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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

#171

Post by mhurron »

derefr wrote: post #149
antisthenes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 2G…

> three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s

Ah Napster.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#172

Post by CoolGuySteve »

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…

I was in rural China with an EDGE connection on Google Fi last month.

Hacker News was pretty much the only site I visit that could reliably load quickly. m.facebook.com had a slight wait but was still bearable. I had to leave my phone for 10 or 15 minutes to get Google News.

WeChat and email worked well.

Everything else was horrible, especially ad networks that would ping pong several requests or load large images.

Opera has a compression proxy mode that helped a bit when it worked but it was still painful.

For search results, Stack Overflow, and YouTube, it was easier to easier to ssh into an AWS node and use elinks/youtube-dl.

Using SSH as a socks proxy/compression was insanely slow due to something with with the great firewall.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#173

Post by gnud »

gabemart wrote: post #158

Something I have had at the back of my mind for a long time: in 2017, what's the correct way to present optional resources that will improve the experience of users on fast/uncapped connections, but that user agents on slow/capped connections can safely ignore? Like hi-res hero images, or video backgrounds, etc. Every time a similar question is posed on HN, someone says "If the assets aren't needed, don't serve them…

Random idea: Get the current time in a JS block in the head, before you load any CSS and JS, and compare it to the time when the dom ready event fires. If there's no real difference, load hi-res backgrounds and so on. If there is a real time difference, don't.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#174

Post by cgh »

dragonwriter wrote: post #52
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #38

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems? I'd argue that it didn't, and yet even with the light weight of pages back then, it was incredibly slower than today's pages (even heavy ones) load over our much-faster connections. So really, I think what the author is observing is that having experienced high-speed reliable connections , it is very disappointing to move to a much slower connection. For the…

> Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems? Yes, lots of the early web sucked over dialup.

While waiting for some JS-laden crapfest to load earlier, it occurred to me that I haven't heard the term "World Wide Wait" in many years. But here I am experiencing it all over again.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#175

Post by CaptSpify »

davesque wrote: post #86
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.'

Practically speaking, I think it's much more appropriate to just assume the admins are lazy.

I'll respectfully disagree with you.

It takes more work to have a bloated JS mess of a site, than it is to have a small, simple, clean site. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot in the first place.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#176

Post by SquareWheel »

zeveb wrote: post #82
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…

> The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable. No, no it's not , it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with…

>The web is a web of hyperlinked documents.

The web used to be a web of hyperlinked documents. This has not been the case for a long time now. Webapps have evolved to enable widespread communication, collaboration, gaming, social media, and so much more.

It's the single-largest open platform that's available from nearly any device in the world. It's a little more than a document viewer.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#177

Post by discreditable »

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.

https://bestmotherfucking.website

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#178

Post by bluGill »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #168
ggreer wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is why, when discussing infrastructure upgrades in our Hackerspace, I keep reminding that infrastructure is an enabler - it should not be built to support current needs, it needs a healthy margin to enable people to do more. People always find interesting ways to use up extra capacity.

There is a limit to that. People point out all the growth that overbuilt freeways caused argue we need to build more freeways. Nobody every asks if the trend will continue. They want to bring that same growth to small middle of nowhere towns, but it isn't clear if that will happen.

Also lost in the conversation is opportunity cost: sure people drove more and that drove growth to those areas. However what if the roads had not been built - what would have happened instead? We don't know, but it is fun to speculate. (maybe railroads would still be the most common mode of transport?)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#180

Post by CaptSpify »

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.

There are exceptions where JS is needed. They are exceptions though. A vast majority of the sites I see now are web-pages that think they need to be SPAs. Sorry, sucks to be them, but if they didn't mis-design, I wouldn't mis-interpret their intentions.
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