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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

321–330 of 622 posts

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#321

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…

I thought Sprint and T-Mobile had unlimited plans in the $60-80 range for LTE?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#322
post #321

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…

I thought Sprint and T-Mobile had unlimited plans in the $60-80 range for LTE?

They can still throttle you after a certain level of consumption. With a recent T-Mobile promo, you could have 4 lines for the price of 2, each with its own 4G allotment... so if I ever experience throttling, I can switch to an alternate device.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#324
I live in a very remote town in the North Cascades in Washington state and work remotely in development. I'm on a 1.5mb DSL connection and while it's slow it's consistent and I rarely have issues with Skype / Hangouts / Slack / Git / normal work. Downloading large data dumps is another story, but you learn to plan ahead.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#325
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works? The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds

But still should make sure low speed works. But try convincing some privileged 20 something developer of that.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#326
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…

On the TV series Stargate SG-1, they envisioned using conventional EMR (like radio and TV signals) through wormhole connections.

Later plots faced invasion attempts through the stargates (permanent, direct-dial wormhole portals), so matter shielding was employed, and signals were used to authenticate who was on the other side of the connection before lowering the shield.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#327
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

I use NoScript. The web is much less annoying by default, and I can still enable scripts for those sites where I think it might be useful. There are a good number of sites now which have entirely given up on progressive enhancement and simply don't show you anything without JS... but I generally find I just don't care, and just close the tab and look at the next thing instead.

I found that, usually, the ones that don't show anything when javascript is disabled are the ones loading scripts from ajax.google.com.... it might appear to be so because google is so much larger (or maybe Google did that on purpose)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#328

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.

Not really. It's very easy to get bloat if you integrate ad-networks, analytics tools, social media tools etc. willy-nilly without looking at all the resources they fetch.

The lazy approach WILL lead to bloat.

No news agency is running a plain jane HTML website.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#329
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this so much that I should probably just copy/paste it in the future but... I used to work at a place that had a that , it needed to be optimized. I wish more places would test this way. Your sight may work fine in downtown SF, but that doesn't mean it's going to work well anywhere else.

Databases too. Hosting the database on a fast machine with a lot of RAM and an SSD will hide performance problems that should be immediately apparent.

With games, it's way easier to see problems in the profiler on the minimum spec PC than it is on your dev machine. Everything is magnified.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#330
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works? The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds

But still should make sure low speed works. But try convincing some privileged 20 something developer of that.

It's really not about a privileged youngster, it's about business priorities. Most of the time the cost benefit ratio doesn't justify the effort to optimise for high latency high packet-loss connections. Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider.

At work we did something similar a few years ago with our Android app. We dropped support for Android 2.3 users because we only had a couple hundred of them and it didn't justify the developer cost to maintain it. WhatsApp only dropped support a month ago. I don't think that was because they were somehow less privileged than us.

The casual ageism in your comment is unbecoming. You could reconsider it.

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