USA Today Serves Different Site to EU Visitors That Is Way Faster Than Regular Site

Marcel Freinbichler:

Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! 5.2MB → 500KB

They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34.

The privacy implications of all the JavaScript that gets loaded for user-tracking is alarming enough, but practically speaking the bigger problem is that it makes the web slow. Web developers, generally speaking, are terrible at their craft. 124 JavaScript files and over 500 HTTP requests for a single goddamn web page is just shameful.

Again I say: the web would be better off if browsers had never added support for scripting.

★ Sunday, 27 May 2018