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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

61–70 of 613 posts

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#62

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 no issues with Amazon on my iPhone 8 running latest iOS 16

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#64
post #38
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who is this mythical end-user with an old browser? Because they don’t show up in browser usage statistics. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share Chrome is evergreen, even on Android. Safari, after a bit of a fallow period, is updated fairly aggressively, and though it’s still coupled with OS updates, it’s no longer married to the annual x.0 releases. Mind you, I still believe, and practice, you shou…

Exactly. The landscape has changed because those old browser users have been forced to update.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#65

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…

Did you try disabling JavaScript on Amazon? It actually doesn't function too badly. I know, I know, you shouldn't need to do it and I agree.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#66
Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. I believe it's primarily this category of user that accounts for Dan's observation that incremental improvements in CPU/RAM/disk measurably improve engagement.

As for users with the lowest-end devices like the Itel P32, Dan's chart seems to prove that no amount of incremental optimization would benefit them. The only thing that might is a wholesale different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved successful: the empathy problem returns in a different guise, as US-based developers often make the wrong decisions on which features/polish are essential to keep versus discarded for performance reasons.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#69
post #44

Not only the user is affected by this. The difference between a 2MB and a 150KB CSS file can be a lot of bandwidth. The difference between a bad and good framework can be a lot of CPU power and RAM. Companies pay for this. But I guess most have no clue that these costs can be reduced. And some companies just don't care as long as money is coming in.

A lot of companies don't care about end user performance experience. Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus, endpoint monitoring, TLS interception, Microsoft Teams, etc. If there's no explicit responsiveness goal, then performance dies by a thousand cuts.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#70
post #50

If you don't have a good phone and a high speed connection, you don't have any money to spend on either the sites products or the products of their advertisers. When looked at from that angle, bloat is a feature. It's not reasonable to have an expectation of quality when it comes to the web.

Well that take sure goes from 0 to 60 real fast. Can you really be sure that only people with good phones and connections have money to spend? Just to poke some obvious holes: what about old rich people who have a distaste for modern phones but spend lavishly on vacations every year? Or outdoorsy rich people who are frequently in areas with poor cell coverage but are constantly purchasing expensive camping/climbing equipment? How about people who aren’t rich, but work for companies where their input is part of a purchasing process with millions of dollars of budget? Those people are all super-lucrative advertising targets, I don’t think advertisers are intentionally weeding them out.
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