Space Jam’s New Site Is 39 Times Heavier Than the 1996 Original
The beloved Space Jam website—long celebrated in developer circles as a testament to the web’s backward compatibility—has been replaced. The original, which debuted in 1996, was kept online for a quarter-century before the update.
Naturally, comparisons were inevitable. Developer Max Böck ran the numbers:
Unsurprisingly, the new site is a lot heavier than the original: with 4.673KB vs. 120KB, the new site is about 39 times the size of the old one. That’s because the new site has a trailer video, high-res images and a lot more Javascript.
The 25-year-old page weighs in at less than one-thirtieth of its modern counterpart—though both serve the same basic purpose of promoting a movie, making for a fair apples-to-apples comparison.
Böck also adjusted for era, pitting the old site on a 1996 56k modem against the new one on a 3G connection (roughly 30× faster). Under those conditions, the race is nearly even, with the new site finishing just 1.3 seconds sooner.
It’s a familiar pattern: whatever bandwidth we gain, we consume—much like better protective gear in sports simply leads to harder hits.
