The web sucks if you have a slow connection

Agreed. It's not just "third world countries" that have slow connections. Low powered devices have slow connections. Places where there are lots of people with portable devices have slow connections. This is now not a long time ago, nor far far away. The more wearables and IoT becomes a "thing" you're going to find that attempting to get more interactions by saving on transmission and client CPU load is worth the investment.

> if we just look at the three top 35 sites tested in this post, two send uncompressed javascript over the wire, two redirect the bare domain to the www subdomain, and two send a lot of extraneous information by not compressing images

So uncompressed javascript and images are bad, but I thought apex domain to www subdomain redirection was an optimisation as the apex domain can often only point to a single server but the subdomain can point to a range of geographically well distributed CDNs. So rather than going to North America for every request, the browser only needs to do it once than the rest can come from a regional CDN. Am i misunderstanding something, does this also break down on a slow connection?

> Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases

Except if you are in a rural area of a developed country, or in practically any undeveloped country. Most of Africa, Asia and South America have abysmal internet connections, and rural parts of Australia (even a few hours drive from a major city) are only able to get satellite internet.

Tech people often fail to realise how divided and limited access to internet actually is once you leave 'tech hubs'.

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems? I'd argue that it didn't, and yet even with the light weight of pages back then, it was incredibly slower than today's pages (even heavy ones) load over our much-faster connections.

So really, I think what the author is observing is that having experienced high-speed reliable connections, it is very disappointing to move to a much slower connection. For the emerging tech markets, I can imagine the experience would not be great if the load was long enough to cause timeouts and connection failures, but at the same time, the 99% experience, as it probably was when the web was born, is "holy crap look at everything I have access to now!"

Yes, there are some really terribly optimized and redirect-happy sites out there and yes, you should do everything you can to make your page speedy. Everybody benefits when you do. I think, though, that this is more of a case of "let's be thankful for and aware of what we have," and "if you suddenly have a slower connection you might find yourself annoyed" more than "most sites suck on slow connections."

I travel fulltime and my primary internet is 4G LTE. But, even though I spend $250 per month on data, I still run out, and end up throttled to 128kbps for the last couple days of the data cycle. The internet is pretty much unusable at that rate. I can leave my email downloading in Thunderbird for a couple of hours and that's usable (gmail, however is not very usable), and I can read Hacker News (but not the articles linked, in most cases). Reddit kinda works at those speeds. But nearly everything else on the web is too slow to even bother with. When I hit that rate cap, I usually consider it a forced break and take a walk, cook something elaborate, and watch a movie (on DVD) or play a game.

So, yeah, the internet has gotten really fat. A lot of it seems gratuitous...but, I'm guilty of it, too. If I need graphs or something, I reach for whatever library does everything I need and drop it in. Likewise, I start with a framework like Bootstrap, and some JavaScript stuff, and by the time all is said and done, I'm pulling a couple MB down just to draw the page. Even as browsers bring more stuff into core (making things we used to need libs for unnecessary) folks keep pushing forward and we keep throwing more libraries at the problem. And, well, that's probably necessary growing pains.

Maybe someday the bandwidth will catch up with the apps. I do wish more people building the web tested at slower speeds, though. Could probably save users on mobile networks a lot of time, even if we accept that dial-up just can't meaningfully participate in the modern web.