luke175 - 6:07 am on May 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

Except in extreme circumstances is this really warranted? Really?

It's 2008, large segments of the population have broadband and those that don't are familiar with the load time of an average page.

If it were 2001 this would make perfect sense...but at this stage of the game does it really make sense for webmasters to worry about the load time of their pages (unless there is a drastic amount of load time that is out of the ordinary).

The last time I paid conscious attention to the load time of a page was probably 4-5 years ago...it feels like a step backwards to worry about getting all those gif images to be 2kb less just to please the adbot.

I feel this a change that no one really asked for...advertisers with obscene load times will be pushed out anyway as customers bounce instead of waiting for the page to load.