The Front Page Weighs More Than Fifty Megabytes (opens in new tab)

A reproducible measurement of the New York Times front page, taken on an ordinary day in 2026, recorded the browser issuing more than four hundred distinct network requests and pulling down more than fifty megabytes of data over the course of roughly two minutes before the page came to rest. The measurement was done with the browser's own developer tools. Anyone with a laptop and a network tab can run it again, on any popular news homepage, and the number that comes back will not be small. Th...