Webkit size profiles of a few sites I visit, ordered from smallest to largest.

Metafilter: 0.2MB

Metafilter’s front page is probably my most-visited and most-interesting thing. It’s a wall of solid text and not a lot of images. Still, the volume of actual content is smaller than the volume of javascript, which itself is about 80% jQuery (minified). It’s not immediately clear to me what jQuery is doing for Metafilter.

Google Homepage: 0.5MB

I don’t actually visit Google.com much and I typically have Javascript suppressed for the domain when I do, but the default experience looks like this: half a megabyte, 60% of which is a single .js file clocking in at 300KB.

OpenStreetMap: 0.64MB

The bulk of OSM’s Javascript use is taken up by OpenLayers, an epic bandwidth hog coming in at 437KB minified. You can build custom, minified versions of OpenLayers with just the features you want; I’ve never successfully gotten one below 250KB. Based on my experience with Modest Maps, I think it should be possible to get the core functionality of OpenLayers across in 100KB, tops. The next 100KB of Javascript on this site is a minified archive of Sizzle and jQuery. The remaining 16% of the bandwidth for this page is the visible map and all other content.

New York Times: 0.76MB

The Times is a toss-up depending on when you’re looking at it; I just reloaded and saw the overall size jump to 1.4MB, then reloaded again and saw it drop to 0.5MB. It’s the front page of a major paper, so the ratio of actual content (text and images) to code and stylesheets looks to be in the 2 or 3 to one range, which is decent.

Github, My User Page: 0.99MB

I spend an inordinate amount of time on Github these days. It’s balanced heavily toward code and stylesheets, with about a three-to-one ratio of framework to content. Github’s Kyle Neath has an excellent presentation on responsive web design where he shows how despite the heavy load of Javascript and CSS used in Github’s interface, the all-important “time to usable” metric is still pretty fast for them. He contrasts this to Twitter, which… ugh, more on them below.

My Home Page: 1.1MB

Here’s me; essentially 100% Actual Content, mostly images. I switched to big, stretchy images a little while back, and I’ve gotten more free with the sizes of things I post.

The Awl: 1.36MB

Page sizes take a sharp upward tick here. Most of The Awl is Javascript, though it appears to be largely custom with the usual slug of jQuery sitting in the middle. A majority comes from widgetserver.com and ytimg.com, so I’m going to guess it’s lightboxes and ad server junk.

The Verge: 7.4MB

Lots and lots of pictures. So many that after a minute or two, I wondered whether something had gone wrong with my network connectivity. Below all the images, there is 300KB of minified jQuery, thanks to the inclusion of jQuery UI. Also, 244KB of fonts which in Safari prevents any text from loading until this item is done.

A Single Tweet: 2.0MB

Twitter allows you send 140 characters in a tweet, which (when you add entities, hashtags, and all that) ends up in the 4KB range as represented in the JSON API. 140 is what you see, so I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that a single tweet page on Twitter has about a 15,000-to-one ratio of garbage to content.

I get links to tweets by mail, etc. on a regular basis, and the aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers is probably the thing that gets me most irrationally riled-up on a daily basis. How does this pass design review? Who looks at a page this massive, this typically broken and says “go with it”?

It’s mind-boggling to me that with the high overlap between web developers/designers and iPhone users on AT&T’s network, there isn’t more and smarter attention paid to the sizes of the things we’re slinging around the network. The worst sins of the Flash years are coming back with a vengeance, in the form of CSS Frameworks and the magic dollar sign. There has seriously got to be a better way to do this.