What is the most bloated website you use
Looking for examples of bloated websites where you are seeking some textual data/information but have to suffer to retrieve it. EDIT: Preferably sites that do not require log in to access the data/information.
Reddit by far. I find the old version unappealing but the new is just a dumpster fire. I'm basically dreading any missclick because I'll be stuck for a few seconds. Not to mention the worst video player on the internet.
This website's performance is shameful.I would spend easily twice as much time on Reddit as I do right now if it was snappy
The Twitter website on mobile devices. I've just timed myself to see how long it took to view my own twitter profile on my phone (I don't use Twitter on my phone, hence I'm not logged in).
It took 15 seconds to load the profile, but I couldn't view any tweets until I'd pressed the "Not Now" button to the pop-up asking me to install the app. Five seconds later, I was able to view my most recent / pinned tweet.
This is all for a service that delivers a timeline of (primarily) text, with some images and video. It should not take 20 seconds to load!
I don't actually use it that often, but when I do use Jira, every action seems to have a noticeable delay.
I don't remember it being like that a decade ago. Maybe there was a big rewrite or two that bloated things up?
There are too many to list nowadays. I keep one browser setup with JavaScript disabled for when I want to look up a product review, a recipe, or a how-to (even on my mobile devices). I’ve set all my browsers to disable autoplay (why is this not the default?). The web is becoming a miserable, slow, annoying experience. It’s hard to believe that as we have the best tools ever and the fastest computers that we’re choosing to inflict the most burdensome and repellent experiences on our users. God help us.
Confluence. A truly hot mess of an SPA-style website. Literally >10 second page load times with hundreds and hundreds of API calls to populate a page. To show a document. Literally the very thing the web was created for. It's honestly astounding how bad it is.
Reddit has lots of valuable info, especially if you are looking for tips on products, but the UI isn't just bloated, it's downright hostile with its dark patterns to make you use their terrible mobile app.
JIRA.
For personal stuff, bloated websites just get replaced with less bloated alternatives. At work, I don't have that luxury...
Some sites are bad but I use them so little that they don't matter. For instance, USAA shipped my 529 to another company and their site is trash. It's heavy and broken. I login once a month though, so it doesn't matter much.
Slack and GMail I have open all the time. Slack is by far the worst of the two but they both consume a ton of resources. I'd probably be more annoyed by GMail if the UX was as bad as Slack though.
Then there's any atlassian product. Slow, confusing, constantly changing for the worse. There was a time in my life when I used both daily and they weren't that bad. Now I use a slack bot to interact with jira and and make one edit in confluence a day (for a standup and it takes about three minutes to edit, update and save).
And reddit... If I had to rely on that daily I'd probably rage quit the internet. I still use the old interface for most things. It's ugly but it's not a dumpster fire of slow loading API calls to render bloat.
I think Yammer takes first place. It's required reading at work (the main feed). It loads incredibly slowly (I think it's like 5 redirects for auth and whatnot) and the default "What's new" view is entirely useless.
Jira and Confluence are excruciatingly slow, too, but at least the information isn't hidden behind useless feeds.
Every news or recipe site is basically a disaster now. I don't understand how anyone can browse without uBlock Origin installed on their phone.
The dual motivations of SEO and making money from ads have just saturated those sites.
I hate to say it because I love it, but GitLab.
When I'm on a repository, the sidebar has 5 items that I don't use and cannot remove (Github in comparison lets me hide almost anything I don't use: discussions, issues, wiki...).
Issues are bloated and nothing can be hidden: designs, linked issues, votes, comments, right sidebar with todo, assignees, time tracking, due date, labels, weight (even though the feature is "locked"), confidentiality, status and references.
That's true on every single page on Gitlab: tons of great stuff hidden between things that I don't use.
I love that Gitlab has so many features, but I hate that I cannot cherry pick what I actually use to cleanup the UI.
Atlassian products: Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence. They are the tools I use the most and they bog my computer right down especially when connected to a corporate proxy which only supports HTTP 1.
Fandom. Unfortunately it's the best source for in depth data about several video games I play (notably Civ VI... e.g. here's a random page [1]) but for a website with primarily user-generated text content, it loads a ton of video ads on every single page, making it a bear to use.
[1] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilizations_(Civ6)
Google Drive. It is a file listing, there is no excuse for a folder not loading nearly instantly. Furthermore they make it feel even slower by requiring double clicks and breaking basic features such as copying the URL or opening in a new tab.
Whenever I use the drive file browser I miss Apache directory listings.
I don't know if it's really bloated but in terms of feeling terrible, it's Google Cloud's various dashboards. The underlying page loads in reasonably enough, but then everything on top is 'hydrated' on the go and it psychologically feels dragged out, like how pages used to load in the 90s but faster.
