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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

#471

Post by hefty »

milesrout wrote: post #459
hinkley wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when Netflix was young, and I had slow internet, that if you queued up a movie and then paused it, it would continue to load. So you'd pick a movie, queue it up (literally) and then go make snacks and get situated. When the bar looked long enough you'd start watching. Then if it stalled (which it would do like clockwork every evening around 8 pm) you'd take an intermission. By the time I got stuck wi…

Yes, back when things actually buffered properly on the internet. The way YouTube buffers now: not actually loading more than a few seconds of the video ahead of where I'm watching, even when it KNOWS my internet is spotty, really frustrates me.

You could install the YouTube Plus browser extension and check "disable DASH playback" in the settings. Then if you start playing a video for a second or two and pause it, it will buffer the entire thing. The only downside is I think it reduces the maximum video quality for all videos to 720p.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#472

Post by abricot »

rev_bird wrote: post #415
curun1r wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the thing that we'd want cooperation with the browser vendors rather than everyone hacking together some JS to make it happen. If browsers could expose the available bandwidth as a media query, it would be trivial to have different resources for different connections. This would also handle the situation where the available bandwidth isn't indicative of whether the user wants the high-bandwidth experi…

>If browsers could expose the available bandwidth I don't know why this seems like such an imposition, but I think I'd be uncomfortable with my browser exposing information about my actual network if it didn't have to. I have a feeling way more people would be using this to track me than to considerately send me less data. That said, browser buy-in could be a huge help, if only to add a low-tech button saying, "reque…

This sounds just like the idea that the website should be able to know how much power you had left on your device, so it could serve a lighter version of the webpage.

I think the arguments against are pretty much the same.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#474

Post by yoz-y »

wyc wrote: post #344
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

Wow, uncanny resemblance to Giffen goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

From the wikipedia article I gather that the only Giffen goods that were actually shown to exist are the Veblen goods and thus disqualify as Giffen goods. It seems to me that Giffen goods are a theoretical thing that has never been actually shown in real world (as the article states, all of the proposed examples were discarded).

The case of website cost going down and demand going up seems pretty standard.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#475

Post by mathgenius »

I wonder if there is room for a product, a kind of browser-in-a-website, that would eat those big-ass webpages (server-side) and spit out just the text and (heavily compressed) jpegs. With a little layout to match the original website. Something like how streaming services adaptively subsample data, or like how NX tries to compress the X window protocol. Obviously this would be patchy, but it could be much better than "FAIL".

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#476

Post by tim333 »

CalRobert wrote: post #468
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't physically impossible to use eminent domain to seize all the property around the roads and then build 32 lane roads all over Los Angeles. That is a separate question from how stupid that is in comparison to the alternative of building higher density residential housing closer to where people work and with better mass transit. But if people don't want to do that either , you have to pick your poison. And ther…

Also, one thing that's often forgotten is that roads take up space. A lot of it. You make your roads bigger to accommodate more people, and all of your buildings wind up farther apart as a result. When buildings are farther apart you have to drive farther, meaning that everyone's journeys are longer, meaning more traffic... and on and on it goes. 14 percent of LA county (not just city!!) is parking. http://www.cityla…

Gosh, 3.3 parking spaces per car (citilab article). That's be some space to free up when they're self driving.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#477

Post by bigbugbag »

antisthenes wrote: post #186
acdha wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.

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…

IIRC in 1997 (was it 1996?) this thing called webcasting made lifecasting possible, Jennicam and Amandacam come to mind. Then there was stileproject and its treasure trove of videos, Not mentioning internet porn videos that people burned onto CDs to sell to people without internet.

Internet video has been a thing a while before youtube got released hoping to capture enough of this thing through offering to host it for free in the hope to be bought later by one of the big players.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#478

Post by inian »

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…

this was in relation to Project Feather of the Youtube - the Youtube website did not even load before for them and when it did, they started watching more videos even though it took more than 20 seconds to load!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#479

Post by blixt »

Aeolun wrote: post #425
rev_bird wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If browsers could expose the available bandwidth I don't know why this seems like such an imposition, but I think I'd be uncomfortable with my browser exposing information about my actual network if it didn't have to. I have a feeling way more people would be using this to track me than to considerately send me less data. That said, browser buy-in could be a huge help, if only to add a low-tech button saying, "reque…

I think if someone wants to track you, the bandwidth is not the first thing they'll be looking at. It's just another signal, but there's already a few tens of them, so adding one more is not going to make a significant difference.

If you consider every identifying piece of information as a bit in a fingerprint, it makes more than a significant difference; it makes an exponential difference. Consider the difference between 7 bits (128 uniques) and 8 bits (256 uniques) and then 15 bits (32K uniques) and 16 bits (65K uniques). Every additional bit makes a difference when fingerprinting a browser.
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