Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 622 posts

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#311

Post by btschaegg »

toast0 wrote: post #253
j3097736 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>only Sounds like you need an adblocker, Firefox ESR + ublock Origin should be enough to make a 10yo single-core machine usable for common web browsing

I work at a company whose revenue primarily comes from advertisements; it feels unethical to run an adblocker while ads are paying my salary. (And also would blind me to the experience that most users have; even ignoring the nice connectivity and ram that I have)

I have to applaud you for the second point. With many pages I see nowadays just googling for things like Vim-keybindings (I am sadly not allowed to install an ad blocker on some systems), I started to heavily doubt that anyone maintaining those sites has seen them through a user's eyes.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#313

Post by sonar_un »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #259

What really has baffled me lately is Chase's new website. They did a redesign around, maybe 6 months ago, to make it "more modern" or something, I guess. Now the thing just loads and loads and loads and loads. And all I want to do is either view my statement/transactions or pay my bill! Or sometimes update my address or use rewards points. That's not complicated stuff. I open it up in a background tab and do other st…

Chase's website is just awful for just about anything.

It's particularly terrible if you are ever trying to use award points. The site is painfully slow, even on the fastest of connections.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#314

Post by 72deluxe »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #299
antisthenes wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmm, either your experience, or memory, of the nineties / dial-up, is different than mine and all of my (quickly polled friends). We all built a library of painfully-obtained 320x200 horrible overcompressed video... ahh, the memories of RealPlayer. Some video was down to 180p... heck, I still have videos that were one or two megabytes in size in my archives - that I darn tootin' well waited hours to download :)

Please don't mention RealPlayer again. I feel ill and queasy thinking of that piece of software, its million rewrites and the CPU hog they released for Linux (at least on my lame hardware).

I remember using "download accelerators" to try and grab files faster back in the day. Who knew they were just doing 4 simultaneous downloads of ranges of the same file eh?

Ah I feel old

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#316

Post by 72deluxe »

barkingcat wrote: post #169
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.

3 hours is so low in the grand scheme of things. It used to take 3 hours to download a jpg over dialup ...

I used to rely on PC Plus and cover CDs for all of my software needs. I remember needing Qt for Linux (it was all new to me) and spending hours downloading a 16MB file, only to be grabbing the non-devel RPM.

We take file sizes for granted these days.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#317

Post by nindalf »

swiley wrote: post #155
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.

When I had a slow connection I loved tools like youtube-dl because they didn't expect to be used interactively. Network tools like browsers that just assume they can monopolize your time are probably the most frustating things in these situations.

YouTube-dl helped a lot when I was living in a rural town a few years ago. I would download a bunch of tutorials over the weekend when I visited my parents in the city and watch them course of the week. Seems strange to say now, because this was the case only 3-4 years ago and only a few hundred km from where I currently live. Today I can't imagine watching in anything less than HD.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#318

Post by eeZah7Ux »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #271
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Yes, that was slow, but if it was literally the best, then it was awesome

I remember people complaining that the web was too slow compared to gopher, even on pages without images.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#319

Post by ChuckMcM »

jff wrote: post #289
some-guy wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RealPlayer video rips of my favorite TV shows for me, all in wonderful 160p!

A year or two ago, I went through some old files that had somehow followed me all through highschool. Among them were a handful of music and video files I got from friends passing around burned CDs. I was quite amused to play some random episode of Dragonball Z and have it pop up a postage-stamp sized video on my relatively high-res modern screen!

Or to have your kid say "Dad, why are there video thumbnails in the archive directory and where are the actual videos?"

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#320

Post by stuckagain »

ashark wrote: post #193
EvilTerran wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is commonly stated but not true under all conditions. The full-blown GMail UI has extensive latency-hiding capabilities. The basic HTML UI has no latency-hiding features of any kind. If you are on a high-latency connection but you have some bandwidth available, you will have a much better experience with the full UI. Otherwise you face the full latency for every action.

The Inbox UI is for some reason irredeemable. It is slow under all conditions.

Post reply on HN