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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

#161

Post by JohnFen »

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?

Those buttons drive me as crazy as cookie banners seems to drive others.

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

#162

Post by JohnFen »

timmb wrote: post #70
yawnxyz wrote: post #3

Despite faster computers every year, my computers don't seem to run any faster, either

But software is faster to write and so in theory cheaper to buy.

It's just disheartening to see software racing to the bottom, quality-wise.

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

#163

Post by JohnFen »

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

> In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ?

I don't know about a real analysis, but it's pretty easy to see the effect in your own browser. Disable JS and see how much faster the page loads.

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

#164

Post by r00fus »

roydivision wrote: post #64
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…

'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

The "open all links in Reader view" option in iOS is amazing. I whitelist sites where it breaks or if I need translate, but load times are faster too.

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

#165

Post by fuzzyset »

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…

Somewhat related, but I recently discovered the Calibre "Fetch News" function. It parses the articles (similarly to archive.org I assume in that it also bypasses paywalls) and puts them into a nice EPUB format. I run it in server mode on a RPi so every morning I can just load up the Calibre web reader on my phone and read the news in pure text form.

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

#166

Post by dspillett »

Kiro wrote: post #150
exo762 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

> Is it really that ineffective?

Maybe, maybe not. It could all be a huge cycle of cons with each part of the advertising and stalking business making crap up about what is effective and convincing the next people in the cycle. But certainly some think it is effective, or at least are hoping that it will be.

It could be like junk email: there are companies and individuals who make money from sending it. It doesn't actually matter to them if it is effective, as long as they can convince others buying their services that it is, or likely might be, effective, and they get their money whether it actually is or very much is not.

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

#167

Post by maximus-decimus »

yodsanklai wrote: post #99

Classic rebound effect. Same thing for cars. > Contrary to popular belief, the average car is not in fact that much more fuel-efficient than older cars. Still, to this day, the average vehicle has a range of between 20 and 30 miles per gallon; a stat which was very similar in the 1920s. But, why is this? Well, cars are a whole lot bigger.

It's not cars just being bigger, they need to produce less toxic emissions too because of regulations.

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

#169

Post by mod »

modeless wrote: post #157
throwaway0asd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of them do, and then we end up with social media that doesn't take 15 seconds to load.

This site, for instance.

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