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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#441

Post by [deleted] »

SilasX wrote: post #248
hueving wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A lot of people naively assume that if you can use a resource more efficiently, then total use will go down, "because you don't need as much, right?" See: the entire popular support for efficiency mandates. (Edit: Also, this very example -- I certainly didn't expect that a faster site would allow that many more users: my model was more "either they want to see your site, or they don't", i.e. inelastic demand.) The (c…

[deleted]

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#442

Post by lucb1e »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #335
Someone1234 wrote: post #21

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…

My 35Mbit cable got shaped down to 0.25 Mbit/s yesterday because we went over our download limit. It was like having no connection. I just gave up using it. I hate the all-or-nothing approach to shaping. At least give me 5Mbit or something!

5mbps is a perfectly fine connection, they might as well not throttle you at all then. If they want to give you barely-usable internet, about 500kbps might be reasonable. 250kbps is quite slow indeed.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#443

Post by AstralStorm »

72deluxe wrote: post #306
Nas808 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

Yes I remember using mods and xm files instead as attempting to play a low bitrate MP3 on a Pentium 100 (I think?) Elonex laptop meant 100% CPU. Even tried it on mpg123 and mpg321 on RedHat on a 486 DX66 - I was poor. Didn't fare any better.

You would have much better chances with Opus and its integer decoder today.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#444

Post by lucb1e »

geforce wrote: post #3

Sad thing is that most of the web sucks on rather fast connections too. Pages being almost 5mb of data, making multiple dozens of requests for librairies and ads. Ads updating in the background, consuming evermore data. I don't notice it much on my PC, since I've got a FTTH connection, but on LTE and 3G, it's very noticeable. Enough that I avoid certain websites. And that's nowhere near slow by his standards. I do ag…

Figure out a few interesting/useful websites that work fine without Javascript. Try browsing those for half an hour, then switch Javascript back on and browse your usual websites. You'll probably notice it's so much slower, even with FTTH, because of network load but also CPU (and marginally RAM, though modern browsers are mostly to blame for that).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#445

Post by tehbeard »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #338
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

Reddit appears to be actively trying to hurt the mobile experience. They bought the best iPhone reddit app, and removed it from the store entirely. They are also currently trialling a version of the mobile site that does not work at all if you aren't logged in. Personally I'd prefer they just show ads on mobile than make the experience suck on purpose.

I use to get the desktop version on my tablet (nexus 7, 2013). It worked fine, though swapping to .compact was a little easier to use.

For the last month, it's given me the new mobile version. It never remembers that I don't want to try their app (and the opt out link is both tiny and right under the giant yes please button)

But the worse part? I'm on a fast home connection, and the mobile site gives the same loading/network experience as being in the Welsh countryside.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#446

Post by wingerlang »

chrismorgan wrote: post #404
E6300 wrote: post #33

> The main table in this post is almost 50kB of HTML Just for fun, I just took a screenshot of that table and made a PNG with indexed colors: 21243 bytes.

And converted to using single-character class names and reducing the CSS needed, it can be down to about 3KB, sans-compression. (I manually minified the whole source; the original is 53313 bytes, 12438 gzipped, while my minified source is 25628, 10124 gzipped. Most of the bloat in the tables compresses really well, as is common with such things.)

Out of curiosity, how did you do it? I did as well, and I used Sublimes multi-cursor functionality + some manual work to replace classes where it should be. Mainly because i saw an interesting problem and I like (love) using the psuedo automation tool that is Sublime 2.

Just curious how you went about it, if it was /all/ manual or some interesting technique.

My result was not too shabby, 7kb I think it was when I stopped due to the time cropping up.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#447

Post by nannal »

brownbat wrote: post #397
kevinwang wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I don't really see the similarity

Both describe unexpected effects when trying to extrapolate from price and quantity involved in individual use cases. Jevons: Quantity required per use goes down, so you might expect total demand to decrease. Instead total consumption goes up. Giffen: Price per use goes up, so you might expect total demand to decrease. Instead, total consumption goes up. Either could increase consumption by displacing available subst…

And now with both of those things Baader-Meinhof is going to be triggering every hour for the next month at least

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#448

Post by tmd83 »

fegul wrote: post #428
samuell wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understand…

In Ethiopia's case, it's not so much the connection speed in Addis. There's a great deal of interference from the national Deep Packet Inspection filters that leads to timed-out requests, reset TCP connections, etc. JS-heavy apps make a lot of requests to background servers and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang. It's quite frustrating and I would often load pages with the console open to see which req…

There can be whole lot of reason for this and it kind of make sense. What doesn't make sense is that for such a big company, such a big product thats the best Google/gmail can do. I can understand if scaling the gmail backend can be tough. I can appreciate gmails feature set of spam filtering, tagging but on the UI feature-set I don't see anything that revolutionary that makes it (according the chrome task manager) the heaviest tab in my browser ~500MB. I think thats to the point of shameful.

I think the standard of whats considered slow, bloated, complex has become absurd. I think if the processor companies today release processors that say improves the single thread performance 10 times in two years gmails and facebooks of the world will eat all that up with marginal improvement in functionality. I'm talking about the client side, in the server side yeah they may make 10 times more complex analysis though most likely 80% will go to feeding us more accurate ad.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#449

Post by kalleboo »

whiddershins wrote: post #50

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.…

Back in my dialup days (90's), I used to use Opera since it had great tools for dealing with poor connections. E.g. IIRC you could have it only show images that were already cached, with a handy button to async load in new images that weren't already displayed.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#450

Post by estsauver »

witty_username wrote: post #430
tangue wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only about connection speed but also about infrastructure. If you look at this map https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ you'll see that your packets have a looong way to reach their data center. AWS is no better than Google on this point. Guess it's not bankable

That only adds about 200-300ms RTT I'd guess. I live in India and use many websites which are hosted in the US, and they work fine.

(Hello from Kenya)

There are usually CDN nodes in India. Cloudfront has edge nodes there, google's cdn does.

There's also a Mumbai AWS datacentre.

When you get far away from the common edges, it gets real noticeable.

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