It seems that Google is not as minimalistic as it once was. Now there are user bars, share links, translations, drop-downs… don’t you miss when it was simple, and (importantly) loaded almost instantly?

To remedy this, I’ve created g.k3vin.net, an ultra-minimalistic homepage with a Google search box, and nothing else.

Behold! Nothing!

The entire page is 3,753 bytes (yes… bytes), and is entirely self contained, so only one HTTP request is made when you visit the site. The result? It loads near instantly (488ms!), so you don’t have to wait before searching.

Compare this with Google’s main page: 272.5 kilobytes (1024 bytes), 23 HTTP requests, and a loading time of 1.51 seconds.

Not that Google’s page is big/slow by modern web standards, but it was an interesting experiment that’s proved useful on several occasions.