91–100 of 613 posts
Next try out the search engines. Anecdotally, Google Search loads ~500ms faster than DuckDuckGo on the OG Pinephone.
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.
But I doubt companies purposely increase their hosting costs as some kind of firewall to only include the rich. More like they just don’t care. Same reason for technical debt, everyone wants to grow and move needles.
If a company could magically make their site more available and efficient for free I am sure they would jump at the chance. But spending a million on that vs. a million on ads wont seem worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what I miss from the removal of serviceable components on MacBooks. Was a time I would buy the fastest processor and just okay memory and disk, then the first time I got a twinge of jealousy about the new machines, buy the most Corsair memory that they would guarantee would work, and a bigger faster drive. Boom, another 18 months of useful lifetime.
Is the total useful lifetime more than MacBooks with non serviceable components? I see people around me easily using Airs for 5+ years.
Next try out the search engines. Anecdotally, Google Search loads ~500ms faster than DuckDuckGo on the OG Pinephone.
That is one performance metric. What about energy use and loading search results not just the home page. I find DDG faster from a perception point of view. I imagine on sone metrics it is faster.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=test9999
vs.
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State your case that bloat is good . I currently have a client who will do literally anything except delete a single javascript library so I'd like to understand them better.
Joel Spolsky on Excel bloat, 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
I can load the entire MS Office suite and open a Visual Studio 2022 project in less time then it takes to open a blank Jira web form.
What’s your point?
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.
Nobody, nobody, nobody cares about old hardware, performance, users, etc. if anyone cared, React wouldn't be a success. The last time I tried to use the react website on an old phone, it was slow as hell. LetsEncrypt is stopping serving Android 7 this year. Android 7 will be blocked from 19% of the web: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration The option is to install Firefox. Users with old hardware…
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 exp…
And the if I’m in a place with a shitty signal, forget about it, this problem is 10 times worse.
I’m not even talking about the cluttered UI where only a third of the page is visible because of frozen headers and ads, I’m talking about the size of the websites themselves that are built by people who throw shit against the wall until it looks like whatever design document they were given. A website that would have already been bloated had it been built correctly that then becomes unusable on a slow internet connection, forget slow hardware.
All that is to say, I can’t imagine what it must be like to use the internet under the circumstances in which you described.
I can only hope these people use localized sites built for their bandwidth and devices and don’t have to interact with the bloated crap we deal with.
I'm not sure what youtube is doing (or everyone else for that matter.)
If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans. eating CPU cycles for profit (ad-tech would be my off the cuff guess for why youtube sucks on these low power devices) should be loudly derided in the media and people should use more efficient services, even if the overall UX is worse.
I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet loss are real.