My first modem was a 2400bps MNP5, before the revelation that was the 14.4 HST (sysop discount, naturally). I first used the Internet in the early 90s, “pre-Netscape” and for a couple of years even “pre-Mosaic”. Precisely because so few people had good connections, web site owners were economical with their use of images, and information was structured so that it loaded quickly. Presentation took a back-seat to accessibility.
The Bullshit Web (2018)
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection
Same here. I have very clear memories of dismissing the WWW as useless for exactly this reason. Those memories are 30 years old so they may not be entirely accurate, but the principle of embarrassment [1] lends them some support if you buy into that sort of thing. [1] https://cafn.us/2010/12/10/terminology-principle-of-embarras...
I don't know about you guys but I got a hell of a lot done on a 56K modem all the way up until the mid-2000s. Hell, I was even doing group content on City of Heroes from the dial-up connection I had while working my night-shift hotel job, and the game played surprisingly well given the bandwidth and latencies I had.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#43Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…
Cable television showed that paying to remove ads does not work in the long run.
People who have money to pay for content are precisely the ones you want to show ads to.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#44Google made a solid attempt at improving web performance and usability with AMP and offering preferred ranking - and hacker news mostly skewered them for it. Publishers need to be compelled to improve performance but the current model encourages bloat
> solid attempt
Nope. A compromised attempt.
This is Google's problem; they smuggle in invasiveness and control in an attempt to conquer the web wearing a costume of benevolence and reasonability.
It's cyber-imperialism. The professed virtues are honorable but they have to be instrumented without the power grab
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#45>A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load The Hill is what finally pushed me to install an ad blocker. Before that it didn't bother me too much to get served ads etc that I filtered out of my awareness anyway, but The Hill was unusable. So, I installed an ad blocker and immediately realized how negligent I had been-- in terms of quality of web browsing experience-- in not doing so earlier. The Hill loaded n…
Install the Steven Black hosts.txt or equivalent. Possibly tailor to your own needs (e.g. I allow Twitter, but absolutely no other social media site).
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Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#46I don’t really understand the complaint. If you don’t like the CNN website, don’t go to CNN or use CNN lite, which has been well documented on HN. No one is forcing you to visit the site. Also, blocking webfonts is trivially easy at this stage so if you have specific complaints then you can take matters into your own hands with little more than a flip of a setting.
Idk, in my case I just stopped using web at all, with some exceptions like hn and some messengers. I’ve passed the point where I missed “the old web”, I don’t really care anymore. I’m back to reading books, that’s what I had been doing before the Internet, so that’s just getting back to roots. I don’t read news, I haven’t been using social networks for at least a decade, and I feel good. Modern web is a shit show I just can’t stand.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#47It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…
> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now
I don't know, perhaps the internet I had was just too shit, but it was so much slower than what I get now. I remember when the progress bar was actually meaningful when loading a pure text webpage; and I don't get that today unless I'm using a phone inside an elevator.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much c…
I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.
It may be a different answer than you expect...
A lot less developer time spent making sure the application fit in a tiny amount of memory.
Of course that sucks for you as a user when an application takes up 4+GB of memory for no reason (I'm looking at you Teams). But for the company that writes it, it is great. Compile and ship, no more weeks or months of trying to shave off every bit so you can fit this in 16MB of RAM, or on just a few floppies. You have a big customer that will sign a 10 million+ contract if you add feature X? Sorry, no way to make that work in under 105KB, which means we can't ship it.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much c…
I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.
It saves when the user wants to, not automatically without asking, saving even unintended accidential changes, and publishing them to others.
It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser.
Saving to disk does not require navigation through 3 sub-menues.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#50It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…
But, obviously, the web hasn't gotten faster, because the increased bandwidth has been filled with increased nonsense, and browsers now download 2MB of nonsense to show a 200-character text post.
A 10KB page at 14.4kbps takes 5 seconds to download. A 2MB page on a typical 30Mbps connection take less than 1s (ignoring improvements latency, changes in TCP frame size, better line conditions, etc). Web pages are definitely much bigger, and arguably bloated with unnecessary junk, but they still download faster than they did in the 14.4kbps days.
Bandwidth speed and page sizes don't explain why you think the web was faster decades ago.
I think it's more likely that you're just wrong. I remember using the web in 1995 on a 28kbps modem (such speed!), and it was slow as hell. It was genuinely click-a-link-and-get-cup-of-tea slow a lot of the time. Not only wasy connection awful, a lot of hosting companies were slow too. Servers would throttle and kill sites that used too much bandwidth. Pages often failed to load compared to today. I still used it of course because it was amazing, but I didn't enjoy it. Surfing wasn't really possible. Uploading anything was a pipedream. When I went to uni in 1997 and got access to broadband for the first time it was a revelation. The web became truly useful. I had my first website up and running 3 months later and I've never looked back...