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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

#191

Post by antisthenes »

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…

Yes, my point was specifically about videos, and I've elaborated on it further in the post above.

I, too, remember quite vividly waiting 30-40 minutes to download a 5MB installer for WinAmp and ICQ.

I honestly wouldn't even know where to look for videos in the 90s internet. Most people probably didn't have the upload speed to even consider sharing them online.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#192

Post by CaptSpify »

diggan wrote: post #39

Something 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 heard this somewhere on HN, but websites should fail like escalators, not like elevators. Too many people design sites like elevators though.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#193

Post by ashark »

EvilTerran wrote: post #131
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

I use gmail's Basic HTML interface all the time. AJAXy gmail and Inbox balloon to incredible levels of memory use pretty quickly, and are slower for most interactions than the full-page loads on Basic HTML, which means that someone somewhere lost track of WTF they were supposed to be doing all of this for.

It's easily worth the loss of a couple features.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#194

Post by rmc »

joeyh wrote: post #68
diggan wrote: post #39

Something 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…

> (NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for ISS residents, something like VNC to a ground-based browser IIRC.)

Wait, VNC? Won't that use oodles more bandwidth than proxying HTTP?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#195

Post by 5ilv3r »

throwawayish wrote: post #162
derefr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A Pentium II can play a DVD back at 24 fps back no problems.

That's because the pentium 2 chip isn't decoding the video. Try it with a software decoder some time. It hardly works. I had to disable video scaling before my 366 would stop dropping frames.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#196

Post by semi-extrinsic »

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…

I think your memory of the late 90's is actually from the early 90's ;)

I remember the first realtime mp3 player on Windows, Fraunhofer IIS' WinPlay3, which launched in '95. Then Winamp came out in '97 and blew our minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#199

Post by dba7dba »

ggreer wrote: post #147
dba7dba wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The unintended consequence I'm talking about is they expected it will take 100 years for the system to be utilized at full capacity but in reality it took just 20-30 years...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#200

Post by antisthenes »

snarfy wrote: post #153
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.

I'm guessing you've never downloaded porn from usenet over a 2400 baud modem.

I have not. That was a little bit before my time. The first modem I've had the luxury of using was a 33.6K.
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