51–60 of 321 posts
Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and breakdown in bad network environments.
I will if I want to target that kind of user. Personally I much prefer targeting people who have nice laptops. Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you’re getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in that case you only have to please the buyer not the user. So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
You're obviously being facetious, but probably most HN users really do feel this way.
"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…
More often than not I feel these decisions are out of the developers hands. As a dev, I want to use tree shaking to make my bundles small and optimize to make my website lighthouse score 100 across the board. What happens? Marketing needs tag manager installed and then proceeds to async load 50 tracking scripts in the background. Design wants the large hero images because on the high Res devices they use it looks sli…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technical worker who codes up the web site and its backend does have a say, but not a lot of it. Product and sales people have a stronger say, because they optimize for the money the web site produces. Explaining them how much worse the bloat makes the site's experience for the user, showing how many pages are left partially loaded because the user did not have the patience and navigated away, how the competitor'…
This. Asking for web sites that don't have 27 trackers, enormous hero images, a full copy of framework of the week, etc. is like asking for native games under Linux: the money isn't there to justify the added hassle and support costs.
There 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. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode/#cpu
Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.
Buy a 5-years old laptop off eBay, yes. In a good working order, but with a slow CPU, little RAM, and a mediocre screen (not even FHD). A thinkpad is a fine choice because they are usually made to last, so it won't keep breaking at you.
I had plans with 35GB of transfer and the modern web meant I was having to restart my plan every single week. Some of us live in Internet deserts where there is no hope of getting a wired connection (downtown Chicago in my case).
I will if I want to target that kind of user. Personally I much prefer targeting people who have nice laptops. Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you’re getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in that case you only have to please the buyer not the user. So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
Gmail 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…