Last night John Gruber pointed out how bad The Next Web was to load in a Web browser. Here’s what Gruber found using Safari’s inspector on The Next Web:

I measured a few of their articles using Safari’s web inspector, and Cody wasn’t exaggerating. One article at TheNextWeb weighed in at over 6 MB and required 342 HTTP requests. 73 different JavaScript scripts alone. Absurd. I did a reload on the same page a few minutes later and it was up to 368 HTTP requests but weighed “only” 1.99 MB.

It got me thinking about some of the other sites I visit, so I did some tests loading the homepage of each site and here’s what I found. There are three stats for each site — the number of http requests, the size of the page and how long it took the page to download. To be fair, I also included The Loop.

Clearly most of the Web sites I tested are pretty good. At least they don’t come close to The Next Web.

The Loop: 38 requests; 38.66KB; 1.89 secs

Daring Fireball: 23 requests; 49.82KB; 566 milliseconds

Macworld: 130 requests; 338.32KB; 8.54 secs

Ars Technica: 120 requests; 185.99KB; 2.08 secs

Apple: 46 requests; 419KB; 1.39 secs

CNN: 196 requests; 269.41KB; 4 secs

BGR: 368 requests; 2.74MB; 35.33 secs

AppleInsider: 141 requests; 649.39KB; 5.64 secs

Facebook: 137 requests; 993.54KB; 11.19 secs

MacStories: 119 requests; 2.16MB; 2.13 secs