Just yesterday I was on a news website. I wanted to support it and the author of the piece so I opened a clean session of firefox. No extensions or blocking of any kind.

The "initial" payload (i.e. after I lost patience approximately 30s after initial page load and decided to call a number) was 14.79MB transferred. But the traffic never stopped. In the network view you could see the browser continually running ad auctions and about every 15s the ads on the page would cycle. The combination of auctions and ads on my screen kept that tab fully occupied at 25-40% of my CPU. Firefox self-reported the tab as taking over 400MB of RAM.

This was so egregious that I had to run one simple test. I set my DNS on my desktop to my PiHole and re-ran my experiment.

Initial payload went from almost 14.79 -> 4.00MB (much of which was fonts and oversized images to preview other articles). And the page took 1/4 the RAM and almost no CPU anymore.

Modern web is dogshit.

This was the website in question. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcomefest-dispatch-centrism-abundance/

Yes, but the manager with a shitty MBA doesn't care about overall company appearance of performance, as long as their department looks good on paper. And they figured that would be easier by using four different external libraries, and then let another department figure out the rest.

Yeah, this is so fucked up ! When you archive reddit pages, those are over 20 fucking MB for just a conversation ! That's fucking insane...

I can reduce it to less than 500KB with alternative frontends, but still... This makes absolutely no sense and I'm scared to find out what they are hiding in between all those lines of code !