I find these days almost any local tv news website to be all but unusable. Between the multiple ad pop ups, multiple auto play videos, and the general clutter. Just trying to read a single news story is an effort that pisses me off to the point where I just close out the tab instead of reading the article.
I'm surprised Facebook hasn't been mentioned (yet).
The mobile application is workable but the desktop version is just awful
Tripadvisor beats them all: I have been using it since its beginning (amazing product and amazing competitive advantage over other travelers). Today, it is a hall of fame of all the direct marketing tricks, black hat seo technics, anti-patterns, external javascript from everywhere, etc. Also, its information is so diffused and played that it does not provide extraordinary advantage.
Thanks to covid, I have not visited it this last 1.5 year.
The heaviest website I use is Figma, but for completely understandable reasons—it's a professional piece of design software, which so happens to take the form of a website. A questionable choice, perhaps, but Figma is still relatively performant for what it is.
Facebook. What does it do? Chat (for adults and kids), dating, blogging, marketplace, groups, stories, AR, image recognition, live feeds, YouTube-style videos, shopping, property rentals, Q&A, clubhouse-style rooms, COVID-19 info center, multiplayer gaming community, events, job listings, mental health, weather, fundraising.
I avoid the app because I think it's data harvesting, but the mobile site is such a pain. Sometimes it's the little things like writing "the..." in the text box, and accidentally tagging "Theodore" because of a generic word. I have to type all my Facebook comments in a separate text editor.
LinkedIn, partly because the tech is so bloated and slow and it makes it hard to navigate/search, but also because literally 99% of the site is bloviating self-promotion spam.
My bank (a Bank of America subsidiary). Takes about 12 seconds to log in, 5 - 6 seconds to load each page in their site. My typical session (check that a transaction went through, or read a message through their secure portal) takes a minute or two. Infuriating.
Data transfer isn't a major factor, it's all delay in their servers.
Chase bank banking.
What an unbelievable bloated animated JavaScript monstrosity... I do my bills once a month, so I open chase side by side with all the other tabs, and it's like - click a button in chase, pay one entire credit card/mortgage/check account history/whatever in the other window while it's loading.
I usually have time for everything and sometimes even to research and do my option trades in the time it takes to check and pay 3 cards with chase. Cancelling chase sapphire soon in part because of that (I have another similar fee card with a normal site), and stopping the use of another no-fee card purely because of the site.
If we ever interview someone who worked on this atrocity I'd have to recuse myself :)
-Reddit (The new one)
- JIRA (Need I say more)
- AWS new UI: For some reason, recent changes by AWS in their UI/Console is terrible. When I open S3, the buckets now take few seconds to appear compared to before when it was instant. The number of buckets are similar. WTF AWS.
I might be naive, fairly new in UI. So my questions are as follows -
What does bloated website actually mean? What is characteristics of a bloated website?
I could imagine something that bloated for you, might not be bloated for me? Are there any metrics that quantifies this?
brooklynvegan.com - on my relatively well specced (intel) Mac it'll start up the fan and grind to a halt at some point.
The Wells Fargo website is just broken most of the time. I'll click on my account, when it does let me log in, and it automatically logs me out.
IMDB has been getting slower and slower with feature bloat, to the extent I avoid it for doing movie-info searches. Thankfully there's a nice app for that I wish more people knew about: Coollector. https://www.coollector.com
Since JIRA has already been thoroughly excoriated, I'll go with The Athletic. It used to have a brilliant, simple UI. Now, it takes forever to load and when I click, the UI will magically shift and I will end up clicking an ad.
Any news site, but foxnews.com is one of the worst. On top of everything almost every article has some auto-playing video that follows you as you scroll.
GCP. I don’t know what it’s doing under the hood but it’s such a slog loading it up and waiting for the UI to settle before I can actually do something.
Definitely whichever one I'm currently working on
Facebook, not only it is bloated but many times it simply fails to work (chat not working, pages not loading, etc.).
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) web console : really slow and take HUGE amount of memory
Adobe XD for designs/ wireframes... Jira is small in comparison
ADP. Aggg. Slllloooowwww.
Payroll, so naturally there is a gate.
AliExpress and Alibaba
Dell/HP driver download sites
Facebook. Aside from all the obvious privacy problems, the product itself is also ridiculously bloated for what it is.
Glassdoor seems bloated to me.
All3dp.com. It’s a scourge.
Summarizing:
- JIRA
- Reddit
- Twitter
- AWS
- GCP
- Slack
- Gmail
- News
- Recipes
Every single recipe site.