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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

#551

Post by hinkley »

hexane360 wrote: post #417
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…

Of course, you could spring for the high capacity Netflix plan.

Alas, I bought a new TV just before 4K was a thing. It saved me the temptation of buying one while they were so expensive. The HD level is good enough for me.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#552

Post by pmlnr »

Tade0 wrote: post #346

Kudos to the author for making the post readable using a 32kbps connection. My apartment does not have a landline, not to mention any other form of wired communication, so my internet connection is relegated to a Wi-Fi router that's separated by two walls(friendly neighbour) and a GSM modem that, after using the paltry 14GB of transfer it provides, falls back to a 32kbps connection. Things that work in these circumst…

gmail _could_ work: use the IMAP endpoint with an offline client. If you need to use mailing on an 56k connection, it's either Squirrelmail or regular mail clients.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#553

Post by CaptSpify »

hinkley wrote: post #550
CaptSpify wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

They try to match the resolution to your bandwidth. Sometimes that's the right solution, but not always. When the playback stalls right at the big reveal it can be painful, but that doesn't mean I want to watch the minecraft edition of the movie the whole time

And, as most things, I'd rather have the choice. If you want to default to auto-configured resolution, that's fine. But give me the choice to override if I want!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#554

Post by dormento »

btbuildem wrote: post #528
bartread wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Nothing controversial here, it's common sense. Most web stuff is built by total amateurs figuring things out as they go.

I'd like to complement: most _stuff_ is built by total amateurs winging it.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#556

Post by NoGravitas »

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 think your 2, 2b, and 3 are absolutely spot on, and it is amazing the extent to which web developers go out of their way not to do these things.

I'm going to slightly disagree with 1, though. It's somewhat important now, but should become less so as http2 gets more widely used.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#557

Post by SilasX »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #377
SilasX wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's technically true, but it assumes away the core, ever-present problems: - It may not be physically possible to add enough lanes to e.g. handle everyone who would ever want to commute into L.A. - Even if that road was correctly sized, it still has to dump the traffic into the next road, through the next intersection point. If you've increased the capacity of the freeway but none of smaller road networks that the…

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…

You're right -- I should have said "feasibly" rather than "physically" above. It's certainly physically possible, but requires a tradeoff I don't think many people would actually sign off on: blowing 3 years of budget for multi-deck freeway tunnels and having twelve-lane streets for most of the city, a parking garage for every block, and 95% of the city allocated to roads.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#558

Post by SilasX »

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.

Assuming "parking spaces" include one's home space (like garage or reserved spot), 3 should be expected, at least: home, work, and wherever you're visiting.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#559

Post by zelias »

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 don't completely agree. If you're working on an SPA that targets higher-income (e.g. better internet) consumers, a developer could be forgiven for doing as much as possible using JS. I choose to sacrifice the I get that the web was designed to be optimized for HTML/CSS first, JS last. However, the web was also not originally designed to support web applications as complex as the marketplace currently supports. As the web matures as the only universal application platform (to compete with various native platforms), I think a paradigm shift is required -- towards replacing as much markup with programmatic code as possible. Such a paradigm shift is required for complex web applications to compete with native environments going forward.

Of course, none of this applies if your organization just requires static websites. Choose the right tool for the job, and all that.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#560

Post by Entangled »

Can't browsers provide a service like

txt://example.com

that shows web content in plain text, no images, no javascript, nothing, something like readability but directly without loading the whole page first?

It would also be good for mobile connections.

* Wikipedia should be the first site to offer that txt: protocol, Google second.

* Btw, hacker news is the perfect example of a text only site.

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