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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

#121

Post by makeitdouble »

crb wrote: post #85

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.

The interesting twist to me is that waking up a phone and opening the Google Docs app is the same time length or a tad faster.

We haven't progressed in speed, but versatility is theough the roof compared to 10 ~ 20 years ago.

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

#122

Post by alkonaut »

moring wrote: post #117
alkonaut wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is obviously no way of knowing the actual time that will take without trying (...) 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 compl…

Let's take another example. E.g. if you have a progress bar for doing a set of 5 git operations you don't know whether the 3rd might start some housekeeping. For some tools (such as git) it might be possible to force this automatic housekeeping off in order to make a predicable progress bar. But in others it might not be. In some tools you may be able to predict if it will happen, and in others maybe not.

Another example (from the real world this time): I make a progress bar for an iterative optimization of an design in a program. The number of iterations until the design completes can't be reliably estimated. It's not completely underterministic of course, but the complexity of making that estimation isn't just high, it's likely to be so high that it approaches the complexity of the optimization itself.

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

#123

Post by Kye »

kmitz wrote: post #111

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 put Patreon's official button on a site once and was confused at the seconds it added to the load. It's a little button!

Turns out it was hauling in 10MB of analytics scripts.

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

#124

Post by tekkk »

crb wrote: post #85

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.

No, c'mon. I still remember how it took ages for my old Windows to boot up and even get to the desktop. Maybe DOS was faster without GUI but it was god damn slow at one point. And all that weird noise your PC would make while reading from the disk non-withstanding the dance with the modem. With my current Mac I'd say it takes about 15s to open Docs.

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

#125

Post by moring »

alkonaut wrote: post #122
moring wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is obviously no way of knowing the actual time that will take without trying (...) 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 compl…

Let's take another example. E.g. if you have a progress bar for doing a set of 5 git operations you don't know whether the 3rd might start some housekeeping. For some tools (such as git) it might be possible to force this automatic housekeeping off in order to make a predicable progress bar. But in others it might not be. In some tools you may be able to predict if it will happen, and in others maybe not. Another exa…

Your second paragraph is basically what I meant: The complexity is just too high. This is especially true when downloading data from the internet is involved.

But the first example, git housekeeping, depends only on information readily available locally. git could just give this information to any calling program that needs it, but my guess is that nobody thinks that progress bars are worth it.

Actually, in today's world, I'd be happy if progress bars (or even indefinite loading indicators) would even show me when the process has crashed and won't ever finish, but they'll happily show "progress" that will never finish.

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

#127

Post by exo762 »

dspillett wrote: post #106
Kiro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

So much effort to be able to claim that you do targeted advertising, that is yet to be proven to be effective.

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

#129

Post by civilized »

modeless wrote: post #22

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…

They won't go down without a fight. They want real human eyeballs.

But I wonder if there will come a point where captchas and "Not a Robot" checkboxes no longer work.

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

#130

Post by AStrangeMorrow »

zxienin wrote: post #128

On similar note: Despite faster hardware every year, laptops don't perform any better, running applications. Usage experience with typical specs of 2022 (500G SSD and 16G RAM) is as good or bad as ones from 20 years back (say, 20G HDD and 128M RAM).

Actually curious, what do you mean exactly by "doesn't perform better" in this context? My experience doesn't go as far (10-15 years), but while I agree a whole subset of softwares don't feel much different (text editors, web browsers), in some other domains I can feel the difference (video games, programing IDEs and the tools they offer). Where I imagine I agree is if a computer hardware becomes 10x more performant, there is not a related 10x improvement performance on softwares
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