Software in general has become bloated. The increases in performance, memory etc in consumer hardware has been offset by the bloat.

Android P uses 10x as much memory as it did from Gingerbread, I don't feel as if there's 10x as many features.

To be fair, ads are the reason websites are bloated. I don't mind websites loading 50 MB if I'm in awe of the amazing multimedia presentation it's giving me. 50 MB of ads just... isn't.

That's not always true. Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox.

In this case, the largest resources are Javascript and CSS (yes 1.2MB CSS files!). The weird thing is that it appears to be making requests with different cache-busting strings and getting resources that are the same size.

(32MB now, I haven't done anything on it since starting this post)

> Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox.

The new gmail is the slowest web app I have ever used. It's gotten so bad I've started managing my email on my relatively snappy inbox iOS client.

It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't load so much crap, like the gchat functionality nobody has used since 2008.

The old HTML only version still works. I just refreshed mine and got 19.11 KB transfered with cache disabled. (about half that with cache)

Sadly I like the bundling of inbox far too much to switch back at this point.

Agreed 100%. Just getting it to load takes forever, and Google Calendar sometimes never renders for me (on latest Chrome for OSX-1).

There's been plenty of public discussion, albeit in the tech community [1]. It's a hard issue to sell to people outside because most people don't care if a website is downloading 1mb or 100mb.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm