YJL

Recently, Flickr is trying to make a new layout for photo page and I really want to shout out to Flickr: “Please just stop!” It looks like Google+ Photo and I simply hate that kind of design.

Anyway, there seems to be a new option for sharing photos on web, a new embed option besides HTML and BBCode. It’s implemented using <iframe/> element.

The following is a screenshot of the embed¹:

At first glance, I was kind of like it until I realized how wasteful this new embed option is. Don’t get me wrong, direct favorite functionality is nice, full-screen is great, browse other photos is a plus, but do we really need those?

The image in width of 640-pixel is about 273 KB, but now it loads tons of stuff, just for this embed option.

Summary:

• Additional 26 requests,
• Using 1.7 MB more bandwidth, and
• Adding up 3.3s loading time

Detail:

For a simple 640-pixel image, it’s really wasteful in my opinion. I didn’t look into those CSS/JS, but I’d guess those ain’t optimized. If they do, that’s really scary to think about how Flickr ships some bloated files.

I wish Flickr will add an option for not having the function of browsing through images right within embedded iframe. It’s nice to have, but “at what cost?” In most of embedding case, I don’t see there really is a reason for it, especially the near by photos may not be related to the subject of where it’s embedded. That might only add confusion to the readers or viewers.

When Flickr rolled out new designs months ago without transition period, there were a lot of haters and quitters afterwards. Although New Beta Experience is giving us a chance to give feedback, I don’t reckon that it would end well for me.

Regardless how I dislike the wasteful design and Flickr’s decision on many things, one thing is clear, bandwidth are cheap.