No Stupid Questions

I miss when browsers used to be fast. Almost every site has perceptible lag now.

I hate with a passion how when looking up recipes, you gotta go through like 5 pages of why they like it, a fluffed up but useless how it's made, all sorts of other shit, and only then do you get the actual fucking ingredient list and cooking temperatures and the actual cooking instructions.

I HATE IT SO MUCH!

It depends on the site. A recipes site is trying to get as many impressions as possible so they can either turn a profit or keep the lights on.

If your company doesn't rely on ads to stay afloat, the site experience is better.

If you dislike the page, exit the page within 10ish seconds without clicking anything and you will hurt the page's SEO ranking.

You can still write plain html websites, and they would be super fast! But that's not how we do things damnit! I need to implement feature x. Do I spend all day rolling my own lean version? Fuck no. I download a 5-ton JavaScript library that already has that feature, and I fuck off the rest of the day.

You are correct on one thing. The math does not add up at all.

The root cause is the current meta of software development. It's bloat. Software is so ungodly bloated today because we've been taught since as long as I can remember that hardware is so fast nowadays that we don't need to care about performance. Because of this mindset, many of the best practices that we were taught work directly against performance (OOP was a mistake. Fight me).

There might be overhead on the ad tracking bullshit... Sure. But, if developers cared about performance, that ad tracking can be fast, too ;]

How long should it really take to render a webpage? That should be near instant. If modern games can render a full 3D landscape over 100 times a second, surely a wall of text and some images can be done in under 1 second, right?

This is a problem in all software. For a simple example, I remember Microsoft word from 20 years ago being quite snappy on the desktops of the time. And by comparison, we are running supercomputers today. A cheap android phone would blow that desktop out of the water. Yet, somehow, word is a dog now...

Because many are served by a 3rd party CDN that's more robust than the original article.

Also might be part of the coding.

As I mentioned, small mom and pop shops can't afford to give you free content without ads. So they prioritize the ad so they can get paid for the impression.

Unfortunately the content is not free to create and maintain.

It’s a bullshit excuse - a couple pages of text loads in a second or two in even poor connections. Their optimizing for ads and tracking

Let me correct my other comment here: I miss when a 9600 baud modem was fast but holy crap has the internet gone downhill. Now get off my lawn

You lose backwards compatibility with web browsers if you do that.

It also doesn't help reader apps or plugins, SEO or various other things to have the site stream the text instead of just loading it.

Basically it moves you from standard thing everything understands to non-standard thing which might break. It's just not worth it.

You can, but you would have to do it through scripting which would rely on whatever methodology you're using not breaking with browser updates and standards changes, whether or not the user has scripting enabled to begin with, whether not their adblockers or other plugins mess it up, etc. And then you can wind up just deferring the issue. Let's say the user intends to quickly skim through your page to see if it actually appears to contain what they're looking for or whether it's just SEO bullshit, so they scroll down right after the first chunk loads and hit the point where the next chunk should load, and unexpectedly find that it didn't do so instantly (because it probably won't) and it appears your content cut off mid-page. They'll assume your site is just broken and you've never seen another user hit that back button so fast.

So the answer is "yes, but," and may not be worth the trouble.

Clicking a "continue reading" button is not an ideal solution either, but at least the user will (should) realize that they've performed an action that will load more content, as opposed to having it happen behind their backs in a manner that they weren't initially aware.

What you're talking about is called lazy loading. It loads text first and CSS and then images after.

Most modern sites now do this along with needing to load it at all until you hit the continue button. That not only reduces your browser load, it also reduces server load as well.

There are many other reasons to have the continue button, but the positives outweigh the negative. It's not considered a dark pattern and helps the content team improve on their content.