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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#61

Post by zeveb »

Jakob wrote: post #49
Someone1234 wrote: post #21

I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

> You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster.

And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy.

I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#62

Post by hyperpape »

iLoch wrote: post #46
ferbivore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the point is that everything should be human parse-able. But most things on the web are not complex applications. Dan Luu isn't trying to use Google Maps over HSCSD, he's trying to read hypertext blogs and Twitter. Do you seriously think Twitter qualifies as a "complex application"?

The concept behind Twitter? No. Twitter? Maybe..? They have a user experience they want to deliver to 9X% of their users, so they optimize for that. For most of Twitter's users, their connection speeds aren't the limiting factor in their experience. If you optimize for the lowest common denominator, that 9X% almost certainly gets a worse experience.

It's not always a tradeoff. Several sites stopped serving CSS during the Superbowl (https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/828415747625992192). At a smaller scale, the same thing happens to some sites that reach the HN front-page.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#63

Post by Filligree »

minikites wrote: post #14
Filligree wrote: post #7

Not related to the contents of the article, but please add a max-width styling to your paragraphs. 40em or so is good.

I don't disagree, but your web browser doesn't need to fill your entire screen.

It, um, only fills two-thirds.

That's a compromise. Too many sites don't deal well with thin browsers, but I need space for my terminals. This width usually works, although I sometimes have to do a bit of horizontal scrolling to get the article fully visible. (As opposed to the sadly inevitable sidebars.)

Margins are good, though.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#64

Post by coldpie »

geforce wrote: post #3

Sad thing is that most of the web sucks on rather fast connections too. Pages being almost 5mb of data, making multiple dozens of requests for librairies and ads. Ads updating in the background, consuming evermore data. I don't notice it much on my PC, since I've got a FTTH connection, but on LTE and 3G, it's very noticeable. Enough that I avoid certain websites. And that's nowhere near slow by his standards. I do ag…

Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#65

Post by pbhjpbhj »

iLoch wrote: post #16

> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…

>That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" //

We do allow horses on our "highways" in the UK, not motorways but other highways. It's a terrible analogy though as you can't have progressive enhancement of a road for the vehicle capabilities as you can a website.

>But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me. //

Not serving simple text, for websites where that's appropriate, and then offering enhanced capabilities when the web client can make use of them seems perverse to me.

You don't have to not advance the technology, having radio broadcasts doesn't hold back VR/AR, but if all you have to convey is able to be passed on in an audio stream then purposefully designing a site to be hostile to clients that can only consume an audio stream to me is wrong. Sure add on an immersive environment where one can play on a VR beach whilst listening to your "24/7 wave noises" but don't make it so that simple audio access is impossible if the primary content only requires that.

In other words don't require webgl so I can see your store opening times.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#66

Post by richardwhiuk »

riskneural wrote: post #13
Swizec wrote: post #2

Slow connection is okay, it's just slow. Now spotty connection, or high latency, that 's the killer. Webapps that make 50 requests to download all the JavaScript and CSS and talk to the API and get 3 images really really really don't behave well when 12 of those 50 requests fail or take 30 seconds to complete. Honestly, I'd rather have slow internet than packet lossy internet. Still don't know why, but my Xfinity rou…

What do you mean by latency in this context?

Probably really means highly variable latency, i.e. jitter, where the RTT spikes horribly, which will cause packets to assumed to be dropped.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#67

Post by 23443463453 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #21

I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…

It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices.

Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better solutions and thereby make your services better. The west and the tech centers in particular is really rather blinded by the glutinous bandwidth that keeps eating up greater and greater amounts of data with only marginal improvements in outcome or user experience.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#68

Post by joeyh »

diggan wrote: post #39

Something that sticks out looking at the table. How can some sites simply FAIL loading? I mean, there is something inherently wrong with our web today, where if my internet is very slow and _could_ load a page in 80 seconds if I just leave it like that, the server itself could have configured the timeout to be 60 seconds. So I can never load the page?! The assumption is here that both points of the connection is base…

I chatted about just this timeout issue with an engineer from a major CDN while he was at my house enjoying the dialup. Seems like simply a matter of resource management; slow connections do use more resources. Most CDN customers don't care or don't know that a few percent of the US population is getting their web browsing broken by timeouts, so there's no push back.

(NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for ISS residents, something like VNC to a ground-based browser IIRC.)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#69

Post by ddebernardy »

Try it with a bad connection and a 1st-gen iPad. :-)

You basically need to disable JS altogether to have a chance to even view many websites. And some, well, just crash the browser regardless.

It's amazing how much the web evolved in the past few years...

There used to be a time where supporting 10+ year old browsers was matter of factly. No longer.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#70

Post by solidr53 »

minxomat wrote: post #26
meriobrudar wrote: post #4

Wow, really? Who knew overuse of JS and fancy graphical effects where they're not needed could negatively impact user experience? Could it be that all the web devs using 20 CDNs, cramming 900 frameworks, 100 externally provided analytics, advertisement providers and fancy layout eye-candy were wrong all along? What a surprise! I'm already sick when I have to visit a webpage and it won't even load ANYTHING if I don't…

Every time I get angry about this I'll open https://purecss.io/ or http://skytorrents.in and look at the source. It's a form of meditation to browse fast websites.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com
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