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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

#511

Post by bartread »

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…

I may get flamed for pointing this out either by people who are offended by the viewpoint, or by those who find it so bleeding obvious as to not be worth stating, but those page hangs (and I know exactly what you mean) are really down to poorly architected and implemented front-ends rather than an inherent flaw with JavaScript-heavy apps and pages.

Any time you do an XHR you can supply both a success and a failure callback and, if you care at all about your users, the failure callback can come in handy for error recovery, handing off to a retry mechanism, etc.

Modern web apps can be a lot more like fat client apps, just running in a browser. Even there, there's no inherent need for them to be unusable, even over relatively slow connections. A lot of it comes down to latency, and the number of requests going back and forth between client and server, often caused by the sheer quantity of assets many sites load (I'm looking at YOU, almost every media site on the Internet).

I seem to spend my life citing this paper, from 1996, but "It's the latency, stupid" is still relevant today: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#512

Post by gkya »

danappelxx wrote: post #111
zeveb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy. I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'

Well, that's quite unfair. JavaScript is also used for creating interactive web applications - not just tracking users. Really your attitude comes off unnecessarily aggressive.

How can one know that first time viewing a webpage? I just enable some particular websites to run JS because I know that they are indeed interactive web applications that I want to (read: have been constrained to) use. Also, most interactive web applications can stay just as interactive even though they were to reduce the amount of JS and CSS libs, fonts, images, icons, videos and other stuff that they thoughtlessly pull in. I disabled fonts loading on webpages and all the search boxes are now an "fl" ligature for me, though many times I see that it's not more cryptic then before I disabled fonts, because weird icons some people invented are just as meaningless to me as random letters. I've gotten used to the fact that an identity sign is for a meny, but every other day someone invents another one that now I can't click anything without fear and uncertainty, as most of the time no-one bothers to put a tooltip or a litte label.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#513

Post by pjc50 »

slededit wrote: post #223
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your memory of the late 90's is actually from the early 90's ;) I remember the first realtime mp3 player on Windows, Fraunhofer IIS' WinPlay3, which launched in '95. Then Winamp came out in '97 and blew our minds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

Seems about right; I could play mp3s on my Libretto 30, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder, Winamp wasn't quite optimised enough.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#514

Post by gkya »

CaptSpify wrote: post #175
davesque wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically speaking, I think it's much more appropriate to just assume the admins are lazy.

I'll respectfully disagree with you. It takes more work to have a bloated JS mess of a site, than it is to have a small, simple, clean site. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot in the first place.

Quite the opposite actually, people don't know how to set up a website, let aside making a simple, static one. Many websites are created on services like Squarespace, wordpress (used by many as a CMS), CMSes, Blogger, etc. And then for who knows to edit text files, it's easy to start with a tutorial and end up with a +1Mb hello-world website.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#515

Post by gkya »

nindalf wrote: post #330
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still should make sure low speed works. But try convincing some privileged 20 something developer of that.

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…

What is an ageism? People are always inventing new ways to get offended...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#516

Post by gkya »

It sucks if you have a fast connexion too, because then your CPU and RAM suffer instead. And as you add addons to rectify the many offending web pages, then the performance penalty of those quickly equal to that of crappy JS. I was so happy with Xombrero as my browser, but it's stagnant and insecure now. I do like my Firefox but with all the blocking addons it's slow, and without them it's slower (not that it's its fault).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#517

Post by CalRobert »

tim333 wrote: post #476
CalRobert wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're already empty most of the time, for what it's worth.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#518

Post by scaryclam »

CaptSpify wrote: post #192
diggan wrote: post #39

Something that sticks out looking at the table. How can some sites simply FAIL loading? I mean, there is something inherently wrong with our web today, where if my internet is very slow and _could_ load a page in 80 seconds if I just leave it like that, the server itself could have configured the timeout to be 60 seconds. So I can never load the page?! The assumption is here that both points of the connection is base…

I heard this somewhere on HN, but websites should fail like escalators, not like elevators. Too many people design sites like elevators though.

I'm going to steal this comparison :)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#519

Post by scaryclam »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #406
20years wrote: post #23

Most of the web really sucks on fast internet connections too. Thanks to so many web developers thinking every dang thing needs to be a single page app using a heavy JavaScript framework. Add animation, badly optimized images and of course ads and it becomes really unbearable. We keep repeating our same mistakes but just in a different way.

I saw a sarcastic comment a while back saying that webdevs should be forced to work on a Pentium II machine and they would cut their bullshit, I laughed, and moved on. But after seeing many examples where sites were built on huge iMacs with no care for users running off a battery, slower network connection or with an average 1366x768 display I somewhat agree with the sentiment.

I tend to run web frontends in lynx (or links) to see if they can degrade well enough. If the core user flows don't/can't work then there's a big problem with the UI.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#520

Post by StavrosK »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #501
StavrosK wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Greece, the internet is plenty fast (in bandwidth), but everything is far away, so there's lots of latency in opening every page. Going to the US on a trip, it's striking how much faster every website loads, there's no 300ms pause at the start anywhere. Because I got frustrated at fat websites downloading megabytes of useless things, I decided to start an informational site about this very thing: http://www.l…

Thanks for the links to lightweight CSS and JS libs; I actually need exactly that right now for a project. Gitlab link is 500-ing, unfortunately.

Ah, oops :/ Seems to be okay now, let me know if there's something else you need! I'm looking for ideas on how to organize the docs/site at the moment.
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