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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

#531

Post by tmd83 »

iLoch wrote: post #16

> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…

Its not just about plain text vs. content. Its about doing things at least reasonably efficiently. I commented about gmail taking 500MB on Chrome in another comment. I just checked Mail.app it started with 200MB. I wonder whats the energy budget of all the bloated website and their parsing is on millions of computers. The server side computation allows economy of scale and might have saved cpu cycles for the actual work but I'm sure many times more than that has been wasted by a bloated web.

I don't disagree that web and web applications provide a lot of convenience and I don't want to loose that. But I don't think for a moment that things can't be significantly more efficient.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#532

Post by HorizonShadow »

etatoby wrote: post #510

I design and write my company's framework, that other devs use to write websites and webapps. I base my work on existing technologies (lately Laravel, which means Symfony, Gulp, and hundreds of other great libraries) but I always strive to: 1. Reduce the number of requests per page, ideally down to 1 combined and compressed CSS, 1 JS that contains all dependencies, 1 custom font with all the icons. Everything except…

I would say a lot of people disregard internet speeds when creating websites. Just check the source of any random website, and you're going to see jquery loaded, where it's either not being used at all, or using a single function in the entire library.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#534

Post by CaptSpify »

gkya wrote: post #514
CaptSpify wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can agree with this. I was talking about people who know how to code, but you make a good point.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#535

Post by beefield »

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.

> It seems to me that Giffen goods are a theoretical thing that has never been actually shown in real world

In practical terms (that may not fill the theoretical definition of the giffen good), spare time in certain circumstances is quite obviously a Giffen good. Once your income increases (which means the opportunity cost of your spare time increases), you are willing to work less, i.e. consume more spare time. Of course, this is not a universal rule, but I think it is obvious that for _many_ people this is the case. If it was _not_ the case, there was no way people in sweatshops work longer hours than western middle class.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#536

Post by gwu78 »

"Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text..."

Yes.

My kernel, userland, third party software and configuration choices, the entire way in which I use the computer, are optimized for consuming plain text.@1

As a consequence, the web is very fast for me compared to a user with a graphical browser. This is why every time some ad-supported company claims they are offering a means to "make the web faster" it makes them appear to me as even more dishonest. They are, at least indirectly, the ones who are responsible for slowing it down. They are promising to fix a problem they created, but will never really deliver on that promise. Conflict of interest.

@1 I find there is no better way to optimize for fast, plain text web consumption than to work with a slow connection. It is like when a batsman warms up with weights on the bat. When he takes the weights off, the bat feels weightness, and the velocity increases. When I spend a year or so on a slow connection and adjust everything I do to be as bandwidth efficient as possible, then when I get on a "fast" connection, the speed is incredible.

I also use the same technique with hardware, working with a small, resource constrained computer. When I switch to a larger, more powerful one, such as a laptop, the experience is that I instantly have an enormous quantity of extra memory and screen space, for free. I do not need a HDD/SSD to work. My entire system and storage fits easily in memory.

Now if I do the opposite, if everyday I only worked on a large, powerful computer with GB's of RAM with a fast connection, then switching to anything less is going to be an adjustment that will require some time. I would spend significant time making necessary adjustments before I could get anything else done.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#537

Post by Humdeee »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #336
stuckagain wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used both, I'll take the 2G mobile over the 56k modem every time.

I just looked up EDGE. It's crazy to think that the first iPhone topped out at double the speed of a 56k modem. And that I actually used my iPhone on that network sometimes, when 3G wasn't available.

I had a blackberry a bit before the first iPhone. I remember getting an update wirelessly that was something like 3MB and just thought "Good, it should only be about 10 minutes this time."

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#538

Post by kps »

23443463453 wrote: post #67
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…

It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices. Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better soluti…

Chrome's Developer Tools has throttling options immediately available in the Network tab.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#539

Post by CaptSpify »

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.

This drives me INSANE.

I'd rather let it buffer for 10 min, then watch it in 360p because you guys can't figure out your buffering. The same goes for netflix!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#540

Post by PatentTroll »

tmd83 wrote: post #448
fegul wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) t…

That's why fastmail is such a breath of fresh air. It has lots of features and is wicked fast.
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