The Size of Web Pages in the Broadband Era

How big is too big (in terms of kilobytes) for a web page today? I remember sweating over every last kilobyte 10 years ago — using DeBabelizer to squeeze extra bytes out of GIF files, condensing whitespace from HTML files. Anything you could do to shave a kilobyte without screwing up the way the tag soup browsers rendered your design was a win, because it took so damn long for anything to load over a modem.

I don’t really worry about it these days, though — I don’t even remember the last time I measured how big the front page at Daring Fireball was.

★ Tuesday, 7 November 2006