Bring back 1995 - all is forgiven

I've been doing a fair bit of mobile browsing on my shiny, ever so beautiful E7 lately. One thing that you really notice, despite the wonder that is surfing the net on the bus, is download speed. When a page loads, my browser displays a little gauge, showing the quantity of data that has been downloaded so far, and roughly how much is still to go before the page is loaded. And what really becomes apparent is that many, many sites have just become huge, bloated, sloths.

I was cruising some tech blog type sites recently and found it difficult to find a page that was not loading up 1.5 megabytes or more, which frankly struck me as a bit - well - crap. Indolent, even. We're often spoiled with fast broadband and faster browsers and it is all to easy to forget that not all the world can download a gazillion gigaquads in spitting time. I found myself reverting to 1990's dial-up syndrome and quitting pages a lot faster than they were loading, and looking, often in vain, for a lighter page with a little more alacrity.

I cannot help but feel that if your page needs megabytes and megabytes to download, then there's something really wrong with it. 

Now that mobile internet is an established norm, we need to dust off some of the principles of web design that we left behind in the 90s and take a bit more care with page load. Mobile is an instant gratification medium, and people are just not going to hang around for monolith pages to load.