this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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That's half the problem, the sites are the other.
And the third half is bad math
The fourth half is caching
The fifth is your mom.
My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.
These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.
If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that's too old to update, and it's not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn't some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.
Honestly, the whole model of "you can customize every detail of your page (and not the user) but you also have to implement basic accessibility and consider screen resolution/orientation, reduced-motion, prefers-color-scheme, etc., etc.), for each and every single webpage, is imho inherently broken.
The sad thing is, they could in most things (except reduced/animations) just not do that and the browser does accessibility & stuff for you and you have a lightweight site. But that's not how businesses (and developer curiosity) work. Also, progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation most don't do.
Btw, to the Indieweb: you don't have to define a text or background color: browser does that already. And you have to care for prefers-color-scheme now. Please keep CSS to layouting.