41–50 of 136 posts
After thinking, “no, it wasn’t _this_ slow back in the day,” I scroll down to see..
Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current browser.
Maybe hide the spinny circle thingy if you’re smart enough to know you’re not going to load anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lack of care and attention. By developers who are pressured to keep sprint velocity up. By product owners who follow the ideal path. By designers who want sites to work like their mock-ups. By testers who don’t have enough time to test under specified features. By clients who are focused on reporting upwards and tracking business goals. And by prioritising new learning experiences over boring reliable solutions.
What's wrong with wanting a site to look like a mockup?
A hell of useless code/new APIs/authorization issues just for no customer value but only discutable esthetics considerations when mockups are designed up front by some never available designer like they are some inviolable part of the specifications thus are enforced to the team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets. I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question. As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.
Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display? I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable? "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed So where is the…
If by chance you block certain actions, you'll see it spin ridiculous amount of CPU, trying to sent tracking data all the time over graphql.
Some tracking systems injected (often without developer involvement, using so-called tag managers) will send your mouse position and clicks.
Through tag managers, you can easily end up loading 50 different scripts, often compiled with attendant framework code, usually in chains of tag manager loading tag manager (classic example - using Google Tag Manager to load Facebook manager and Google Ads, which then issue multiple calls to load JavaScript ads and trackers, which might involve further script loads).
And the tag managers are often managed by marketing in complete separation from any development or QA, so what was reasonably good website loading fast even under limited network conditions, suddenly turns into huge freeze-fest as 3 autoplaying videos get preloaded, 2MB JS/CSS animated overlay ad loads in, 3 ad boxes are filled in dynamically , and don't forget 15 trackers, 4 of them from ad services, 8 of them added by marketing team with possible duplicates, and 3 of them part of malware loaded by the ads.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
> I don't want to just blindly blame JS.
JS is a tool, a language. Don’t blame the tools as they have been refined to an astounding degree over the last 25 years. As a long time front end developer blame the business, specifically:
* Developer incompetence. Do you really need the largest frameworks humanity has written and a million dependencies to put a couple lines of text on the page? Yes. Well, no, but most developers will claim otherwise and most businesses will refuse to hire those who are so capable.
* Stalking. Analytics code is a silent performance killer and generally responsible for a lot of JS on many commercial websites. This wonderful stuff allows for session tracking via advertisements across various websites and at times serves as a point of malicious intent by both valid business interests and criminal organizations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets. I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question. As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.
Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display? I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable? "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed So where is the…
Some of the ads are generated on the run based on that tracking data and it involves many, many http round-trips before it's injected via ajax. Further, comment sections have some sort of fb tracking integration, triggering even more round trips.
And all that is separately loaded on a non optimized website layer with many externa JavaScript frameworks and dependencies.As well as injected video components, huge images which most likely aren't optimized. Lazy loading should be native now, no jQuery function needed, no intersection observer either, and it does work ok, but it's often not properly implemented or not at all.
As for react, the stripped shadow Dom might be faster then the native Dom, but you still need the Dom and react is still a heavy load. I remember the days when people said don't needlessly load jQuery. Today, people use react when there's no real need to do so.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
Did you try restarting your computer? If that doesn't work, try restarting your router.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
Javascript is one of the major reasons, but also trackers, huge graphics and loads of videos. Old pages still load fast so it's not the browser's fault. Say what you want about https://www.lingscars.com/ , but it loads instantly, is full of all animations and doesn't lag down the browser. The problem is modern design, basically. We've invented server-rendered pages, then started rendering everything client side with…
It’s not the modern tech that is at fault. When used correctly it can work very well as it was intended.
Problem is it’s just about easy enough to be used wrongly by low skill developers who don’t engage with anything they’re making deep enough to even become critical of how it’s functioning.
And worse when you start pointing it out they always just come up with lame excuses as if it’s normal that a page displaying 30 items takes 15+ seconds to load and have to spend your time lecturing them that yes links should open in a new window when ctrl clicked or that urls should actually function when you go to them directly.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
It's been that way since the ad industry took over the web.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
boss: "browsers today are so fast and capable, we don't need to waste resources on something that doesn't give us tangible ROI."