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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

#361

Post by nsp »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #349
nindalf wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consid…

I could, but I've worked with too many examples that only care about writing new code in whatever is the latest hotness and moving on. They[0] don't want to fix their bugs. They don't care about anything but "works on my machine." They certainly don't care about using bandwidth. [0] The ones I've worked with

Bring it up! They're newer to development then you are, they're newer to life. They're far more likely to have always have had high speed internet growing up, and not have had that visceral experience. The initial reaction will probably be negative, but initial negative reactions to perceived increases in scope/work is basically a universal human trait, it's surmountable.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#362

Post by collinmanderson »

Filligree wrote: post #7

Not related to the contents of the article, but please add a max-width styling to your paragraphs. 40em or so is good.

Agreed.

body{max-width:640px;margin:auto} The extra 33 bytes won't slow things down (unless you somehow hit the next ~1kb packet boundary)

line-height 1.5; would also make it more readable.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#363

Post by flukus »

nindalf wrote: post #330
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consid…

> 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.

Your making it usable for that 1%, but you're making it better for the other 99%.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#364

Post by arjie »

hueving wrote: post #237
SilasX wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! A Jevons Effect[1] in a web site's bandwidth! [1] When an increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used causes total usage to increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I'm not sure why this gets a special term. It sounds like basic supply and demand. If you decrease the price of something by increasing the efficiency of production, you will obviously capture more of the demand curve. What am I missing?

Well, that's because it's often not the case. Take the two cases:

* Engines get more efficient (fewer litres per kilometre traveled). Does the total amount of petrol consumed go down or up?

* Flushes get more efficient (less water / successful flush). Does the total amount of water consumed go down or up?

Both of these have a more efficient use of a consumable quantity. Often, however, more efficient engines lead to more traveling and larger vehicles whereas more efficient flushing leads to reduced total water consumption usually.

The fact that gains from efficiency can be outraced by the induced demand can be seemingly paradoxical. And "seemingly paradoxical" is the only thing that makes anything labelled "Paradox" interesting.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#365

Post by CaptSpify »

scoates wrote: post #355
CaptSpify wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard this somewhere on HN, but websites should fail like escalators, not like elevators. Too many people design sites like elevators though.

I love this visual, but elevators have way more safety mechanisms than poorly-designed web sites. Check out the source HTML of instagram.com for a great example. /-:

Well, my point isn't about safety, it's about usability. Escalators can still be used as stairs when they fail. Elevators can't be used at all.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#366

Post by CaptSpify »

nsp wrote: post #360
CaptSpify wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're hand coding it either way, maybe but, at least in my personal experience, it's much faster/less effort to drop bootstrap and jquery on the page and get to something acceptable looking then to hand code just the 50 lines of js/CSS I actually need. Obviously there are many benefits to the latter approach, especially in the long run, but it's definitely not the lazier approach.

> hand code just the 50 lines of js/CSS I actually need

That's the problem. If you do legitimately need it, then yeah, it might be, but my experience says you probably don't need that.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#367

Post by therealmarv »

bsukn wrote: post #356

It only sucks if you've experienced a fast connection. We generally don't target hardware from 98, why should we target bandwidth from 98? Current smartphones and computers are really powerful, and most applications are targeted towards those devices. Native apps don't have this insane requirement to support hardware from 2 decades ago. The web is so much more than text in 2017. And before you whine about the ads and…

For you it's bandwidth from 98. If you go outside your obviously modern country it's a 2017 problem and it will stay this way for a long time. It's not so much about backwards compatibility... it's more like "keep it working" with slow bandwidth. Posting this from Philippines where I'm currently happy with a stable 750Kb/s connection.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#368

Post by CaptSpify »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #328
CaptSpify wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your kind of proving my point. If you add these things in, it's more work. If you make a plain html site, which is what these sites should be doing, then you aren't going to add that stuff in, which means less work.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#370

Post by abrowne »

derefr wrote: post #149
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.

> 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…

I remember my family's pre-PPC Mac could play MP2, but not MP3.
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