111–120 of 178 posts
In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency ? Is it a problem of latency or bandwidth ? What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Just wondering
> 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
It is possible that website loading is bottlenecked by latency and an irreducible number of round trips needed. Bandwidth is not obviously a bottleneck.
Not 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?
I 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…
And Google Search is so utterly weak. Not just because of the neutering of search options or the weird priority conflict inside Google, but just because even with litteraly all the data in the world about a specific user it doesn't seems like it can wrangle what a request actually means.
It can tell me the time in Chicago, but not what computer would actually be the best for my work. That search will only be spam, irrelevant popular results and paid reviews.
Same if I asked for a _good_ pizza recipe, it would probably not understand what that actually means for me.
The whole model of "throwing a request in the box and expecting a result" seems broken to me, I mean even between humans it doesn't work that way, why would it work with an advanced AI ?
PS: even with more back and forth, I'm imagining what we have now with customer support over chat, and while more efficient than by phone, it's definitely not the interface I want by default
It'd be interesting to know why load time hasn't improved. In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency ? Is it a problem of latency or bandwidth ? What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Just wondering
I'm not sure what sort of analysis you're looking for, but different sites have different problems. I'm not convinced that averaging them makes sense, and it's very difficult to create a reasonable metric. As soon as you start measuring some specific metric, people will optimize for it whilst still making the site unusable. Unfortunately "usable state" is too hard to quantify without it being game-able.
> How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency
Very little, you can check here [0] and see for yourself. Obviously it depends on your distance to the server you are reaching, but the added latency of HTTPS isn't really a factor when you're looking at 10s for a page to load.
> What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ?
Lets look at CNN (only because I happen to remember that a lite version exists thanks to someone on HN). The lite[1] version loads entirely in 350ms for me. The normal version[2] with adblock on finishes loading everything after 1.43s. The normal version with adblock off, finishes loading after 20s and reflows a bunch of times as ads get loaded.
So I agree with the rest of the comments, it's "because of js and adtech".
Disclaimer: I'm in South Africa at the moment on 4g, my internet isn't the best :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
How is that obvious? Deleting a file doesn't just block for no reason. The OS (usually) or disk hardware (rarely) are the ones that decide to block it, and they have the information needed to know how long it will take.
What actually happens is that the advantages of showing a correct progress bar simply don't justify the complexity needed for it, and a decision to show a crappy incorrect progress bar is made.
See also Induced demand/traffic: building more roads/adding lanes to roads increases congestion rather than decreasing it: https://bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/trunk-roa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Not 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?