Programming

How big is 10 MB anyway?

To be honest, after typing all these numbers, 10 MB doesn’t even feel that big or special. Seems like shipping 10 MB of code is normal now.

If we assume that the average code line is about 65 characters, that would mean we are shipping ~150,000 lines of code. With every website! Sometimes just to show static content!

And that code is minified already. So it’s more like 300K+ LoC just for one website.

An important takeaway, as I feel byte size can be hard for people to intuitively visualize. And for those who didn't read the article, many of the sites tested sent significantly more than 10 megs of JS, even sites containing nothing more than simple input boxes that should be doing any processing server-side.

I want to see the difference with ad-block enabled. Analytics and tracking are certainly complex enough to account for a lot of that payload. Same with an addon like Decentraleyes to see how much is bloated frameworks that could easily be cached locally.