Much of the web is a bloated mess, festooned with pop-ups, banner ads, trackers, autoplaying videos, captchas, cookie consent dialogs, lengthy terms and conditions, and AI slop. I'm allocating more of my online time to geminispace (the gemini protocol, not google's AI), gopherholes, and text-centric webpages that don't rely on tons of (or any) javascript. Such pages load fast and can be read in cognitive peace and quiet with very lightweight browsers.It never ceases to amaze me the amount of memory needed to display ONE webpage. Borderline criminal. Code written by people who have never worked on a constrained memory system can usually be improved to make it use less memory - in many cases, a LOT less memory. Why does it take 0.5GB of RAM to display a single webpage?
I'm not sure it's smart to assume web pages will get leaner on their own, so I'm not waiting for that to happen and am changing my habits now. But I suppose it could happen if RAM prices disrupt the long-term trendline for hardware upgrades, and people just can't get pages to load anymore and quit waiting on them.
Statistics: Posted by cspan — Wed Feb 04, 2026 4:17 am