What happened to the web?
this is just a rant about the current state of the web

Date: 2022-02-05

I am using an i5 3470, with 8 GB RAM. My computer is fine if I ran the browser and nothing else, or if I ran my browser (LireWolf currently) and some smaller software, or some retro game.

But if I ran two browsers at the same time, in 15 minutes I ran out of memory, or if I ran my browser and even just 1-2 electron stuff (you know just another browser), like stupid Discord.

I use ublock origin and unload to make it easy for the browser to use webpages and resources.

Our web and browser shouldn't be this hard to code for speed and resources usage.

Back in the 1990s when I had internet access (not my place), we had a really good connection (it wa a university), and unless you needed to download an mp3 or some 10 MB game (which was considered big, sine it was about 7-10 floppy disk), the speed was fine. We could browse really well.

Except the pages were much simpler and therefore faster to load. Even with the ones which has tables inside tables (a common tactic back then to create complicated webpages), it still loaded relative well. People were also more careful about how they built their pages. There were no giant images, because we still used monitors with 640x480 or 800x600 resolution, and bandwidth was precious.

Today without blocking ads and trackers, the web is barely usable. In fact the problem is that the web was hijacked by statistics. Every webpages wants to know more about you, than your parents did, when you were a teenager. It makes them money.

Small companies have webpages made with WordPress, when they only need 3-5 simple pages. You don't need a database and you can make beautiful and most importantly useful static websites. It will load faster, more secure and visitors will be happier.

It looks like we forgot why the web started: connection. Most websites exist only on an island, or everything is an app nowadays. Most website looks the same, without any originality at all.

The web is going backwards faster than it went forward. Most people if you ask, probably won't even care.

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This is post #10 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge, where we write 100 posts in a year. If you are interested in this event, check out the official website: 100DaysToOffload.com. Happy writing everybody! :)