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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

#121

Post by rhizome »

danappelxx wrote: post #111
zeveb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.'

Well, that's quite unfair. JavaScript is also used for creating interactive web applications - not just tracking users. Really your attitude comes off unnecessarily aggressive.

Is it more aggressive than the uses to which JS is being put these days?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#122

Post by joeyh »

ferbivore wrote: post #35
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…

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"?

For a long time, you had to load 2+ mb of data to see a 140 character tweet. Twitter actually recently fixed this; the tweet text is available in the title now, so will be available very early in page load.

Not only does this make twitter usable on dialup again (it was effectively unusable ever since they switched from a simple html page to a massive "application" that you have to re-download every time they deploy), but it lets you search through tweets you've read in the browser history.

Getting this stuff right is not rocket surgery.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#123

Post by howderek »

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…

In the US, we do generally allow horses on our highways. https://asci.uvm.edu/equine/law/roads/roads.htm

The Amish frequently do so in my area.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#124

Post by antisthenes »

swanson wrote: post #103
ikeboy wrote: post #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 cause…

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video.

Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing.

You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#125

Post by interfacesketch »

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…

Text articles are probably the most widespread type of content on the web. Most web sites are not web apps. But many developers want to re-construct web sites into web app architectures even when there's no benefit to the end user.

I posted the links below on a previous discussion about AMP. They are two examples of basic, javascript-free web pages with text content. There's about 2500+ words on these test pages, but the page weight is still much smaller than, for example, a medium article with one tenth the number of words (250).

Try loading them on your mobile on a 3G (or slower) connection. Do they load fast or slow?

Version A: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html

Here is an identical version to the above but one that loads custom fonts (approx 40kb extra).

Version B: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#126

Post by fenwick67 »

By far the worst site I regularly use, from a page loading perspective, is my local newspaper.

It takes about 10 seconds before it loads to a usable state on a T1 connection.

If I pop open an inspector, requests go on for about 30 seconds before they die down. It's about 8MB.

http://www.telegraphherald.com/

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#127

Post by mining »

iLoch wrote: post #117
__jal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?" Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play. More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is…

> More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes. Doesn't affect the vast majority of users. > But I realize I'm in a minority. Yes, your statements are pretty anecdotal and don't really relate to the vast majority of internet use…

I don't think your claim that it doesn't affect the vast majority of users is correct. There's well over a billion people in India alone. You might argue that you were only making claims about US users, but a lot of sites have no reason not to be global.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#128

Post by dman »

Terr_ wrote: post #113
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…

I have Javascript off-by-default, and about 80% of the time it simply makes everything better. Oh, sure, a few sites need JS (and get whitelisted) and some just have minor layout quirks... But I can actually scroll down and read the text of a news article rather than suffering through waiting times and input-latency as Javascript churns.

Same here - I would highly recommend people to at least try this once and get a reminder of how fast sites can be.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#130

Post by warcher »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #79
warcher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

Ah, I'm just joking around. Mostly. ;) I agree with and mostly implement the vast majority of google's recommendations vis a vis site weight and speed (when I have time/budget to do so), because I regard making sites fast as a signifier of competent professionalism. Any hack can make a sucky, slow, heavy website. Making a website that really cooks is one of several things I use to justify my rate. ;)
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