reddit.com takes 7.5 seconds to load on FIOS? I must be reading this table wrong.
The web sucks if you have a slow connection
181–190 of 622 posts
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#182By 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/
When I opened that page and emptied my cache, I got a lot more than 8MB...
http://imgur.com/a/qt0Zd (59.9MB)
I don't think JavaScript is really to blame for this though, the problem here is they're dumping a whole bunch of full sized images when they could have used thumbnails.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#183I 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…
It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices. Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better soluti…
I say this so much that I should probably just copy/paste it in the future but...
I used to work at a place that had a that, it needed to be optimized. I wish more places would test this way. Your sight may work fine in downtown SF, but that doesn't mean it's going to work well anywhere else.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#184I just realized this is why the growth of network speed is increasing at a lower rate than that of compute. Even though they both continue to grow in capacity, the accelerations are different.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, they don't even look that great. Lots of sites could be using lots of modern browser features to be fairly innovative from a visual design and user experience standpoint, but it's mostly just really inefficient (and inaccessible, with no compat fallbacks) implementations of the same old shit.
yes lot of these web pages are the size of mp3 files. it's just fucked up. we decided static html webpages are sooo 1999. Yet it remains the most secure and user friendly medium to deliver value. bring back the 1999 frame side bar. what was wrong with that?
There is making the web more janky and hard to use and making it a simpler page. I think there is a balance here we can find.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#186Earlier 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.
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.
Not sure what your comment has to do with mine.
I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped installers (after researching that it was what you actually needed) and checking email.
Internet "videos" didn't really even exist as content before ~2005 and Youtube. The biggest player before them was Break.com, which posted a whopping 10-15 videos a day.
While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To illustrate my point even further, the speed we're talking about isn't even dial-up speed. It's 6.5kbit/second, which makes it almost an order of magnitude slower than a 56k modem! 10 times slower!
And people are actually suggesting that someone would spend that valuable bandwidth to spend days to load a video...
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#187Something 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…
I chatted about just this timeout issue with an engineer from a major CDN while he was at my house enjoying the dialup. Seems like simply a matter of resource management; slow connections do use more resources. Most CDN customers don't care or don't know that a few percent of the US population is getting their web browsing broken by timeouts, so there's no push back. (NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for IS…
I'm surprised they need anything. I get my home internet from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and it works fine other than the latency. No human has got that far from Earth since Apollo in the 1970s, so my home internet has to be worse than anyone NASA cares give internet. (though I have no idea what bandwidth NASA has)
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Minutes might be slightly overselling it but AMP has a bit over 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript alone before you get the actual content.
Here's the current top story when I hit news.google.com in a mobile browser:
https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.was...
Loading that in a simulated 2G connection takes about 80 seconds and at least 30 seconds of that is waiting to display anything you care about. Looking at the content breakdown shows why: ~200KB of webfonts, 1.2MB of JavaScript, 275KB of HTML, etc.
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/...
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details
Loading the same page without JavaScript pulls the content render time down into a couple seconds, still over 2G:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/...
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#189> 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…
> 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?"
As a counterpoint, I have a 1G FTTH connection, 8GB of ram, but only a dual-core 1.4 GHz Haswell (Celeron 2955U) and an iffy SSD, so I get a terrible web experience if I have more than one tab open.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#190Something 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…
One hack-y way to do it would be to load it via JavaScript. For example, see this stackoverflow [0]. Obviously not a great solution, but it works if your dying for something.
I bet people w/ slow connections are much more likely to disable javascript, though.
let loadTime = window.performance.timing.domContentLoadedEventEnd- window.performance.timing.navigationStart;
if (loadTime > someArbitraryNumber) {
// Disable loading heavy things
}