>>> Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
I would rephrase it:
Because faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
101–110 of 178 posts
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#102The title of this post is annoying: Typically we say "faster broadband", when we talk about bandwidth, not about "speed" (which would be latency). So obviously, as long as your website is not larger than your bandwidth capacity, nothing is gonna get "faster", when you upgrade your broadband bandwidth. This is the same as saying "Despite larger pipes every year, water still doesn't reach your house any faster".
Bandwidth = data per unit of time. So for the same amount of data, faster bandwidth absolutely decreases load time.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#103in 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…
Because for some files developers can set a max time it should be cached. Just open developer tools and go to the Network tab, make sure "Disable Cache" is unchecked and then reload the page. In the column "Transferred" you can see, which things are loaded from cache
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
'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.
And for the most egregious cases of broken design, which are sadly regular, you need to disable styling too.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Writing a progress bar is basically still impossible. If you are doing a single slow thing like rendering or uploading etc then you can make a progress bar.
But if you are making something that has multiple phases and you want to use a single progress bar then that isn't goingt to progress nicely from 0 to 100 it's just impossible.
You'll either have to make an overall progress bar for the different phases, or just indicate that this is phase 4/5 and the progress of that phase is 82%. This solves the jumpy progress bar issue, but doesn't solve the underlying issue of actually showing an estimate of time remaining. You have no idea whether phase 5/5 is going to take 1 second or 1 minute.
When a progress bar stops at 99% it's just because some final task that was expected to not take very long, did. E.g. it could be deleting a file at the end of some install process, and that for some reason blocks. There is obviously no way of knowing the actual time that will take without trying it, at which point it's too late for the progress bar to adjust of course.
So: we'll have general artificial intelligence on smartwatches, before we have smooth multi-phase progress indication (because that's never).
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#106Not 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…
What's the point of "continue reading"? Why not just show the full thing immediately?
What the network tab in your browser's DevTools when you click it, and you'll see.
Even if the whole text is loaded with the initial page, you'll see a request to somewhere to record that you clicked. Your engagement has been measured. This can be helpful for the site directly (which articles do people actually care about after the first paragraph) and that people are engaged enough to click for more is something they can “sell” to advertisers. A better designed site will have the “read more” button be an actual link so if you have JS disabled (or it fails to load) instead of the content reveal simply failing it falls back to a full-page round-trip so you are counted that way.
This could be done with picking up on scroll events or visibility tests on lower parts of the article, instead of asking the user to click, but those methods are less accurate for a number of reasons (people with big screens, people with JS disabled or JS failed to load, …)
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#107I 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…
Using a LLM as an agent will be comical, like a supervillain trying to explain a menial chore to a dimwitted henchman: “No, you fool, that’s not what I meant when I said bring me the head of R&D!”
Then, maybe LLMs will get more intelligent and it will be less comical, and more like having an actual slave. An agent intelligent enough to do all these things is probably intelligent enough make me queasy at the thought of being its master.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#108More bandwidth, more processing power, more browser APIs and support for shiny CSS effects:
More sites taking advantage of them at the same pace of technical development, cancelling them out.
Otherwise if we had a website from 10 years ago it is faster to load with today's connections.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#109Earlier 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.
I had heard the 1 ms number also and did some research some time ago. As far as I understood the 1 ms is for specialised low latency connections and devices not for the every day browsing.
Here are two sources which I found useful at that time https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean...
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#110I 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.
Try beat:
1. Power on BBC
2. Type *EDIT[ENTER]
Though obviously not as fully featured as a modern word processor, or even some editors of the time.