Sure. Again, the basic issue is that this is not optimized for the user. It's optimized for whoever stands to make money from the pages.
Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
141–150 of 178 posts
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#142Recently I've been wondering why my internet seems to be getting so slow. It then dawned on me that webpage bloat has progressed to the point that my 2015 MacBook (the small one with the rubbish processor) really struggles to load a typical webpage in a reasonable amount of time.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#143Earlier 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.
>Go re-watch "Office Space" from the 1990s
I like how you assume I can't recite that movie from memory.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#144Earlier 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…
>Writing a progress bar is basically still impossible.
So then why try it?
I would much rather see some sort of update like when you run "yum update" and it spits out 3/15, 11/15, etc. You don't have to show all of the lines scrolling, but you could do similar to a "\r" instead of a "\n" in the progress window with an update that is very intuitive. You know how many steps you must take to accomplish the user's request. I don't need to see how long each step is taking per se, but if you showed me the total number of steps and show each one ticking off would be much more useful than the typical blue bar race.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It isn't as much to claim specifics about what you do wrt targetting.
It is to try prove they have engaged users who are looking at the screen rather than, for instance, opening it in a tab then closing it later without ever reading any of it.
You might link that to what adverts were shown, but only if they know that information (they may not if the advertising space is farmed out to 3rd parties which is very common).
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#146You can make pages insanely fast: https://danluu.com/car-safety/ for example, but you will notice it is very simple and lacks video/ads.
This is not optimized for "engagement" or whatever proxy for "money in my pocket", however, so it's pretty rare.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#147Earlier 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.
I was a huge fan of NoScript when it first came out and depended on it extensively until FireFox changed something on their backend and it broke NoScript. Then NoScript released an updated version of the extension and honestly I had a terrible time trying to figure out how to use it.
IIRC there was some kind of grid format used that was entirely opaque to me; yet the developer must have thought was an improvement over the previous "allow X.domain.com temporarily" vs "allow X.domain.com permanently." that I was used to.
I should give it another try, maybe it's not as obscure as it once was.
EDIT: I've just reinstalled it, and it is much more intuitive then it was before. Thank-you for reminded me about it.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#148Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#149Before I upgraded my macbook air 2019 to an m1 I could barely visit most "big" websites. I remember a redesign of a specific store that went from "perfectly usable albeit a bit outdated in term of design" to "10x slower, looks nicer but usability is dog shit"
Which is exactly why professional users use desktops.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is it really that ineffective? Let's say I get 1 million click-throughs and 100k of them click "read more", which I send as conversions to Facebook. Won't Facebook's algorithm start targeting people similar to the 100k that "converted", making the next 1 million clicks contain more people that hit "read more"?