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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

#591

Post by aethertron »

gnarly wrote: post #389
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…

Simple. Design your webpages to only load the functional lighter weight essential stuff by default. Then use javascript to add in all the large assets you want. Users with slow connections can browse with javascript turned off.

I like this solution.

Unfortunately there is little consistency in how well browsers accommodate JS-less browsing. Firefox removed the ability to switch off JS from its standard settings panel. Brave lets you switch JS on/off for each domain from the prominent lionface button panel.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#592

Post by hobarrera »

PatentTroll wrote: post #540
tmd83 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I'm actually really impressed at how fast and responsive the UI is. As a user, it's probably one of the most responsive and functional UX's I've used in years.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#593

Post by tepmoc »

Uristqwerty wrote: post #578
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 abo…

SCTP can't go through NAT (there is ietf draft in works for that). But SCTP already exist in your favorite browser Chrome, Firefox both use usrsctplib (https://github.com/sctplab/usrsctp) to provide sctp over udp for webrtc signaling.

But there also need to be sctp over udp over dtls (or just sctp over dtls) happen as you can't use TLS with SCTP unordered mode or multihoming.

SCTP slowly gain traction in userspace besides being only in mobile operator networks (lte)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#594

Post by niutech »

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…

There are two ways:

1. Serve the AMP version of your page (https://www.ampproject.org) which uses lazy loading and other optimizations

2. Use the Network Information API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...) to load heavy assets only on high bandwidth connections.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#595

Post by niutech »

curun1r wrote: post #264
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…

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…

You can get the network type or downlink speed in Firefox and Chrome using NetworkInformation interface: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...

Then you can lazy load your assets depending on that condition.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#596

Post by ddebernardy »

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…

Here's a proxy: buy a 1st-gen iPad, turn JS off, and then use it to browse the site.

If it crashes the device, you're way off.

If it's appreciably slow or clunky, find ways to improve it.

Iterate until it's fast and usable.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#597

Post by Applejinx »

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.

The sense I get is that it's an elaborate way to soften people up for abandoning their ISPs and going with Google Fiber. There's a whole system of alerts and pages for basically saying 'LOL ur internetz sux', and it's plausible to me that they'd get that in place in markets they've not currently entered yet.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#598

Post by molsongolden »

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…

Have you tried the HTML version of Gmail?

https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

I've used this on my kindle keyboard while traveling but the free data speed might still have been faster than 32kbps.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#599

Post by i336_ »

StavrosK wrote: post #590
i336_ wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's funny that you mention that, because I just wanted to have a site I could optimize to hell, and it seemed apt to make an informational site about optimization for that . AppCache is obsolete and harmful now (yes, already), and I should link to the articles that talk about that, thanks for reminding me. As for the "come browse" approach, you're definitely right, and I don't intend the finished site to look like t…

I've wanted to play around with some similar ideas for a while too, actually. I have a few loose high-level ideas - I know I want it to feel like an app, but I want to use plain JS; I want to leverage everything modern browsers can support, while remaining backward-compatible (!); I want to try odd things like using Lua inside nginx for everything (or even writing my own web server), or programmatically reorganizing my CSS and JS so runs of similar characters are grouped together and gzipping has the best effect. I also have a hazy idea of what I want the site to be about (not a content site, some sort of interactive thing) but I haven't resolved all the "but if you make it about X, it doesn't really nail all those bits about Y you wanted" stuff yet. Anyway.

Thanks for the note that AppCache is now out of the picture. I actually think I remember reading something vaguely about it being not the greatest, but I didn't know it was actively harmful. Do you mean in a security sense or it just being bad for performance?

I wasn't sure what to say about the content structure thing at first, but then I thought: take the pragmatic approach. Gather piles and piles and piles of actual content and dump it either on the site itself or your dev version. Notions about structure, presentation and content will likely occur in the process of accumulating (or writing) what's on the site.

As for what kind of content to put up, I would suggest focusing heavily on links to (and/or articles about) pragmatic, well-argued/well-reasoned arguments for lightening page load, and the various kinds of real-world metrics that are achieved when people make the investment to do that.

An obvious example: it's one thing to say "I recommend http://vanilla-js.com!", it's quite another to say "YouTube lightened their homepage weight from 1.5MB to 98KB and made it possible for brand new demographics in 3rd-world countries to experience video playback (http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters). Also, the reason the site feels so fast now when you click from one video to the next is that the platform only pulls in the new video URL, comments and description - the page itself never reloads."

Regarding where to start, I was thinking that a mashup/ripoff of halfway between https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/ and MDN might be an interesting target to aim for. I'm definitely not saying to [re-]do that much work (although I wouldn't be protesting if someone did... some of those Fundamentals tutorials are horribly out of date now), I'm just saying, the way that info is presented could do with cleanup and you can always run rings around them in various ways (layout, design, navigational hierarchy) because of bureaucracy blah blah... but you could do worse than aiming for something that feels like those sites do. Except you'd be focusing on making everything as lightweight as possible, and you would of course make the site your own as time went by. Maybe what I'm trying to get at here is that nobody's done a full-stack (as in, "bigger picture") top-to-bottom "here's how to do everything lightweight, and here are a bunch of real resources" sort of site yet, and I'm suggesting the lightweight-focused version of Google Web Fundamentals... :/

On a related note, I've come across a few websites that are nothing more than a bunch of links and a tiny bit of text describing some technical/development issue or whatever. They almost feel like spam sites, except they talk about legitimate issues and are clearly written by a person.

I'm sure these people mean well, but the low-text high-link format (or the "I'm going to rewrite what's in this link in my own words" approach) doesn't work for blog sites (possibly because of WordPress's 10000-clicks-to-get-a-high-level-overview browsing model...tsk) and similar - I'm trawling for actual text when I'm on a site like that, if you give me a link I'm not even on your website anymore.

You've probably seen sites like that too. (Note that I'm slightly griping here, I don't see your site as similar at all. I think I got a bit off track, I was trying to demonstrate the exact opposite of the direction I would suggest you go in. :P)

Also, I just thought of https://www.webpagetest.org and https://jsperf.com. Arguably microoptimization-focused, but I thought I'd mention them anyway.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#600

Post by i336_ »

j_s wrote: post #547
etatoby wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMail has a HTML-only version that is much more lightweight and usable on slow / flaky connections. It's worth it to memorize or bookmark the address, in case you ever need it: http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ (on mobile browsers you need to "request desktop version" and then paste the address again, before you can see it)

Thank you for sharing this link. Here is a related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513388 My problem with accessing the low-bandwidth Google tools with archaic browsers ( http://dplus-browser.sourceforge.net/ , etc.) is that Google still requires the high-bandwith login. Are you aware of any alternative login URLs or authentication mechanisms?

I just tried the two-year old 3.4-dev copy of NetSurf I had buried on this computer, and was able to login to Gmail's Basic HTML.
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