Browsers are pretty good at loading pages • Hacker News Board

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#141

Post by arthurcolle » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #109

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it's faster. The whole point of the article is that it's not true. It's not the only article that disproves it, and honestly, it's not difficult to notice it. Just go to any blog running off a static site generator; loading times of pure HTML webpages on good connection are so fast they whole thing outruns client-side page switches even if the page is already in memory.

Case in point, navigation on my site is pretty fast (to me, at least) and doesn't use much JS at all: https://www.stavros.io (I promise I'll reply to your email soon)

Scrolling on the hamburger buttons is in my opinion much smoother on your site than on sites that force you to click their links in the page itself. I'll have to check out the source when I get home, its overall a great UX with a focus on functionality over form, but the form is still nice enough to get the job done!

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#142

Post by visarga » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

You can also make a mess of server side nav. Just take a look at PyTorch documentation: 2.5MB of shit loaded in 26s. At least 10 fonts, 300KB of CSS and 455KB of JS. What I hate most about it is that the 'in page search' function doesn't work for many seconds after the page starts showing, and it's the only way to navigate such a long-ass page. Even with such a huge page most functions have no example of usage, it was better with the TurboPascal 7 help in the MS-DOS days.

https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/nn.html

Apparently I am not the only one who noticed this bad behaviour:

https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/20984

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#143

Post by claudiawerner » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

csande17 wrote: post #115

claudiawerner wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Describing an entire country as Socialist seems super opinionated to me. Not to mention the fact he's wrong; contrary to popular belief, "socialism" has been described as many things but the simple fact of offering healthcare, market regulations and some amount of free Internet access(?) - Socialism is a mode of production in which means of production are operated and managed (and some would say "owned") collectivel…

I, uh, was kidding about Canada being a socialist state... For what it's worth, I had a 128 kilobit connection in Canada because American T-Mobile plans give you one for free when you're outside the country.

Unfortunately it's not always clear who's joking and who's not; many (most?) people who feel the need to comment on socialism and capitalism have done very little reading in political philosophy.

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#144

Post by SilasX » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #139

SilasX wrote: post #132

> Most web browsers also store the pages you previously visited so you can quickly go back to them. Not anymore, they don’t. Most of the time I get a huge lag when I hit the back button as all kinds of stuff reloads. I’d prefer if the back button worked like going to a previous tab, where nothing has to reload, but they don’t work like that.

> Not anymore, they don't. Hell yes they do, it's the websites that make it impossible most of the time. Try it on a standard website that doesn't use many megabytes of resources (which it would evict for memory reasons). I notice it sometimes when using such websites, it's amazing how fast it feels compared to even so much as a 304 Not Modified round-trip.

No, they don't make it impossible, because browsers could just implement the same behavior as if I had opened the page in a new tab, and indeed, many people do (and are advised to do) this as a workaround.

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#145

Post by OkGoDoIt » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #106

trop wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps would be the classic example of client-side refresh working so well that it's now the universal choice. At the time, it was a revelation, as the Mapquest-ish predecessors (if I recall) required a click and server-side refresh to scroll or zoom the map. Of course the revelation here was that tags weren't what we needed to move a map, but rather a click-and-drag plus scroll-wheel behavior to explore a huge…

I think this can be generalized as: if you need to break out of "click and wait a moment and see a changed screen" paradigm, for something like a continuously scrolling map or a smoothly flowing server load graph, then you can make good use of client-side loading. If you are just trying to re-create it, don't.

Exactly. But why a blog platform or news site or other content-focused website would feel the need to do that is beyond me. Not everything on the internet needs to be an app.

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#146

Post by greenhatman » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #109

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it's faster. The whole point of the article is that it's not true. It's not the only article that disproves it, and honestly, it's not difficult to notice it. Just go to any blog running off a static site generator; loading times of pure HTML webpages on good connection are so fast they whole thing outruns client-side page switches even if the page is already in memory.

Case in point, navigation on my site is pretty fast (to me, at least) and doesn't use much JS at all: https://www.stavros.io (I promise I'll reply to your email soon)

It's not as fast as https://dev.to/, which is an SPA. I.e. client side routing.

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#147

Post by Blackstone4 » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

bhousel wrote: post #95

jakobegger wrote: post #3

I don't get client side navigation. It's a worse experience in every way. It's slow, often doesn't support things like command-click, it usually breaks the back button, and even if it doesn't it breaks the restoration of the scroll position. The only thing worse is a custom scroll UI. Why do people try to reinvent the most basic features of a webbrowser? And if they do, why do they always only do a half-assed job at…

I see lots of responses to this article asking "why client-side navigation?". I can share my own experience with building an app a few months ago, and how/why I switched to a client-side single-page app.. The app is this: https://osmlab.github.io/name-suggestion-index/index.html It is a worldwide list of brands that have been seeded with OpenStreetMap data, and which volunteers have linked to Wikidata identifiers. We…

I believe that a multi page app/website would have the data in a database rather than distributed across html files. The server would then populate the html files before serving them up to clients.

It sounds like you started by trying to build a static website and then decided you wanted something more dynamic...so shifted to react where you are doing the dynamic data manipulation on the client as opposed to a server..not a like for like comparison

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#148

Post by teen » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

tiborsaas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's faster. If you don't have to download all the content again, force the browser to re-render everything, then by design you just get the new content from the server faster, if you have to download anything at all. The idea exists since the introduction of AJAX. Furthermore, you don't lose state, which makes things much more simple. Imagine a simple image gallery. You just update the tag, update the URL wi…

> Because it's faster. The whole point of the article is that it's not true. It's not the only article that disproves it, and honestly, it's not difficult to notice it. Just go to any blog running off a static site generator; loading times of pure HTML webpages on good connection are so fast they whole thing outruns client-side page switches even if the page is already in memory.

the article is wrong tho

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#149

Post by buboard » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

Try visiting indiehackers.com, the come back to hn for a comparison. I would love to love that site but i value my time and sanity more. Waiting 10 seconds for every click is just torture.

Ajaxy navigation has its place i guess, but your website has to be fast for that too. The worst offenders i have seen here must be all the advertising managers like google adwords, facebook ads. Each request takes a horrible amount of time to load, which makes the interface completely unintuitive. Is the browser loading a page or not? Is this popup from the first time i clicked the button or from the second time? Where did this other popup come from and why now? It's like reading HTML sent through UDP.

Re: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

#150

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 21, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #49

jakobegger wrote: post #3

I don't get client side navigation. It's a worse experience in every way. It's slow, often doesn't support things like command-click, it usually breaks the back button, and even if it doesn't it breaks the restoration of the scroll position. The only thing worse is a custom scroll UI. Why do people try to reinvent the most basic features of a webbrowser? And if they do, why do they always only do a half-assed job at…

Because it's faster. If you don't have to download all the content again, force the browser to re-render everything, then by design you just get the new content from the server faster, if you have to download anything at all. The idea exists since the introduction of AJAX. Furthermore, you don't lose state, which makes things much more simple. Imagine a simple image gallery. You just update the tag, update the URL wi…

[deleted]