Sadly, yes. If you really want a chuckle in the news space, run a test for cnn.com - I’ll probably hear your laughter from here.
You’ll find that in a lot of the big companies, there is a strong push for “features” and customer-facing content and not much regard to the underlying technology. There are a few exceptions (and Google is the biggest case of that) but even with all of the evidence of the benefits of a fast site the time to look and work on it usually takes a back seat.
I feel the big problem here is that the people in charge of the web stuff… themselves use a better browser like firefox or chrome… and visit their own site so often that they would have the static files in cache… so they arent aware about these issues… I was guilty of this exact same thing… Hats off to Google for making me realize that my site was slow…
990.4 KB total in compressible text, target size = 408.6 KB - potential savings = 581.9 KB
They are also usually on a REALLY fast connection really close to the servers. That and the prevelant use of Firefox by our dev’s was why we built WebPagetest in the first place.