Raspberry pi works well for this
I second this! A Raspberry Pi 400 is often my primary web browsing device, while my workstation is busy with other things. There's no reason why a website should overwhelm it.
Test your product on a crappy laptop
21–30 of 321 posts
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#22"It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger." This attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be fat and get fatter. That's a lie. Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in your hands, you just need to use it. No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking…
And as a dev, I make none of those decisions.
Also as a dev, I don’t really care. It’s not my money on the line, it’s the companies. If the site sucks and users don’t like it, the company loses profits and they will be forced to change.
The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not my problem.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#23Test it?! I develop it on a crappy laptop!
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try the shittiest laptop at Walmart. Like an HP stream. Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.
> Remember the low res 1366x768 screen. The low ... um. One of us is in a bubble. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine. Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade old)
It’s low res relatively as it is roughy the lowest resolution still in use. Mid range laptops these days come with 1080p displays and high end is somewhere at or under 4K
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#25There is a hidden feature in Chrome Devtools to apply a CPU slowdown... Simply head to Devtools > Performance tab > Gear icon > CPU > 6x slowdown. That isn't a perfect representation of an old laptop (doesn't throttle GPU operations or trigger low memory behaviours), but it's a good start. As a bonus, it makes your fans spin up wildly whenever loading a page!
similarly i often let throttling on.. very nice way to tame dopamine rush :)
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#26I believe that most of the "web developers" have absolutely no idea of how to build a website using bare html+css. Actually, I worked with "web developers" that are basically not touching code much, but using all sorts of tools and framework - without fully understand what they are doing. And that's also why website looks like each other more and more. And that's the silent majority of the industry.
There is no way to be a modern web developer without knowing everything you need for raw html/css unless you are talking about square space or basic Wordpress work.
Things like react are purely extra knowledge needed over the top of the basic website building blocks.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#27There is a hidden feature in Chrome Devtools to apply a CPU slowdown... Simply head to Devtools > Performance tab > Gear icon > CPU > 6x slowdown. That isn't a perfect representation of an old laptop (doesn't throttle GPU operations or trigger low memory behaviours), but it's a good start. As a bonus, it makes your fans spin up wildly whenever loading a page!
Not only CPU but slow networks and mobile screen sizes too. These are all very helpful for quick sanity checks and reproducing races.
Lighthouse also emulates slow-ish web on a mobile device. Though I would take its results with a grain of salt: it can show near-perfect green scores for a website that takes 3 seconds to render
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#28"It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger." This attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be fat and get fatter. That's a lie. Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in your hands, you just need to use it. No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking…
You don't need those 37 tracking libraries, but management does.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#29Gmail has nearly 50mb of JavaScript that thrashes I/O so hard that clicking the search bar and typing too soon will cause it to skip letters (because the search bar is probably some Angular-powered abomination).
It is and was a regression from the previous design which was fast even on 3G connections.
It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9 MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried not being poor?
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#30There is a hidden feature in Chrome Devtools to apply a CPU slowdown... Simply head to Devtools > Performance tab > Gear icon > CPU > 6x slowdown. That isn't a perfect representation of an old laptop (doesn't throttle GPU operations or trigger low memory behaviours), but it's a good start. As a bonus, it makes your fans spin up wildly whenever loading a page!
Unless you mean that the menu is hidden behind the gear icon, calling it a hidden feature is a stretch.