Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

datafantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 178 posts

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

#131

Post by g105b »

Kiro wrote: post #45
wodenokoto wrote: post #30

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?

More room for cramming ads, especially on mobile.

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

#132

Post by sidewndr46 »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #51
wodenokoto wrote: post #30

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…

”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 can we stop the clock on "time to read content".” You forgot the paywall that you will see at this point. Maybe there is also a customer service bot saying: ”Hey! Ask me about our special offer on 12 month subscription!”

Don't forget about the banner advertisement which is lazily loaded and shifts the content you're reading so far down you can't see it anymore.

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

#133

Post by jakzurr »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #104
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, many sites just read faster without the cruft.

For me, everything has continued to get faster for the past 30 years. Better modems, service, dsl, cable. 15 years ago, installed button on browser at work to turn off scripting (all or nothing). Used until NoScript came out.

Most news sites, NYTimes, WPost, CNN, even HN - you don't even need scripting to read the text, and it loads like lightning. I don't even bother with an add blocker these days. Want to see pics? Tweak the pic link yourself, or google the article title. Worth it, because it's so much faster.

On HN, I finally got a log in and enabled scripting for ycombinator.com - it's usually always fast anyway.

Example: to follow the war in Ukraine at

https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/The-War-in-Ukraine/09...

- I just enable "scribblemaps.com". Don't need "azure.com", "google-analytics.com", or "visualstudio.com".

Most sites I leave default, no scripting at all. If I really want to see missing content, I might try enabling some, or even all, if I trust the site. Most of the time I can read everything I want without wasting the time.

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

#134

Post by acdha »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #86
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…

> 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.

This is also amusing from a change management process at large organizations: want to tweak an Apache setting? Spend a month getting CAB approval and wait for a deployment window.

Want to inject unreviewed JavaScript onto every page in the domain? Login to Adobe…

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by fmajid »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #86
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…

Yes, and it's not as if tools like Google's Lighthouse/PageSpeedInsights or Mozilla's Firefox Profiler haven't been available for years.

Economists and lawmakers have determined that the economic benefits of personalization accrue to the ad middlemen like Google, not to the publishers who have to encumber their sites with all the surveillance beacons, but the reality of the market is publishers have no leverage. That said, most of those beacons are set with the async/defer attribute and should not have a measurable on page load speed.

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

#137

Post by fmajid »

gsich wrote: post #75
fmajid wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, backhaul (the connection from the tower to the Internet via the carrier's central facilities) dominates, as well as queueing latency for packets waiting to be delivered to phones, since traffic is overwhelmingly downloads.

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

#138

Post by gwbas1c »

The slowdowns come from:

Latency: Part of the page loads, and then the page asks for more data. In some cases, (such as loading a page hosted on another continent,) this is bound by the speed of light.

Poor data access (database) code: Sometimes this is due to lazy or incompetent programmers, other times its due to the fact that "not instant" is "good enough."

Writing a web page to load everything very quickly in a single request is surprisingly hard, and will often break modern and easily understood design patterns.

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

#139

Post by fmajid »

gnyman wrote: post #109
fmajid wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I subscribe to Dean Bubley and he is a very useful corrective to the telco boosterism on things like overselling 5G, network slicing, the dumpster fire that is RCS and so on.

Still, it's important that latency is top of mind for the designers of 5G, as it gets short shrift far too often.

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

#140

Post by kamarg »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #132
illuminati1911 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”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 can we stop the clock on "time to read content".” You forgot the paywall that you will see at this point. Maybe there is also a customer service bot saying: ”Hey! Ask me about our special offer on 12 month subscription!”

Don't forget about the banner advertisement which is lazily loaded and shifts the content you're reading so far down you can't see it anymore.

And the banner asking you to install their PWA because you wanted to read one article on their site. Also don't forget to enable push notifications so they can tell you when they post a new update.
Post reply on HN