This applies server side too. Note what sort of sites do and don't go down when they make the HN or Reddit front page.
The web sucks if you have a slow connection
71–80 of 622 posts
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#72I totally agree. I used to have a really bad mobile connection up until a few years ago (Spain), and still when I use up all my mobile internet it reverses to 2G.
So I know the pain and decided I wouldn't do the same to my users as a web developer. I created these projects from that:
- Picnic CSS: http://picnicss.com/
- Umbrella JS (right now website in maintenance): http://github.com/franciscop/umbrella
Also I wrote an article on the topic:
- https://medium.com/@fpresencia/understanding-gzip-size-836c7...
Finally, I also have the domain http://100kb.org/ and intended to do something about it, but then I moved out of the country and after returning things got much better and now I have decent internet so I lost interest. If you want to do anything with that domain like a small website competition just drop me a line and I'll give you access.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#73> 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…
> 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 li…
Absolutely, but those are secondary markets for most American businesses because there are an abundance of issues with delivering any application to those areas. Whether its political, cultural, financial, etc. Priority for most businesses and website owners is to serve the people you know you can serve first, then work on supporting those other areas.
Twitter, like most companies, exists to make money. If you're busy shaving off every bit you can from your requests, you're spending a lot of money. You're also losing money because I'd expect you wouldn't be serving ads, etc. as well.
Most blogs that exist to make money aren't targeting those without good internet either, so I don't really see the problem.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#74>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#75Something 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…
He mentions packet loss of 10%. That's a different problem than a slow connection.
High packet loss and slow connections frequently go hand in hand (TCP over cellular modems).
This effect is exacerbated if the web site you're connecting to changes congestion control and TCP ramp up settings.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#76I 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…
Having used both, I'll take the 2G mobile over the 56k modem every time.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#77What do we care? The vast majority of out target audience lives in a city with fast internet (I'm not putting /s because there's actually people that think this is a reasonable opinion in the general case).
It seems totally reasonable if you're not operating a company to be altruistic.
* Pushing all the rendering to the client makes development easier, eases the transition to native apps, and uses fewer resources on the back end.
* The fancy site drives more conversions and makes the stakeholders happy.
* Not having fast internet is a crude filter for disposable income and losing those users probably goes unnoticed and might even increase the value of ad placements.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#78Wow, 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.
Thanks!! First I heard of purecss. Will use asap
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#79I'm gonna read the article, I promise, but is the title really "If your internet is bad, the internet is bad"?
I'm not gonna lie, if my fat high-res site images make life a lil harder in Vanuatu but convert a bunch of black-turtleneck d-bags in San Francisco to customers, I know which side of the bread the butter is on.
I think thats probably part of the point of the article. I would read it less of a statement like "make you webpages smaller", and read it more as "be aware of the bloat of modern webpages".
If your target audience has great internet, then ignore optimising for size. But be aware that people travel, and your market may change, so what is ok in SF may become unusable if they go on holidays, move offices or need to work of roaming data due to an outage.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#80Something 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…
> how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species
IPFS or similar. Basically, make all public content content-addressed (give me the article with SHA 0xabcdef) rather than connection oriented (give me the bytestream that comes from http://news.ycombinator.com/foo/bar)