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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

#381

Post by emodendroket »

flukus wrote: post #363
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…

> 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%.

You aren't necessarily, though. Efforts spent optimizing the existing functionality are not being spent adding new features.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#383

Post by codinghorror »

accountface wrote: post #215
smacktoward wrote: post #56

Looking at that first table, one question jumps out at me: what the heck is Jeff Atwood doing on pages at Coding Horror that makes them weigh 23MB? I mean, I'm all for avoiding premature optimizations, but 23MB for one page is just... wow. EDIT: As a sanity check, I just tried loading the CH home page from a cold cache myself. Total weight: 31.26MB . Yowch.

Appears to be mostly lack of image optimization (and he loves gifs). A common issue with blogs.

Images are meticulously optimized, problem is, retina is expensive in file size.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#384

Post by Filligree »

collinmanderson wrote: post #362
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.

640px would be a problem — that's approximately 15em on my screen. I don't think that unit is supposed to be about hardware pixels, but...

Well, that's how it seems to be implemented anyway. Ems usually do better.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#385

Post by bitwize »

monocasa wrote: post #251
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. I vividly remember waiting hours to download a video in the '90s. The Spirit of Christmas short that spawned South Park, and that news story about the exploding whale, were viral videos that predated modern video sites by m…

Or that stupid dancing baby CGI that blew up in the late nineties for some reason.

It was a demo of Autodesk's Biped bone-animation software. It really took off when the producers of Ally McBeal licensed the baby to appear on their show.

That always reminds me: Earlier that decade, a major plot arc of Beverly Hills 90210 featured a nightclub called Peach Pit After Dark. The door of the club had a flying toaster, from the PC screensaver After Dark.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#386

Post by flukus »

emodendroket wrote: post #381
flukus wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%.

You aren't necessarily, though. Efforts spent optimizing the existing functionality are not being spent adding new features.

But your optimizing things people are using frequently, not adding things they probably aren't. Adding features is usually diminishing returns as well.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#387

Post by samuell »

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…

I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all.

This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps.

I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

[1] https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-a...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#388

Post by flukus »

tempestn wrote: post #298
splatcollision wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most users on fast connections are not going to enjoy explicitly clicking to download every background image, font, etc. For videos it might make more sense, but there are many more optional assets to deal with.

Background images and fonts are examples of things probably not needed at all. I already have fonts on my computer, I don't need yours.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#389

Post by gnarly »

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…

Simple. Design your webpages to only load the functional lighter weight essential stuff by default. Then use javascript to add in all the large assets you want. Users with slow connections can browse with javascript turned off.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#390

Post by sogen »

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…

Read somewhere it was YouTube
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