HackerNews loads pretty fast, and would be one of my favorite sites even if it didn't.
Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
71–80 of 178 posts
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#72Throughput of networks is increasing but latency doesn’t improve as much (although 5G wireless is a big improvement over 4G LTE). Also TCP slow-start limits how fast an HTTP connection can go, and most are short-lived so the connection is still ramping up when it is closed. That’s one of the supposed benefits of QUIC a.k.a. HTTP/3. And then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for fron…
On mobile latency has constantly improved. GPRS/EDGE was often +100ms ping --> 3G 400-50ms depending on the day --> 4G/LTE 50-30ms and now I'm often getting sub-20ms ping on 5G connections.
Yes, moving from voice-centric to IP-centric network technology has helped, and 5G paid laudable attention to latency. Their target for 5G is actually 1ms, but of course backhaul will dominate that.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#73Jevon’s paradox: “…occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating reductions in resource use.”
Developers will therefore always maximize resource usage as more becomes available.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#74Not just load time, but "time to read content" has exploded. Once the webapp has downloaded and it can start doing REST like requests for the actual content, it also needs to start loading pop-ups and the "continue reading"-button, that can hide the content after it is loaded. So once all that is done, the user needs to click away cookie consent banner, newsletter sign-up and the continue reading button. And only now…
'Reader View' plugins for Chrome [1], and native for Safari help me a lot with this, cut out all the fat and you're left with only the meat. Doesn't help with load times though, it would be an interesting exercise for such a plugin to only fetch the content, a la Lynx back in the day. [1] https://add0n.com/chrome-reader-view.html
NoScript gives you a 90s style web experience. It's vastly superior to what passes for normal these days and blows away AMP pages on page load performance.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
On mobile latency has constantly improved. GPRS/EDGE was often +100ms ping --> 3G 400-50ms depending on the day --> 4G/LTE 50-30ms and now I'm often getting sub-20ms ping on 5G connections.
Yes, moving from voice-centric to IP-centric network technology has helped, and 5G paid laudable attention to latency. Their target for 5G is actually 1ms, but of course backhaul will dominate that.
1ms only to the tower.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#76Good enough is good enough. Just like faster computers don’t make new apps any faster (even at the peak of scaling decades ago), they make sure we can write more complex apps without making them too slow, or equivalently, add more things to apps and sites if there is any performance headroom left.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#77I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents. Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the c…
how naive, we have long since moved from peak GUIs now the game is infesting them and rearanging them around the need to serve adds
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#78No post body was provided.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#79> With home broadband reaching 70 Mbps globally
The source for that is some stats from speedtest.net, which I assume is calculated from the users who used their speed test? So it's probably heavily skewed towards power users who have a fast connection and want to check if they are really getting what they are paying for. Most "casual" users with shitty DSL connections are happy if "the internet" works at all and are pretty unlikely to ever use this service...