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

121–130 of 613 posts

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#121

Post by pixl97 »

zbrozek wrote: post #100

There's also a huge tendency to design for fast, high quality connectivity. Try using any Google product on airplane wifi. Even just chat loads in minutes-to-never and frequently keels over dead, forcing an outrageously expensive reload. Docs? Good luck. I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet loss are real.

Developers are expensive, so we give them fast connections and fast computers. Then we act shocked when modern software/web requires fast computers.

Unless it's somehow regulated that people test less than ideal conditions it won't happen, yet most people (myself included) don't really want that either.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#122

Post by genewitch »

jhanoncomm wrote: post #89
maxloh wrote: post #81

YouTube is one of the slowest websites I have ever used. It takes several seconds to load, even with moderate hardware and fast internet connections.

Reddit for me is the slowest site. And while old.reddit fixes this they try to steer you back to main reddit at any opportunity!

RES fixes this, i think. It's a browser extension that forces everything to stay the way it was when reddit worked fine - before publishers bought it.

I don't have any issue with reddit usability, although i do use it a lot less since they nuked my cellphone app from orbit as a cash grab.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#123

Post by dan-robertson »

If one cares about accessibility of a website to people with much slower devices, particularly living in less developed parts of the world, I guess there are more considerations:

- using more clear English with simple sentence structures should make the content more accessible to people who don’t read English with the fluency of an educated American

- reducing the number of requests required to load a page as latency may be high (and latency to the nearest e.g. cloudflare edge node may still be high)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#124

Post by genewitch »

Devasta wrote: 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.

Virtually all pharmaceutical advertising is targeted at prescribers, yet we all have to watch/view them.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#125

Post by nolist_policy »

genewitch wrote: post #99

as a data point youtube is unusable on raspberry pi 3. This happened within the last year, because prior to that you could "watch" videos at about 10-15FPS which is enough, for instance, to get repair videos in a shop setting (ask me how i know). When the raspberry pi model B - the first one released - came out, you could play 1080p video from storage, watch youtube, play games . I'm not sure what youtube is doing (o…

Its worth trying out different browsers. In my experience Chromium based browsers are a bit faster than Firefox on really low end devices (Pinephone, ...) as long as you have enough ram (>1Gb?).

E.g. On the OG Pinephone a 720p video on Youtube is running smoothly in Chromium, but not Firefox.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#126

Post by lelanthran »

This article is basically unreadable for me 48 y/o on desktop). In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it readable:

    font-size: 18px;
    line-height: 1.5em;
    max-width: 38rem;
Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is. I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to make it readable.

Seriously, techies, it's an extra 64 Bytes to make your page more readable.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#127

Post by liveoneggs »

jodrellblank wrote: post #86
liveoneggs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The web doesn't scale like desktops - not even close.

Furthermore - this philosophy has made Windows worse and less responsive in all cases.

I understand that this "pays the bills" but my charge is (currently) to make things faster so I am against slowness.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#128

Post by gerdesj »

LM358 wrote: post #112
genewitch wrote: post #99

as a data point youtube is unusable on raspberry pi 3. This happened within the last year, because prior to that you could "watch" videos at about 10-15FPS which is enough, for instance, to get repair videos in a shop setting (ask me how i know). When the raspberry pi model B - the first one released - came out, you could play 1080p video from storage, watch youtube, play games . I'm not sure what youtube is doing (o…

Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other codecs a while ago.

Is YT so impoverished they can't manage some sort of negotiation mechanism that includes x264 and makes it work?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#129

Post by flir »

genewitch wrote: post #99

as a data point youtube is unusable on raspberry pi 3. This happened within the last year, because prior to that you could "watch" videos at about 10-15FPS which is enough, for instance, to get repair videos in a shop setting (ask me how i know). When the raspberry pi model B - the first one released - came out, you could play 1080p video from storage, watch youtube, play games . I'm not sure what youtube is doing (o…

I've got an old Roku box that has started rebooting after a few minutes of playing youtube videos.

In your case, maybe pulling the video with yt-dlp then playing it works...

Post reply on HN