Obligatory link to Maciej Cegłowski's The Website Obesity Crisis[0]
> These Apple sites exemplify what I call Chickenshit Minimalism. It's the prevailing design aesthetic of today's web. I wrote an essay about this on Medium[1]. Since this is a fifty minute talk, please indulge me while I read it to you in its entirety:
> "Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."
I just opened up that one-sentence, image-free blog-post, with uBlock, uMatrix disabled. Without cache it pulled in 790 KiB - with cache it's still 108 KiB.
And it used to be worse:
> I already talked about how bloated Medium articles are. That one-sentence essay is easily over a megabyte. It's not just because of (pointless) javascript. There's also this big image in the page footer[2]. Because my article is so short, it's literally impossible to scroll down to see it, but with developer tools I can kind of make out what it is: some sort of spacesuit people with tablets and mobile phones.
> These Apple sites exemplify what I call Chickenshit Minimalism. It's the prevailing design aesthetic of today's web. I wrote an essay about this on Medium[1]. Since this is a fifty minute talk, please indulge me while I read it to you in its entirety:
> "Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."
I just opened up that one-sentence, image-free blog-post, with uBlock, uMatrix disabled. Without cache it pulled in 790 KiB - with cache it's still 108 KiB.
And it used to be worse:
> I already talked about how bloated Medium articles are. That one-sentence essay is easily over a megabyte. It's not just because of (pointless) javascript. There's also this big image in the page footer[2]. Because my article is so short, it's literally impossible to scroll down to see it, but with developer tools I can kind of make out what it is: some sort of spacesuit people with tablets and mobile phones.
> It's 900 kilobytes in size.
I hate Medium and their ilk with a passion.
[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
[1] https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1...
[2] https://static.pinboard.in/ob/ob.082.jpg (Cegłowski's archived copy of that once-mandatory 900 KiB footer)