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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

#481

Post by agumonkey »

SilasX wrote: post #224
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…

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

Is there a negative counterpart for that ?

I remember turning an algorithm upside down, making it so fast, it went from "number crunching wonder" to "users saw nothing, this software is meh".

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#482

Post by nailer »

agumonkey wrote: post #481
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

Is there a negative counterpart for that ? I remember turning an algorithm upside down, making it so fast, it went from "number crunching wonder" to "users saw nothing, this software is meh".

Microsoft UX research found that with row adding in Excel. It was instant, so users weren't quite sure if it happened or if it happened correctly. Now it animates for that reason.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#483

Post by ComodoHacker »

gnud wrote: post #216
neuland wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One hack-y way to do it would be to load it via JavaScript. For example, see this stackoverflow [0]. Obviously not a great solution, but it works if your dying for something . I bet people w/ slow connections are much more likely to disable javascript, though. let loadTime = window.performance.timing.domContentLoadedEventEnd- window.performance.timing.navigationStart; if (loadTime > someArbitraryNumber) { // Disable…

It's too late to disable loading heavy things at that point - the loading is already started. Do the opposite, start loading heavy things if the page loaded quickly. A clean way would be to set one of two classes, connection-slow or connection-fast, on the body element. Then you could use those classes in CSS to choose the correct assets for background images, fonts and so on.

>start loading heavy things if the page loaded quickly

...and not loaded from cache. You need a way to determine this reliably. AFAIK there's no way to determine this for the main page itself.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#484

Post by milesrout »

hefty wrote: post #471
milesrout wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a 1920x1200 monitor, so yeah I don't think so lol.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#485

Post by lmm »

yoz-y wrote: post #474
wyc wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are you distinguishing between Giffen and Veblen goods? If you define Veblen in such a way that all Giffen goods are Veblen and then say that disqualifies them then of course you'll find there are no Giffen goods.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#486

Post by Figs »

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…

I use T-Mobile as my ISP because the only landline choice in my apartment building is AT&T and I absolutely refuse to do business with them. I regularly hit the monthly bandwidth cap on my plan and get booted down to 2G.

I live in California -- this is not just something people internationally are dealing with.

Annoyingly, T-Mobile's own website doesn't work properly when you're throttled to 2G speed. Found that out the hard way when I ran out of minutes on Thanksgiving and couldn't talk to my family, and couldn't load their website to add more minutes.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#487

Post by lmm »

samuell wrote: post #387
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 understand…

> 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].

How much disposable income will they have though? Most web products like those you describe are produced by businesses looking to make money.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#488

Post by agumonkey »

nailer wrote: post #482
agumonkey wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a negative counterpart for that ? I remember turning an algorithm upside down, making it so fast, it went from "number crunching wonder" to "users saw nothing, this software is meh".

Microsoft UX research found that with row adding in Excel. It was instant, so users weren't quite sure if it happened or if it happened correctly. Now it animates for that reason.

I believe that this is partly for ergonomic reasons, it's hard to track a grid changing instantaneously, animation allow for "analogous" traceability.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#489

Post by mueslix »

Instead of making sites that try to predict the unpredictable, I'd rather ask the question if TCP is still the right tool to use.

There shouldn't be a reason for a big page with many resources to not load - it should just be slower. Yet I can make the same observations as soon as my mobile signal drops to EDGE: the internet is essentially unusable as soon as there's packet loss involved and the roundtrip-times increase. Interestingly mosh often still works beautifully in such scenarios. So instead of focusing on HTTP2 or AMP (and other hacks) to make the net faster for the best-case scenario, I'd rather see improvements to make it work much more reliably in less than perfect conditions. Maybe it's time for TCP2 with sane(r) defaults for our current needs.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#490

Post by Bahamut »

acdha wrote: post #292
kuschku wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my throttled 2G connection, it’s ~2½ minutes, and because I rarely visit pages with AMP, it’s never cached.

I live in a major city, have an iPhone 6S with good LTE coverage according to benchmarks, etc. and still routinely have AMP take 15+ seconds to render after the HTML has been received. I don't know if that's Mobile Safari applying strict cache limits or an issue in Google's side but the sales pitch isn't delivering.

I have all of those as well, and AMP takes Sounds like either a configuration issue on your end or maybe your wireless carrier.
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