Answer: Advertising
The current common implementation of advertising. You can serve ads that don't noticeably slow anything down.
Why is the Internet so Slow?
111–120 of 164 posts
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#112Because every time we get faster connections, we download more the client and force more client side processing. Angular and friends are just causing a worse user experience, not a better one. We also don't take advantage of DNS enough. We should/could use it to pass along information about the client's ISP to locate a server one or two hops away from the client. DNS could easily solve the IPV4 with SRV records, but…
How is angular making the web slower. An angular project can sit somewhere in the 130kb range, with lighter frameworks like vue sitting at 30kb. These are smaller than most images or gifs used on the web. So the trade-off is one image on your page, or a robust RIA experience, with much more maintainable code. If you build it correctly, you're decreasing the amount of bytes on the wire significantly when using client…
> So the trade-off is one image on your page, or a robust RIA experience
If I had the choice, I'd take an additional image in that trade, thanks. The 'rich' 'experiences' I've been offered so far are inferior to bog-standard web pages. I'll grant you that it is friendlier to coders whose applications fit the model. Beyond that, they don't work without Javascript[1]. The "richness" is usually useless animation and similar, frequently employed because it is there, rather than actually adding any value (Anyone remember the Jquery animation explosion?). It breaks a lot of automation; see the JS comment. These are all things that are important to me.
I get that folks are fine with losing me as a user/customer, and that's their choice. But they should know why, thus my explanation.
[1] Which means I usually go elsewhere when I encounter it, because I default to leaving it off.
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#113If the Internet moved as fast as the fastest thing in existence it would be faster. That's brilliant.
Internet Explorer might face hard times! :D
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't need to cut advertisements. Certainly, they could have as many as 10 advertisements, and only make requests to two domains---the ad network, and their own domain. Their page has a high number of requests primarily because they do not bundle their javascript, CSS, or icons. I see 95 requests that I see without adblocking, and about 20 of those requests are javascript coming out of their own WordPress instan…
I think a large contributor to this trend is a side effect of JavaScript, which is to perform library inclusion at runtime inside the browser. Think about it. If you include a gigantic library in a compiled language, but only use 3 of its features, the rest of the library doesn't make it into your final program. Only those three features that you used do, because that's the linker's job. It takes only the features of…
That's standard dead code elimination, and that's only true in static linking. Dynamic linking, which is far more popular, will load the entire library into memory. And then you get interesting hybrids like Java, where libraries are dynamically linked but only the classes that are actually used are loaded. [0]
The equivalent for dynamic languages is tree shaking, and is a harder or impossible problem depending on the language. When you can do something like the following in JavaScript, how do you determine what's dead or alive?
var fn = document.getElementById("function").value;
var input = document.getElementById("input").value;
var output = functions[fn](input);
document.getElementById("output").value = output;
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#115"Slow" internet is not so bad (especially when it is not really THAT slow). Limitations in connectivity force designers and developers (therefore large companies) to optimise things and save resources. Internet speed growth rate could be 5% (compounding) would be enough in order to provide a friendly environment for new frameworks, technologies in the field of network and web to benefit all.
Speedtest.net claims an increase of average internet speeds by 40% in 2016: http://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/
I'm curious how much of that is actual infrastructure improvements and how much is ISPs increasingly prioritizing traffic to speedtest.net.
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#116If you're thinking, "it's fast enough!" -- remember that a system's performance determines what you're able to build on top of it. If GPU designers had said "it's fast enough" ten years ago, for example, modern neural-net AI may never have happened. It's easy to imagine doing the same things faster, but it's harder to picture the new things that a lower-latency Internet would make possible.
I don't think anyone that has ever used Skype, VoIP, Facetime, etc has thought "this is fast enough".
Actually, I think ~10mbit is fast enough. You can easily use Hangouts/Skype with good quality video on that kind of link. The problems are elsewhere: it's not stable enough, and it's not responsive enough.
Anything faster is just a cherry on top. Sure, files download faster, you can stream 4k, etc. But I'd say that's luxury which you could choose. Lower speeds are "enough" for a lot of people.
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#117“Why are we so far from the speed of light?“
Because we don't know how to build an optical router with the same capabilities as the ones we use today and the alternative is to give up on net neutrality. I'm ignoring endpoint performance and protocol bloat.
There is work being done in quantum computing that might eventually lead to some CPU like device operating on photons alone and hollow core fiber optics also seem to be an active field. The work on upgrading the various protocols together with limiting network requests seem to be the way to go until our technology catches up.
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#118If the 3x slowdown from the infrastructure were eliminated, each round-trip-time being 3x faster would affect all the protocols above, and we could immediately cut the latency inflation from ~37x to around 10x, without any protocol modifications. The page this article is published on makes 87 separate network requests to 19 different domains. Even with a great deal of the content cached, it takes 7 seconds to reload…
What has always pissed me off is the global bandwidth overhead that ads have while not reducing the actual cost of connectivity to the average internet customer.
What percentage of my cellular data-consumption is specifically ads?
I need an app that tracks all data connections and tells me what percent went to which advertisers and a mechanism to block them or bill them to subsidize the cellular bill I pay for data, but that payment has a sizeable chuck allocated to my device displaying their ads.
Does anyone not recall the impetus behind the original paid cable tv model was that "you pay for the content of cable TV, thus we won't show you commercials"
The. They found out they could say "fuck you" to consumers, play commercials, hike up rates and also take in billions of government subsidies for infra upgrades that were never performed.
And companies wonder why some people want vigilante justice on such companies.
Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#119Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is angular making the web slower. An angular project can sit somewhere in the 130kb range, with lighter frameworks like vue sitting at 30kb. These are smaller than most images or gifs used on the web. So the trade-off is one image on your page, or a robust RIA experience, with much more maintainable code. If you build it correctly, you're decreasing the amount of bytes on the wire significantly when using client…
> So the trade-off is one image on your page, or a robust RIA experience If I had the choice, I'd take an additional image in that trade, thanks. The 'rich' 'experiences' I've been offered so far are inferior to bog-standard web pages. I'll grant you that it is friendlier to coders whose applications fit the model. Beyond that, they don't work without Javascript[1]. The "richness" is usually useless animation and sim…
If I understand you right, your contention seems to be more with animation and 'fluff' rather than with MV* frameworks like Angular specifically. To which I'll simply say: in some cases animation is as important to the user experience as an additional image would be, and in some cases the additional image just contributes more 'fluff' than the animation or interactivity would. There are many dimensions to the problem (and the article only hints at some of them on the protocol side), and pinning JavaScript frameworks as the cause strikes me as unfair.
What you're really asking for is for the components being used, be they images, animations of frameworks, to be used with a deliberate purpose. Which I think is what everyone is asking for, and what good developers and designers strive for.