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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

#201

Post by dublinben »

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

It's a shame that their oldest mobile version, the original m.reddit.com is no longer available. It was truly the most compact way to experience the site. Barely more than a list of links.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#202

Post by TeMPOraL »

iLoch wrote: post #117
__jal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?" Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play. More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is…

> More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes. Doesn't affect the vast majority of users. > But I realize I'm in a minority. Yes, your statements are pretty anecdotal and don't really relate to the vast majority of internet use…

> don't really relate to the vast majority of internet users.

It's not that they don't. It's that you don't care.

Because why should you care about something that doesn't meaningfully increase ad revenue or sales? Why should you care that the 2 extra seconds of pageload on a fat pipe, and a fraction of a cent of extra electricity burned, when multiplied by a million of your US users add to over 500 man-hours and few kilograms of coal wasted. Not to mention the site being unreliable or unusable in trains, rural areas and larger buildings in which an user doesn't have Wi-Fi access.

And the problem wouldn't be as big if it was just you. The problem is, everyone else thinks the same way, so all the waste mentioned above adds up. All because people are too lazy to not put useless gunk - which often requires more work to add to your site than to refrain from using it in the first place.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#203

Post by chiph »

antisthenes wrote: post #186
acdha wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 install…

> almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s.

Umm. Porn?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#205

Post by 5ilv3r »

CaptSpify wrote: post #175
davesque wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#206

Post by PhasmaFelis »

antisthenes wrote: post #186
acdha wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 install…

> 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.

I vividly remember waiting hours to download a video in the '90s. The Spirit of Christmas short that spawned South Park, and that news story about the exploding whale, were viral videos that predated modern video sites by many years. You'd download it off of an FTP server somewhere. At one point, the majority of my hard drive was devoted to half a dozen videos that I'd show to everyone who came over.

Basically, watching a video on your computer felt new and exciting and worth waiting for. I'd never do that today even if I were stuck on a slow pipe, but at the time it was oddly compelling.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#207

Post by bobbles »

antisthenes wrote: post #186
acdha wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 install…

I spent like a week downloading individual music videos over 28K. People will do a lot of things

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#208

Post by 5ilv3r »

freehunter wrote: post #41
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…

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…

High paying customers are going to have high speed connections. No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. If you are on a slow connection, they don't want your kind on their site. If you try, they will mock you for not knowing your place.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#209

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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! Pages loaded in 10 to 20 seconds.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#210

Post by jayajay »

Lately my Pixel has been achieving sub KBps speeds on very good Wifi connection (laptop in same room 100MBps), and it reminded me of the old days with dial-up on win 98 -- but worse. The estimated download-time for the LinkedIn app (70MB... gg) was a whopping 6 months! What a great way to get me to guzzle up my mobile data.
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