foresight and "ironically," as an associate explains in relation to another site, "this page boosts JavaScript, but fortunately does not actually require it."
People who give a damn about this planet can and should talk about this; take a step further, be proactive - maybe contact webmasters with polite and constructive input. This problem isn't limited to weather sites or subsites. █