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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

#271

Post by andrewstuart2 »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #209
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.

I think you've missed my point. Yes, that was slow, but if it was literally the best, then it was awesome. The same thing goes today for everybody out there with access to gigabit. There's no reason to complain about it even if downloading takes some time still, because it's not like there's anything better.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#272

Post by dredmorbius »

dba7dba wrote: post #107
ikeboy wrote: post #74

>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…

Reading through some early texts on the coal and oil industry. One notes that at then-current rates of consumption, the coal reserves of the United States would supply over one million years' consumption.[1]

The current North American coal proven reserve is less than 300 years of current utilisation rates: http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...

It's amazing what a constant increase in growth rate can accomplish. Also the overwhelming tendency for lowered costs to induce an increased demand -- the Jevons paradox.

If you want people to use less of something, increase the cost, not the efficiency.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Henri Erni, Coal Oil and Petroleum: Their origin, history, geology, and chemistry, 1865. p. 15.

https://archive.org/stream/coaloilpetroleum00erni#page/14/mo...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#273

Post by tommorris »

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…

There is a proposed API for that.

https://wicg.github.io/netinfo/

And like most such APIs, it has been kicked around for a long time and it has only been adopted by Chromium on Android, ChromeOS and iOS. It'd be great if it were more widely adopted...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#275

Post by btschaegg »

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…

While I agree with others here that dial-up-friendly sites don't "collide" with complex web-apps (thus rendering this argument somewhat void), I sadly think the underlying problem is much more mundane:

Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Same reason. No one wants to pay the additional costs of achieving that.

Practically speaking, this means that either Random Local Newspaper Inc. knows their potential online reader base exactly and deemed the additional effort not to pay off, or they have no idea of their potential customers that would flock to their site if they did put in the effort, and thus don't miss them. Add on top of that the fact that much of the internet is based on (perhaps only assumed) prestige (or loss of it if your page doesn't have the most modern features A through Z or looks like its from the 90ies) or extremely short-lived (a newspaper doesn't care about yesterday's news) and this theory pretty much explains it all.

Cynical, I know, but hey... :-/

Edit: Also: We can have nice things. No one with a 56k connection will honestly try to watch Netflix. A much more interesting question would be: How could we create incentives for big corporations to optimize their pages for connections with a small bandwith? After all, much of the web is also built on ad deals - which also almost certainly don't target those people.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#276

Post by flukus »

dba7dba wrote: post #107
ikeboy wrote: post #74

>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…

This is known as induced demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#277

Post by dragonwriter »

btschaegg wrote: post #275
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…

While I agree with others here that dial-up-friendly sites don't "collide" with complex web-apps (thus rendering this argument somewhat void), I sadly think the underlying problem is much more mundane: Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Same reason. No one wants to pay the additional costs of achieving that. Practically speaking, this means that either Random Local Newspaper…

> Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago?

Because even in the 1990s, word processors weren't orders of magnitude slower than the person sitting at the keyboard, which is the ultimate limiting factor on word processing speed.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#278

Post by disposablename »

tommorris wrote: post #273
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…

There is a proposed API for that. https://wicg.github.io/netinfo/ And like most such APIs, it has been kicked around for a long time and it has only been adopted by Chromium on Android, ChromeOS and iOS. It'd be great if it were more widely adopted...

Yay, more browser fingerprinting data points!
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