Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the point of "continue reading"? Why not just show the full thing immediately?
It's obviously to show more ads.
Can't be that obvious considering every reply claims a different reason.
Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
151–160 of 178 posts
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#152Earlier 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…
Once upon a time, web browsers were equipped with a STOP button. As soon as the thing you were interested in was loaded, you could press it and...everything else on the web page would just stop loading. Unfortunately, now days the thing you are interested is hiding behind mountains of cruft and usually the last thing to load.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#153Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#154Ironically this page loaded for me in about 500ms on my 1GB fiber connection.
To be clear, I wasn't complaining about the speed. 1/2 a second is pretty quick when the average is 6 seconds.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#155The 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 s…
> 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.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that web pages are just built as giant JavaScript applications for no reason. With a page pretending to be an app, the browser has to download, parse, and execute the JavaScript core before the browser can do anything. All of the resources are hidden somewhere inside the application and the browser is stuck with its thumb up its ass unable to load or do anything.
Sites using a bunch of JavaScript to "render" everything client side are causing their own stupid problems. I just built a toy React app that only displays Hello World. It's the most trivial app that isn't just a blank project. A production build of it weighs in at 143kB for just the JavaScript portion. It's also multiple resource requests just to load that crap. Even bundled into an HTML skeleton it's still 145kB of JavaScript to run before the browser can do anything else.
Served locally it takes about 20ms to load that React app and draw something on my screen. An HTML copy of Frankenstein (463kB) loaded from the same server loaded in 5ms. A plain HTML document three times the size of the toy React "app" loaded in a quarter of the time!
> 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.
I find this to be an odd take. This nearly 4,000 word CNN article[0] including graphics weighs in at 70kB. The HTML alone including a bunch of inline styling (tables, font tags, etc) weighs only 55kB. With no graphics loaded it is still a perfectly readable article. Loading the HTML of that page in my above test it still loads in 5ms and is 100% readable.
Not just that but I can navigate with the sidebars and headers. In less space than just a toy React app I've got a completely usable page that can display as close to instantly as my eyes can determine. There's nothing about "modern and easily understood design patterns" that requires hundreds of kB of JavaScript or even extra CSS. It would be trivial to replace the table and font tags with CSS in the header and likely get the whole document even smaller while keeping 100% of the functionality and navigation.
The CNN article example coincidentally shows how stupid the JavaScript bloat problem is because several of the images are not found and the 404 pages CNN is returning in their place are a megabyte.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9806/24/win98.idg/index.ht...
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#156I 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.
If AI can't solve the captchas, we can just hire people to do it. Services for that already exist and they are fairly cheap.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#157I 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…
I have a web app that is essentially a full OS GUI in the browser. The load time in Chrome with state restoration is almost exactly 0.3 seconds, which includes asynchronous gathering of file system artifacts and rendering display thereof. At the same many primarily text sites struggle, such as news and social media, struggle to load in 15 seconds. My connection measures about 920mbps down so 15 seconds is really ridi…
You are right. It is not a technology problem. It is a problem of incentives. The people writing the software don't have the right incentives to make it pleasant to use.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the point of "continue reading"? Why not just show the full thing immediately?
My guess it figures out who actually wants to read the article, as opposed to accidental clicks, scrapers etc.
First reason here that I actually think is valid. Thanks!
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#159I 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…
> we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English Language is an imprecise tool, it has inherent ambiguity. Language is also laborious and one dimensional (stream of bits over temporal dimension). A tool such as the one you describe would be extremely frustrating to use.
If you imagine asking Siri or Google Assistant to do things for you, of course that would be incredibly frustrating; they suck. That style of HCI is a dead end for sure. However, asking a human personal assistant to do things for you wouldn't be so frustrating. Especially if they know you well. That is the kind of experience I'm talking about. Yes, I do believe it is possible in the not too distant future. Maybe 10 years or so. It won't be as good as a human assistant at first, but it will not be like the speech interfaces you're used to.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#160Earlier 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.
I develop very complicated software for a living and as always, there are some features that will take an unreasonable amount of time. On large documents, you have customers wait 5 seconds for a regular operation (that you may need to complete dozens of times in a row). And yet when you ask customers whether they want more features, or a faster program it's invariably features. Fix a bug or add a feature? Add a featu…
>And yet when you ask customers whether they want more features, or a faster program it's invariably features. Fix a bug or add a feature? Add a feature. Improve perf or add a feature? Add a feature.
Of course this is what they want. To the user, the damn thing should have been working when you released it. To the user, you shouldn't have to ask to have something that's broken but is meant to be a feature to be fixed. If it's not working, why is it there in the first place. Fix it. Duh. But also add new features before your competitor does and takes your users. This is such a weird excuse on discussions about a progress bar.