BBC News: Small is beautiful

"An entire online furniture store and a tiny art museum have become winners of a competition to create webpages only five kilobytes in size. ... The 5K competition is one example of an emerging trend towards the creation of parsimonious programs and a backlash against bloated software."

"Bloat is bad
But it is not just in webpage design that the benefits of economy and creativity are being championed. One of the reasons that software such as Linux is proving popular is because programmers and companies are tired of over-engineered programs that crash repeatedly and hog resources."

"Veteran programmer Rick Downes runs the Bloatbusters website that takes apart badly written programs and shows what they are doing wrong. ... Mr Downes has created a version of the Windows Explorer program that is only 26 kilobytes in size... But, he says, consumers are increasingly sensitive to bloat and fewer and fewer people are happy to accept what they are given."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Linux.com: Hardware Performance Monitoring For The Masses(Jun 17, 2000)
• ZDNet: Browser Wars: The Future Belongs to the Dinosaurs(May 25, 2000)
• Salon: Open-source bloatware(Apr 27, 2000)
• sendmail.net: The Web's Essence in Brief(Apr 14, 2000)
• Salon: Blame the consumer!(Jul 07, 1999)
• Slate: The Love Bloat(Jul 06, 1999)
• Windows Magazine: Windows 2000: A Space Odyssey(Jun 28, 1999)