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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

#491

Post by clarry »

brilliantcode wrote: post #29
lotyrin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, they don't even look that great. Lots of sites could be using lots of modern browser features to be fairly innovative from a visual design and user experience standpoint, but it's mostly just really inefficient (and inaccessible, with no compat fallbacks) implementations of the same old shit.

yes lot of these web pages are the size of mp3 files. it's just fucked up. we decided static html webpages are sooo 1999. Yet it remains the most secure and user friendly medium to deliver value. bring back the 1999 frame side bar. what was wrong with that?

> bring back the 1999 frame side bar. what was wrong with that?

That's funny. Back in the day, every Real web developer learned that frames are Evil and must be abolished, because they are breaking the back button and now the poor user can't provide a link to the view he sees, because the state of all the frames isn't encoded in the URL.

Then web2.0 happened and all the Cool web devs knew it's the time to start abusing ajax, use modal dialogs, break the back button, and turn simple websites serving text and images into complex stateful web apps and in doing so, ensure that people don't have nice URLs that encode the view they see, for linking.

Hello??

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#492

Post by franciscop »

tluyben2 wrote: post #421
franciscop wrote: post #72

I totally agree. I used to have a really bad mobile connection up until a few years ago (Spain), and still when I use up all my mobile internet it reverses to 2G. So I know the pain and decided I wouldn't do the same to my users as a web developer. I created these projects from that: - Picnic CSS: http://picnicss.com/ - Umbrella JS (right now website in maintenance): http://github.com/franciscop/umbrella Also I wrote…

Where did you live in Spain? In Spain my mobile internet is far better than, let's say, in parts of the UK I work, let alone in China. And I live in the mountains down south, an hour away from the nearest city. Best so far have been Thailand + Cambodia. Just blazing fast, even in the rainforest with multiple laptops/phones tethered and cheap as chips. If I can have anywhere between 3G/4G stable, everything I need (in…

In Valencia, but this was around 4 years ago and I had a data plan that was also 3-4 years old because I used wifi almost everywhere. As I was a student back then the only problem was the bus from my home to the university and back.

I was with Hacker Paradise for 3 months through SE Asia and I totally agree. I have screenshots yet-to-tweet comparing the great packages from Thailand with the prices in Spain and it's absolutely ridiculous.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#493

Post by acdha »

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…

Two minor points: GPRS is 36-112Kbps and EDGE is faster still, so the 90s modem comparison seems apt to me. Latency is terrible so the player page loading slowly but the actual video playing is entirely plausible since that's the best case network traffic profile. Other technological improvements help, too: H.264 is much better than the codecs like MPEG-1 used for things like the infamous exploding whale video.

The bigger point was simply that people will wait for things they want. Not being able to load instantly changed the style of interaction but not the desire to listen to or watch things and there's far more content available than there used to be. Tell teenagers that the cool music video is available and you'll find a lot of slow downloads over their entire day at school, work, etc.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#495

Post by nailer »

agumonkey wrote: post #488
nailer wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. I see the commonality as being "it's so fast it's hard to tell any work was done" - whether the user is trying to gauge whether their actions had any effect or whether something is worth paying for.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#496

Post by tr1ck5t3r »

NoScript still reports back to Google.

JavaScript is just a means to offload the server workload onto your desktop. If people didn't use javascript, you'd see the need for more data centres, which isn't good for some businesses and helps explains why the internet is slow in some parts of the world.

Still considering how much the US spends on military toys, you'd have thought those warmongers could get more peace by keeping everyone entertained & busy with a good internet connection.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#498

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

Scott Alexander has some examples of that in his post:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

For example:

> Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#499

Post by yoz-y »

lmm wrote: post #485
yoz-y wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to the article:

> To be a true Giffen good, the good's price must be the only thing that changes to produce a change in quantity demanded. A Giffen good should not be confused with products bought as status symbols or for conspicuous consumption (Veblen goods)

Veblen goods = Goods for which demand rises with price because they are status symbols Giffen = Goods for which demand rises with price - Veblen Goods

However there are no examples there that hold, to me this signifies that the only goods for which the law of demand does not apply are status symbols.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#500

Post by TeMPOraL »

D_Alex wrote: post #351
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?

The supply and demand "law" refers to the observation that the price of a good settles at a point where the available supply (which increases as the price goes up) matches the demand (which decreases as the price goes up). Jevons Paradox is only tangentially related. It is based on the observation that sometimes using a resource more efficiently results in higher overall consumption. For example, say 40 kg of lithium…

Not to mention that reducing the cost of batteries may lead to new classes of devices suddenly making sense as battery-powered (instead of corded or gasoline-powered), leading to increased demand for batteries.
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