I think about this a lot. And I think it's really easy for a page weight argument to fall into an "old man yells at cloud" tone. But I also want the industry to move towards simpler HTML and such, so, I've been thinking up an argument that companies will buy. I'm really bad at it though. Maybe the extra African market will open up new ad revenue?
The web sucks if you have a slow connection
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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#142I think about this a lot. And I think it's really easy for a page weight argument to fall into an "old man yells at cloud" tone. But I also want the industry to move towards simpler HTML and such, so, I've been thinking up an argument that companies will buy. I'm really bad at it though. Maybe the extra African market will open up new ad revenue?
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#143Earlier 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.
This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#144By 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/
My local paper is the same way, ublock origin blocks 50% of the requests coming from the site.
Builtwith.com shows 48 advertising libraries being used on the site.
The newspaper has a staff of less than 50, who even has time to look through and use all that advertising data?
The site is unusable.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#145Earlier 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.
I live in the first world and I rarely watch videos at 480p. I have 100gb of bandwidth a month, and typically view YouTube at 360.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#146Something 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 We won't be and aliens have better internet anyway :)
read a fire upon the deep
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#147>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…
Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California. When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city). When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within…
Isn't that a good unintended consequence? They built out infrastructure which attracted lots of people & jobs. Today, SoCal is home to world-leading firms in entertainment & aerospace. They also have top-tier research and educational institutions.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#148I 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…
> PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.
I don't think this has changed, at least not in general. The included roaming package is still free international 2G roaming everywhere except Mexico and Canada (which get free 4G), with "high-speed data pass" upgrades available for a daily or weekly fee if you want faster. They did have a promotion for the 2nd half of 2016 (initially for the summer, then extended through the end of the year), where international 3G, and in a few areas 4G/LTE, was free without buying the upgrade passes for most of Europe and South America [1]. But that's now over, and I believe it's back to free 2G internationally now.
[1] https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/t-mobiles-endle...
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#149Earlier 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.
> it'll take them OVER THREE HOURS
I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then.
+ Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2GB hard drive was now 100% full.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#150I 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.
This is the main reason why Brave is my default browser: you can set the default to disable JavaScript and enable it only on sites which actually do something useful with it. My data usage dropped something like 1GB the first month I switched.