291–300 of 622 posts
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> (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?
It's about lag, not bandwidth.
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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 a…
On my throttled 2G connection, it’s ~2½ minutes, and because I rarely visit pages with AMP, it’s never cached.
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…
Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.
After spending a month in Mexico, including regions with spotty/inconsistent service from one minute to the next, I think the problem goes deeper. Browsers are IMO terrible at mitigating intermittent and very slow connections. Nothing I browse seems to be effectively cached other than Hacker News. Browsers just give up when a connection disappears, rather than holding what they have and trying again in a little bit.…
Oh, we find Amazon, IMDb and Facebook are the biggest pigs on a slow connection.
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> 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.
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Obviously things like gdocs need JavaScript, but blogs and news sites and forums sure don't.
I think it depends on what the JavaScript is used for. I agree that blogs and news site should be static, but forums - and in general, sites with a high degree of user interactivity - can see significant UX improvements with some JavaScript, for things like asynchronous loading, changing the UI without reloading the page, and even nice animations (although many of those can be done in CSS these days). However, gracef…
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…
Design your UX so that any large assets can be requested at will by the user, and indicate the file size? That way it's the user's choice if they want to load that large video over their slow network, etc.
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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…
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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…
> Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Someone doesn't agree with your comment, but rather than come back with a refutation they voted you down instead :) And someone else don't agree with my comment .. modded down -4
If people chose to download porn over 28.8k modems, that's their choice. Just seems like a waste of time, that's all. Probably quicker just to take your dad's nudie mags rather than wait 6 hours for a 400x300 jpeg.