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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

#571

Post by StavrosK »

flukus wrote: post #570
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…

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

I will, it's still early so I hadn't taken a look. To be honest, since this is hosted on Netlify I was kind of assuming they'd be sending caching headers for all static files, but I see that they aren't.

I'll look into it, thank you!

EDIT: Netlify would be setting everything properly if I hadn't turned that off... Luckily they have great support!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#572

Post by milesrout »

angry-hacker wrote: post #524
milesrout wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. SMS isn't archaic. 2. 140-char limit isn't about SMS.

1. 1992 in archaic. 2. Officially it was, not it's just stupid and unneccessary.

SMS isn't archaic any more than writing is archaic. They're both not brand new, and they're both widely used today.

VHS is archaic.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#573

Post by milesrout »

angry-hacker wrote: post #524
milesrout wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. SMS isn't archaic. 2. 140-char limit isn't about SMS.

1. 1992 in archaic. 2. Officially it was, not it's just stupid and unneccessary.

The 140-character limit was INITIALLY because of SMS, but now it's just the standard format for the medium. The whole point of Twitter is the 140-char limit.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#574

Post by ClassyJacket »

lucb1e wrote: post #442
ClassyJacket wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 35Mbit cable got shaped down to 0.25 Mbit/s yesterday because we went over our download limit. It was like having no connection. I just gave up using it. I hate the all-or-nothing approach to shaping. At least give me 5Mbit or something!

5mbps is a perfectly fine connection, they might as well not throttle you at all then. If they want to give you barely-usable internet, about 500kbps might be reasonable. 250kbps is quite slow indeed.

I wouldn't call 5mbps "perfectly fine", but I could do basic web browsing and email etc. And that's my point. I don't want to be shaped down to a barely-usable connection. Why do they need to shape at all? The only argument is congestion. And if there's congestion, they should shape us down to a reasonable level like 5mbps. No reason it should be all or nothing, 35Mbit or zero.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#575

Post by i336_ »

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.

That would be interesting to hear more about.

AFAIK all sound drivers in Windows accepted standard PCM data.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#576

Post by i336_ »

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…

Very interesting.

I would suggest swapping the current structural aesthetic of "come in and look around" for the somewhat more widespread approach of having one or more calls to action and making the homepage fully sketch out the points you want to make.

FWIW, I say this out of pragmaticness. I don't mind the "welcome! browse!" approach myself, but it won't appeal to the demographic you're trying to reach: people who themselves are being paid to eat/sleep/dream modern web design.

Another thing I would recommend is using every single trick in the book to make the site fast. For example you could get ServiceWorkers caching everything for future visits (with maybe AppCache on top just because) and use the HTML5 history API so you can preload all the site text (say, in an XHR that fires after page load) and use that to make it feel like navigation is superhumanly fast.

TL;DR, use this as your playground to learn how to make sites load better. Voila, the site will be stupidly fast, and it will self-describe too, which is kind of cool. And you'll wind up with a bunch of knowledge you could use for consulting... and then you could use the site as the home base for that, which would be even cooler.

(I realize you just started this project, and that the above suggestions are in the "Rome wasn't built in a day" category)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#577

Post by castratikron »

Namrog84 wrote: post #96
ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics. A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.

>This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics.

The average human has, on average, one testicle and one ovary, but there aren't many humans who can actually fit this description.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#578

Post by Uristqwerty »

mueslix wrote: post #489

Instead of making sites that try to predict the unpredictable, I'd rather ask the question if TCP is still the right tool to use. There shouldn't be a reason for a big page with many resources to not load - it should just be slower. Yet I can make the same observations as soon as my mobile signal drops to EDGE: the internet is essentially unusable as soon as there's packet loss involved and the roundtrip-times increa…

Rather than a "TCP2" that, based on name alone, would be far too likely to aim for semi-backwards compatibility but tweak a few things to be slightly better in general but mostly just better for the specific use cases of the one or three top contributing companies, why not just push for the adoption of one of the existing alternative transport layer protocols?

For example, there's SCTP. From what little I've read about it, it seems as if it has most of the benefits of both TCP and UDP, with the main downside that some firewalls and routers may need to be upgraded. Being an existing protocol, however, there are already working implementations and some amount of network support. Maybe it's even fully usable as-is today!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#579

Post by tluyben2 »

franciscop wrote: post #492
tluyben2 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Not only Spain; most of the EU.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#580

Post by ge96 »

Yeah I take my 100Mbps connection lightly, developing an image-oriented web app for the Philippines and holy crap the one guy was lucky to get 0.3Mbps.

So... had to severely redo the code to pull 50px wide images, blur them in, and only load the visible (depending on screen dimension) then a 2-second max refresh thingyyyy (yeah I'm just making this loader-interrupter thing) it's been a mess I feel pretty stupid sometimes. Why can't I get this... JavaScript. Yeap I am lucky to have Google Fiber (and I have the cheaper plan too)

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