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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

#131

Post by EvilTerran »

SwellJoe wrote: post #40

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…

Incidentally, you may find GMail's "basic HTML view" works better when your connection's throttled:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049

And as for reddit, their old mobile view is still available at the "i." subdomain - it's so much lighter-weight than the dreadful JS-laden one they introduced a while back, it's the only way to use reddit on mobile IMO:

https://i.reddit.com

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#132

Post by yellowapple »

antisthenes wrote: post #124
swanson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my observation (of people who still use dial-up here in the US), they usually just do something else (like make dinner or watch TV) while the video loads.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#133

Post by gimagon »

Could a lighter weight website serve more users for the same dollar of bandwidth as bloated website?

It seems to me there's a business strategy, where rather than pushing for more ads, a website pushes for lighter weight and promises its few advertisers a wider audience.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#134

Post by Gracana »

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.

Obviously things like gdocs need JavaScript, but blogs and news sites and forums sure don't.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#135

Post by discreteevent »

antisthenes wrote: post #124
swanson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't watch videos (speaking from experience). But you do not and have never needed to watch TV to be well educated. The same is true of the internet. The tragedy that the post points out is that text and diagrams are being artificially weighed down with video-like anchors for no good reason.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#136

Post by ploxiln »

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 notice it in my browser's memory usage.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#137

Post by Raed667 »

antisthenes wrote: post #124
swanson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you have that kind of speed you watch Youtube in 144p !

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#138

Post by timdavila »

kuschku wrote: post #90
freehunter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that s…

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works? Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.

> which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G

source? the entire goal of AMP is to load pages quickly

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#139

Post by ploxiln »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #5

I'm torn here, in a way. On the one hand light page weights and other such optimizations make the internet better for everyone, on the other, there's a certain point where designing your product to target 3 decades ago (we forget 1990 was 27 years ago) gets a little absurd. I think the greater tragedy is not that the web is bloated (an issue for sure), but that so much of America has internet worse than 3rd world mob…

No need to "target 3 decades ago", just be reasonable.

> Popular themes for many different kinds of blogging software and CMSs contain anti-optimizations so blatant that any programmer, even someone with no front-end experience, can find large gains by just pointing webpagetest at their site and looking at the output.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#140

Post by gumby »

I was exasperated by his mobile example. Why? This is my life with Comcast (the faster of the two "choices"!) in Palo Alto. I also have Comcast in my ski house in the sticks and it's faster than Palo Alto. But my wired connection is so slow that I sometimes use my phone on LTE to read a page that hangs on Comcast.
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