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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#61

Post by jahewson »

scblock wrote: post #2

"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…

But… marketing put the 8MB hero image there using their CMS. The other marketing people put the 37 trackers there using Google Tag Manager.

There’s also mystery JS that slows down everything and breaks random parts of our app - that’s your Chrome extensions :)

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#62

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

kisamoto wrote: post #31
scblock wrote: post #2

"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…

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed...

No?

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#63

Post by bdcravens »

renewiltord wrote: post #44

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.

B2B apps whose customers may be small businesses may be surprised at just how low-grade some of their hardware is. For example, a small mail and parcel store (many of my employer's customers)

Additionally, apps designed to be used in the field by top-tier customers often fail basic requirements. (Funny how many apps and sites fall apart on my iPhone 12 Pro in places where the connection drops down to LTE)

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#64

Post by cube00 »

bluedino wrote: post #9

Microsoft was famous for testing the Mac version of Office on base model 60MHz PowerPC machines

Apparently they had whole labs full of banks of machines in many common configurations to test their software. However now the "insiders" get the privilege of doing it for them for free under the guise of shaping the product direction.

Windows Updates are drip fed out to classes of machine so they can limit the damage when they hit a class that inevitably fails because it was never tested before rolling out to production on that hardware.

I appreciate they can never test every configuration but based on what they used to do it's clear they identified a need for this kind of testing in the past so what's changed? Why don't they need to do this testing anymore? Why make your users do it for you, for free, no less.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#65

Post by avereveard »

Or, do not endorse people's bad buying patterns.

I do care about crappy network and load times. But there's some laptop that have worse performances than three years old tablets, and there seems to be no end to what scummy companies sell at low end.

At some point down the crappy pit, there's a line where it's no longer my problem.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#66

Post by cable2600 »

I use Cheap Acers for $150 they seem to run Windows 10 slow enough to be a craptop. They also run Linux just fine because Linux has less of an overhead. In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#67

Post by kome »

nine_k wrote: post #8
eatonphil wrote: post #3

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.

5 years is not that old, i believe

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#68

Post by thundermuffin »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #62
kisamoto wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed... No?

I've had the exact situation kisamoto is talking about happen to me countless times, and I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've won the battle over images. Sadly, the folks calling the shots on what images to use and exactly how they need to look do not care that I'm using responsive imagery to serve images to our users with appropriate file sizes, reasonable resolutions, and ensure crops have editor selected focal points.

When I say these folks get upset over slight pixelization, I'm not even talking about pixelization where everyone can tell it's a low quality image. I'm talking about situations where people are upset they can't read an iPhone screen someone is holding in the background when they are viewing it on their 4K display (note: that particular phone isn't the focal point of the shot, nor does it have anything to add to it; it's just someone staged back there to make the shot feel more alive, mind you!).

It's disheartening because I do want to deliver the best experience possible and try to do everything in my power to accomplish it, but sometimes I lose out and folks force their megabyte imagery.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#69

Post by seoaeu »

cube00 wrote: post #64
bluedino wrote: post #9

Microsoft was famous for testing the Mac version of Office on base model 60MHz PowerPC machines

Apparently they had whole labs full of banks of machines in many common configurations to test their software. However now the "insiders" get the privilege of doing it for them for free under the guise of shaping the product direction. Windows Updates are drip fed out to classes of machine so they can limit the damage when they hit a class that inevitably fails because it was never tested before rolling out to produc…

> Why make your users do it for you, for free, no less.

I think you answered your own question.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#70

Post by throwaway2331 »

eatonphil wrote: post #3

Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.

T500/W500, 4GB of RAM.

It's something like 13 years old, and ~$60.

It can run almost every website that hasn't been web-dev'ed into oblivion.

It balks at anything with memory leaks and inefficient CPU/GPU load.

It can run YouTube/Facebook/Twitter (surprisingly, for the last).

It can't run https://github.com/

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