There are readability add-ons for both FF (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442/) and Chrome/ium (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...)
There are also other, similar things, like iReader for Chrome/ium: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ppelffpjgkifjfgn...
If this sounds like an advertisement, it's only because I've recited it to friends and family members so many times.
I think ten years ago, a typical mainstream media site would take somewhere around 5 to 10 seconds to load on a modem, which is basically what they take to load for me today. Fox News's website takes about 30 seconds to fully load!
Things are a bit better with AdBlock, since it often seems to be third-party ad and analytics servers both holding up the parade with high latency, and pushing big .swfs. But the number of sites that load in 500 ms for me is pretty vanishingly small. It happens, but esp. without Adblock (which I don't always use) by the end of 500ms usually my browser still hasn't even finishing pinging all the servers the page is loading content from, much less actually pulled the content.
Using Polipo (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/) as a local caching proxy does seem to help in my case. Not sure why it would do a better job than either Firefox or Chrome, but it seems to cache and pipeline more aggressively.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/06/23/googl...
Which is a good thing, but it does make me wonder if the author of this article has ever actually used Reader.
These widgets use "document.write" to insert content into the webpage before it has completed loading, which if the widget server is responding slowly means your page loads slowly.
To combat this, you could program your embedded widgets to not load until page loads. For most people, that's above their skill level, so they just copy and paste and call it a day. The widget authors COULD write their widgets to have them wait until the page loaded before rendering themselves into the DOM, but 99% of JavaScript widgets (Google AdWords included) use 'document.write' and don't wait for the page to load first. They want to make sure that they get the chance to count the hit.
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
...if you include sites with JS widgets, it's probably even less.
It's the coupling of user interface and network. The best way to achieve sub-20ms response times (instantaneous to the human eye) is to decouple the user interface from the network, to transport views and controllers separately across the network, fuse them on the client, and buffer data against the network.
This cannot be done with server-side MVC frameworks (no matter how popular) as they simply were not designed to do this, to deal with network latency, one of the "8 Fallacies" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...). The problem is there's too much CPU activity on the server and not enough on the client, when the reverse could be true.
What is needed is a network-aware, network-straddling framework. The "thin client/fat server" metaphor must give way to the "thin server/capable client". This would probably also encourage Javascript on both client and server, and make offline access a reality as a matter of course. For example, see https://szpil.com.
People who want flashy, pretty, animated sites pay for it in terms of bandwidth and performance.
Regarding the "computers faster" argument, you see the same trend in traditional desktop software. Microsoft Office used to be fast, but it gets heavier and more bloated with each release, and there are nearly no features I use that can't be found in Office 97.
Linux used to be the go-to OS for a lean, fast system. You can't install any recent desktop distribution without it feeling, well, like Windows.
Flash websites continue to become more elaborate, so the sites you saw a few years ago perform great, while new Flash sites still chug along.
I don't see website bloat as an issue, but web designers and developers do need to realize that not everyone's machine is as fast as theirs.
