This is desktop, not mobile, but: I turned off ad blockers, scrolled to the bottom, and waited.
60.9MB transferred https://imgur.com/a/ftGkR3m. They are in fact worse than the rest of them. It is still going up as the ads rotate. I count 11 ad placements.
Saving the article text locally and gzipping it (which lacks html tags, but should be approximately right), it's ~1.5 kB. So 2kB for the article and say 5kB for a cacheable site-wide template is what things "ought" to be.
My 1GB mobile data plan should be enough to read at least 10s of thousands of pages in a month. Instead at 60MB, I could read... 16. Naturally I never use mobile data, and my only real use for a phone plan at all at this point is being forced to have SMS for banking.
I’m due for a new phone and I’m strongly considering going to a dumb phone with a tablet around the house for browsing. I can carry a Kindle or something to kill time waiting for a train.
Question for the thread*: are we at a point where we build apps that chew through ad/user data, but put ourselves in a position to not have our
data chewed on?
*Mostly asking because I have come across this sentiment before, not because I think op(s) are engaged in this
I'd do that but a smartphone is unfortunately a great pocket camera. The sweet spot for me would be something like a modern version of the Nokia N95 — great camera, unrestricted OS that lets me write apps in Python or whatever, and terrible web browsing experience.
Opening this page 6 and a half times would exceed the monthly download limit on the first broadband internet plan my family had about twenty years ago in Australia.
Even though I use an adblocker, I got a huge table showing three Amazon products that took more space screen than any of the text block of the actual article.
I can't even imagine how the site looks like without an adblocker...
This could have been a few kilobytes of static html...