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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#561

Post by bonzini »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #345
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?

To put it another way, marginal efficiency increased but total efficiency went down, which is (to some) unintuitive. It's certainly rare to observe!

I saw a similar effect with really fast disks. If you make the kernel faster at passing requests down to the disk, a simple benchmark with one request at a time will be faster. However, with many requests at the same time and less time spent processing then, you now have more time to poll the disk for completed requests. Each time the kernel polls the disk, it will typically see fewer completed request than before your optimizations, and overall this can actually result in decreased throughput.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#562

Post by NoGravitas »

flukus wrote: post #408
adrianN wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

about:config -> browser.display.use_document_fonts = 0 I don't load fonts. I either don't notice a difference, or the fancy pants fonts are hard to read.

Ever run into trouble on sites that use font's for icons, like bootstrap ones?

It's a pain in the arse. Icon fonts are a Wrong Solution.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#563

Post by mfarris »

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…

UX guy here. I've always kept performance in mind. One of my pet phrases is that speed is part of design.

I've gotten a lot of blank stares.

That's why more designers don't bother: decision makers usually respond only to look/flashiness/branding.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#564

Post by kemps4 »

I live in a rural area. There are three options for internet - satellite (limited data allowance - but decent speed), dial-up or a local ISP with a Motorola canopy system. I chose the last option. I get 100 KB/sec max download speed (on a good day). Divide by the 4-5 people in the house regularly using the Internet and it gets really slow, really quick. Many times I just give up and shut the computer off or I browse using Lynx.

And nope - no cell phone signal here either..

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#565

Post by aperrien »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #308
Nas808 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

I played MP3's on a 486 DX4/100mhz. There was a setting in winamp I had to turn on (I think it was quality related) otherwise it would stutter and be generally unlistenable. Even with that setting turned on it pegged the CPU at about 100% the computer was unusable for anything else while the mp3 was playing. Trying to seek in the track would sometimes crash winamp. My Pentium 166 on the other hand was much more capab…

I think somewhere in that timeframe, standard soundcards adopted support for hardware playback of mp3 files.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#566

Post by nannal »

wolfgke wrote: post #529
nannal wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now with both of those things Baader-Meinhof is going to be triggering every hour for the next month at least

> And now with both of those things Baader-Meinhof is going to be triggering You know that Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were the main founders of the terrorist organization RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction)) in Germany. RAF was also the reason that grid investigation was used in the 70th (where lots of innocent people were accused wrongfully) after a RAF terror series, after which some constitutional…

So triggering^2

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#567

Post by erikpukinskis »

gabemart wrote: post #158

Something I have had at the back of my mind for a long time: in 2017, what's the correct way to present optional resources that will improve the experience of users on fast/uncapped connections, but that user agents on slow/capped connections can safely ignore? Like hi-res hero images, or video backgrounds, etc. Every time a similar question is posed on HN, someone says "If the assets aren't needed, don't serve them…

Which demographic likes large images that are not necessary for the task at hand?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#568

Post by bigger_cheese »

aperrien wrote: post #565
bigger_cheese wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played MP3's on a 486 DX4/100mhz. There was a setting in winamp I had to turn on (I think it was quality related) otherwise it would stutter and be generally unlistenable. Even with that setting turned on it pegged the CPU at about 100% the computer was unusable for anything else while the mp3 was playing. Trying to seek in the track would sometimes crash winamp. My Pentium 166 on the other hand was much more capab…

I think somewhere in that timeframe, standard soundcards adopted support for hardware playback of mp3 files.

I had a Soundblaster 16 in the 486

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#569

Post by flukus »

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…

> 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.

This might be an extreme example that won't work for other reasons, but generally adding more lanes will increase demand, so you still won't have enough lanes.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#570

Post by flukus »

StavrosK wrote: post #470
curun1r wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the thing that we'd want cooperation with the browser vendors rather than everyone hacking together some JS to make it happen. If browsers could expose the available bandwidth as a media query, it would be trivial to have different resources for different connections. This would also handle the situation where the available bandwidth isn't indicative of whether the user wants the high-bandwidth experi…

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…

Can I suggest you add caching to the css, javascript and logo?
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