A technical analysis reveals that modern news websites like The New York Times can load 49MB of data with 422 network requests, taking minutes to fully settle. This bloat exceeds the size of Windows 95 and represents an entire album's worth of MP3 files, largely due to ad-tech stacks and tracking scripts. The article questions whether modern web frameworks have negated hardware progress through excessive abstraction and poor architecture.
Background
Modern web development increasingly relies on complex JavaScript frameworks and programmatic advertising systems that significantly impact page load times and user experience. This comes despite decades of hardware improvements that should theoretically enable faster web browsing.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Mar 19, 2026 at 11:10 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10