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Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

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Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#81

Post by Springtime »

rob74 wrote: post #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…

Prior topics on HN about those speed tests (eg[1]) also show ISPs prioritize them which gives a misleading representation of typical speeds.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062799

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#82

Post by zuhsetaqi »

No website I use does take 6 seconds to load. And I have 50 Mbps downlink. Can anyone name a website that does take that long to load? Github for example does load in 4.37 seconds with cache disabled in developer tools. CNN does take 3.58 seconds.

But I'm using uBlock origin …

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#83

Post by onion2k »

sxates wrote: post #5

Ironically this page loaded for me in about 500ms on my 1GB fiber connection.

Your network packets are making a round trip between your computer and the nearest server the site is on, so there's always going to be a hard limit on site speed based on distance. That has to happen a few times for DNS, OPTIONS, a GET for the HTML, maybe more for any blocking resources. Add on parsing and rendering and it's probably getting close to impossible to get much under 100ms for for websites these days. 5 times that isn't great but it does seem a little unreasonable to complain.

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#84

Post by nibbleshifter »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #82

No website I use does take 6 seconds to load. And I have 50 Mbps downlink. Can anyone name a website that does take that long to load? Github for example does load in 4.37 seconds with cache disabled in developer tools. CNN does take 3.58 seconds. But I'm using uBlock origin …

> But I'm using uBlock origin …

You aren't loading all the adtech webshit that makes up the majority of a page load.

Given that network wide adblock/tracker blocking saves upwards of 60% of bandwidth (for web traffic) on the average network, its pretty obvious where the problem is.

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#85

Post by crb »

I maintain that "booting a Mac, loading Chrome, loading Google Docs, and getting ready to type", takes as long as "booting DOS, starting Windows 3.1, loading Word for Windows 2.0", takes as long as "loading GEOS from floppy disk on a C64, loading geoWrite", and so on, and so forth.

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#86

Post by nibbleshifter »

fmajid wrote: post #53

Throughput 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…

> and then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays.

It keeps getting worse.

When I do web app security assessments, I end up with a logfile of all requests/responses made during browsing a site.

The sizes of these logfiles have ballooned over the past few years, even controlling for site complexity.

Many megabytes of JS shit, images, etc being loaded and often without being cached properly (so they get reloaded every time).

A lot of it is first party framework bloat (webdev active choices), but a lot is third party bloat - all the adtech and other garbage that gets loaded every time (also without cacheing) for analytics and tracking.

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#87

Post by midoridensha »

dylan604 wrote: post #39
alkonaut wrote: post #36

Good 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.

>Good enough is good enough. Oh to be a mere average computer user. I work with files that can still take some non-instant time after hitting save to complete. Conversely, it still takes some non-instant time to open said file. As long as there's such a thing as progress bars, count downs, spinning wheels, beach balls, etc, there is always room to make things faster.

Go re-watch "Office Space" from the 1990s, in particular the scene where the main character is trying to save his work and shut down before the boss comes by and asks him to work over the weekend.

25 years later, progress bars are no better: they steadily go to 15%, then stop there for a while, suddenly zoom to 80%, then slowly progress to 99%, then stop there for a long time.

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#88

Post by a_c »

Making general software faster is saving the planet, both by saving human waiting time and carbon footprint on electricity. We are not measuring on this domain enough and we should start doing so. The added bonus is that faster software/website makes better UX, and we saves time on doing "UX research" as well.

Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

#89

Post by midoridensha »

amused2death wrote: post #15

in my android and linux pc, firefox will refuse to display web pages which was fully downloaded couple hours before. ff always ask for internet connection although all needed files are in the cache. i'm on internet diet (disable wifi for hours long) so bad behaviors are apparent those who always-on-24/7 fiber may not notice

I've seriously always wondered exactly what the purpose of a cache for web pages in a browser is. Why is it there? It takes up many megabytes (or even GB) of space. Yet it seems to serve no purpose whatsoever: every time you navigate to that page, it always reloads it from the web server, even if you just briefly (mis-)click on a link and then click on "back". A lot of disk space could be saved by simply eliminating these caches.
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