It’s easy to forget that the web has not only gotten bigger, but the stuff on it is bigger, too. Videos are high-definition, images are fatter, heck, even text is chunkier, thanks to custom fonts. So it should come as no surprise that as of April 2016, the average web page (yes, page) is about as big as the zip file for the shareware version of Doom.
Ronan over at mobiForge has all the numbers — and graphs featuring those numbers. Back in July, it looked like we were on track for the magic Doom figure of 2.25MB, having already surpassed Wolfenstein 3D and SimCity 2000.
Now, in April, it’s finally happened:
We’ve made it! Doom-sized web pages are now merely average. https://t.co/U6oXQhCsms pic.twitter.com/PNrq3jdSiF
— ronan cremin (@xbs) April 19, 2016
Is this a good thing? Well, no one is keen to download more than they have to, or wait for a page to load, so we should be aiming for smaller, not bigger. It puts it into perspective when you compare it to the size of entire software titles we were sucking down on the old 56K.
Image: id Software / Doom Wiki