New iPad’s Retina Display Pushing Web Pages to Get Bigger
Internet blog Royal Pingdom recently wrote about the iPad’s potential influence on how the Internet offers up images to Web surfers.
The fear is that the new iPad’s Retina display could push the average website page up to 5MB. This is assuming that Web developers and site maintainers would want to update their graphics to be Retina Display compatible.
The fervor is based on a test performed by blogger Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four, who found that the total size of Apple.com with Retina display compatible graphics goes from 502 kB to 2.13 MB, which is an increase of 324 percent.
Pingdom ran a series of page load tests and found that the average website has a page size of 1.1 MB. At the rate that was found on Apple.com, this would increase the average size of a Web page to 4.7 MB.
The writers at Pingdom may be jumping the gun here. Web developers and site maintainers are not likely to start upping the size of their Web pages. One of the biggest complaints that visitors to websites have is slow page loading. The amount of time it takes to load a page could potentially make or break a website. People don’t want to sit around, drumming their fingers while they wait for a page to load, even if the Retina compatible images look fantastic.
There will probably be a couple of websites that will add Retina Display support in order to drum up iPad traffic, but it is highly unlikely that the whole Internet will increase the size of pages just for the portion of iPad users that probably wouldn’t appreciate the excess in data usage anyway.