Page Weight Matters (2012)

Well think about it. Imagine you had no alternative to getting any video on the internet? After all, if not youtube, anything else was probably slower at the time. Obviously you wouldn't simply lose the desire to watch relevant videos, it'd be dimmed quite significantly sure but you'd still want to watch a video every now and then. Whether it's a music video, or a chess match or a farming lecture, there's just a ridiculous amount of content available. I have plenty of videos I'd want to watch even if I'd have to wait hours. (take torrenting for example, or pre-youtube & pre-streaming file sharing, video and music on p2p networks were incredibly slow yet incredibly popular).

But if you couldn't even load the pages to browse through the videos, that'd pretty significantly reduce your watching even further.

Liken it perhaps to a library where you could only get 1 book per week. Well that's not much, but at least you can get 1 book. But if you go to the library you have to wait in line for an hour, and after examining one book section of 10 books, you have to wait 5 minutes to examine the next one. Choosing the weekly book would become such a chore you'd probably not even bother to go anymore. But if you'd suddenly be able to examine the entire library with only 1 minute of total waiting, many more would be much more inclined to do so, even if they could still only borrow 1 book per week.

Beyond that in my experience, lots of requests in a slow connection often fails before completing fully. I don't know why exactly, I've never been a network engineer. While streaming in a slow connection eventually gets there. So it's entirely possible that even browsing normal pages was failing entirely before for some people, even though (if they ever did load the page and choose a video), the video download worked fine albeit at a very slow pace.

I went to work for a company that makes a travel product used by people in almost every country in the world, after trying to use it in southeastern Europe. I told them their page weight was killing the experience, and wanted to join the front end team to fix it.

After 6 months of banging my head against a wall, I realized the reason we weren't fixing page weight was because our product managers didn't care about the experience of users in poorer countries, because they didn't have any money to spend anyway. Even though we had lots of users in those countries, and even though we made a big show of how you could use this app to travel anywhere in the world.

If there's a lesson there, its that as long as cold economic calculations drive product decisions, this stuff isn't going to get any better.

> baffles me

IMO pretty clear why, winner-takes-most economics emphasizes dev speed over quality, and then we need to maintain compat with it

>You'd have to open a page, walk away for an hour, and hope everything was OK when you got back.

This was my first experience with the web in high school, with a modem, on AOL. I loved it.

Well damn.

I'm in Bangalore and being forced to use mobile 3G for now. The data charges are atrocious and each page load saps an MB.