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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

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Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#12

Post by olliej »

It’s not just slow devices, it’s also any time you have any kind of weak connectivity.

I think every OS now has tools to let you simulate shitty network performance these days so it’s inexcusable that so many sites and even native apps fail so badly anytime you have anything less than a mbit connection or greater than 50ms latency :-/

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#13

Post by gjsman-1000 »

dexwiz wrote: post #6
andy99 wrote: post #2

Nobody cares about people with older devices. We've shifted to a mode where companies tell their customers what they have to do, and if they don't fit the mold they are dropped. It's more profitable that way - you scale only revenue and don't have to worry about accessibility or customer service or any edge cases. That's what big tech has gotten for us.

You’re getting downvoted but I think despite the tone you are correct. 10 years ago corporate guidance on web dev was backwards compatibility going back several versions. Now it’s hardly any concern for anything more than 6 months old. More than anything I think it’s because corporate IT has had to modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also…

Part of it was that users were terrible at updating browsers. You needed to support Internet Explorer 6, or cut off a third of your customers. It sucked.

Now every browser gets updates, automatically and aggressively. The only real outlier is Safari, but even that updates way quicker than older browsers used to.

As a result, who needs backward compatibility?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#14

Post by eric__cartman »

ryukoposting wrote: post #5

I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering. It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's not that old, and it still works like new. I know it's not just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the same struggles. I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's website is among the absol…

I have noticed with two 7 year old Snapdragon 835 devices that RAM and running a recent Android version makes a huge difference.

I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to replace the battery and disassembling phones is a pain.

Meanwhile a Galaxy S8 with the same SoC, 4GB of memory and stock Android 9 with Samsung's modifications chugs like there's no tomorrow.

I can understand that having two more gigabytes of memory can make a difference but there is a night and day difference between the phones. Perhaps Android 14 has way better memory management than Android 9? Or Samsung's slow and bloated software is hampering this device?

Either way it's irritating to see that many companies don't test on old/low-end devices. Most people in the world aren't running modern flagships, especially if they target a world-wide audience.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#15

Post by layer8 »

olliej wrote: post #12

It’s not just slow devices, it’s also any time you have any kind of weak connectivity. I think every OS now has tools to let you simulate shitty network performance these days so it’s inexcusable that so many sites and even native apps fail so badly anytime you have anything less than a mbit connection or greater than 50ms latency :-/

It’s not just weak connectivity. I know people in rural areas who still have less than 1 Mbps internet speed over their DSL landline. Using the internet there isn’t a lot of fun.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#16

Post by Gigachad »

dexwiz wrote: post #6
andy99 wrote: post #2

Nobody cares about people with older devices. We've shifted to a mode where companies tell their customers what they have to do, and if they don't fit the mold they are dropped. It's more profitable that way - you scale only revenue and don't have to worry about accessibility or customer service or any edge cases. That's what big tech has gotten for us.

You’re getting downvoted but I think despite the tone you are correct. 10 years ago corporate guidance on web dev was backwards compatibility going back several versions. Now it’s hardly any concern for anything more than 6 months old. More than anything I think it’s because corporate IT has had to modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also…

Because the people with money who are buying your products are all running the latest version of iOS. The ones on a 6 year old Android version are not spending anything therefor it isn't worth investing money in making sure it works for them.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#19

Post by jauntywundrkind »

These sites can and should be much better. Yes. Definitely.

At the same time, while a 10s load time is a long time & unpleasant, it doesn't seem catastrophic yet.

The more vital question to me is what the experience is like after the page is loaded. I'm sure a number of these sites have similarly terrible architecture & ads bogging down the experience. But I also expect that some of those which took a while to load are pretty snappy & fast after loading.

Native apps probably have plenty of truly user-insulting payloads they too chug through as they load, and no shortage of poor architectural decisions. On the web it's much much easier to see all the bad; a view source away. And there is seemingly less discipline on the web, more terrible and terribly inefficient cases of companies with too many people throwing whatever the heck into Google Tag Manager or other similar offenses.

The latest server-side react stuff seems like it has a lot of help to offer, but there's still a lot of questions about rehydration of the page. I'm also lament see us shift away from the thick-client world; so much power has been embued to the users from the web 9.9 times out of 10 just being some restful services we can hack with. In all, I think there's a deficiency in broad architectural patterns for how the thick client should manage it's data, and a really issue with ahead-of-time bundles versus just-in-time & load behind code loading that we have failed to make much headway on in the past decade, and this lack is where the real wins are.

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