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

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 613 posts

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#21

Post by smokel »

MichaelMug wrote: post #9

Since 2000, I've observed the internet shift from free sharing of information to aggressive monetization of every piece of knowledge. So I suspect that is the culprit. If you use the mobile web on the latest iPhone you'll find its unusable without an ad-blocker.

Hm, not entirely true, depending on what you mean with "the internet shifting".

The internet has grown, and the free sharing is still going strong. Have a look at Wikipedia, Hacker News, Arxiv.org.

To be honest, the stuff that was shared freely in 2000 was not all that great, and most of that which was, is still available. Remember that you had to buy a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica back then, and to all the academic journals.

Granted, there are some non-free information silos, but generally I'm pretty happy with the procrastination advice on Reddit being surrounded by annoying ads that drive me away.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#22

Post by ericra »

amelius wrote: post #11

Perhaps these people are better off by running a web browser on a remote machine and interfacing with it over VNC.

This is trolling, right?

Lemme just give my grandma a list of instructions for doing this so she can get to Facebook. I'll let you know how it works out.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#23

Post by Karrot_Kream »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #19

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 a…

Yeah this is exactly the kind of nuance I'd love to see explored but as you say, auditing native apps is difficult, and it's really hard to compare apples to apples unless you can really compare equivalent web and mobile apps.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#25

Post by throw_m239339 »

Every company stopped caring, especially the companies who were at the forefront of standards and good web design practices, like Google and Apple.

Google recently retired their HTML Gmail version, mind you, it still worked on a 2008 256MO RAM Android phone with an old Firefox version and it was simply fast... of course the new JS bloated version doesn't, it just kills the browser. That's an extreme example, yet low budget Phones have 2GB of RAM, you simply cannot browser the web with these and expect reasonable performances anymore.

Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to use "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to data collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and Google.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#27

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Clues that a market is not competitive...

What most impresses me is that this happen on many markets that should be competitive by any sane rationale. Like group buying or hotel booking. Yet, they also do that kind of shit, and people still have nowhere to go.

The world economy became integrated and incredibly rigid.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#28

Post by olliej »

layer8 wrote: post #15
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.

Which is absurd when you think that the internet used to be usable on 14.4k modems.

I remember having to plan to take up hours of time on our phone line to download giant files that were smaller than many basic webpages these days (ignoring things like photos where there's obviously a basic size/quality tradeoff + more pixels)

Post reply on HN