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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

#141

Post by DinaCoder98 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #10
troupo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now says that 2.4 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is fast now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit... (this is from…

You're making the same mistake the post did. It depends on the reader already having sympathy for the idea that bloat is bad in order to make its case. I can read nerd site comments all day that lament bloat. For an article to stand on its own on this point it has to make the case to people who don't already believe this. Dan's articles have usually been very good at that. The keyboard latency one for example makes f…

The reason we have bloat is it's easier to satisfy stakeholders if you don't give a damn. There's really no reason to discuss this at all once you realize this.

But of course, ranting and reading rants is satisfying in its own right. What's the problem?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#142

Post by nolist_policy »

goalieca wrote: post #105
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #3

I'm normally a fan of Dan Luu's posts but I felt this one missed the mark. The LCP/CPU table is a good one, but from there the article turns into a bit on armchair psychology. From some random comments coming from Discourse's founder, readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. Even Knuth gets dragged into the mud based on comments he made about single vs multi-core per…

> what attitudes software engineers supposedly have I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company take performance seriously. No one scoffs when a simple API service for frontend has 500ms response time! How many engineers even know or care how much their cloud bill is?

I'm sure Google invests a lot of resources in making Google Search load fast. AFAIK they serve a specialized version for each user agent out there.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#143

Post by pixl97 »

supertrope wrote: post #69
tdudhhu wrote: 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.

>Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus,

Ugh, bane of my day job. I work with two companies in particular that have high security requirements in their environments and very similar total workloads with our software. One spends around $250k (ish) a year in self hosting costs, the other over a million to get the same throughput. The less costly one worked with us as a vendor to get anti-virus/endpoint exclusions on the file io intensive part of our application and put anti-virus scanning before that point, then harden those machines in other ways. The other customer is "policy demands we scan everything everywhere and the policy is iron law".

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#144

Post by pixl97 »

jhanoncomm wrote: post #92
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.

I think you are close to the truth there. 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…

Ah, the modern AAA games take on MTX. Who cares about gamers, fish for whales.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#145

Post by hinkley »

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…

We need some watchdog group that watches page weight across sites and users and names and shames them.

Maybe they could do that Consumer Reports style, or maybe it’s an add on the works a bit like Nielsen ratings.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#146

Post by lstamour »

gnicholas wrote: post #140
lelanthran wrote: post #126

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.

The first time I saw this blog posted on HN I wondered how it could possibly be popular with such horrendous layout. The conclusion I came to is that the audience is very tech-savvy and is used to activating Reader Mode when they encounter pages like this.

Actually when I hit pages like this, I use the increase font size buttons. I tend to do this on phones too, especially. Yes, reader mode is also an option, but just bumping up the font size works too. You could also go back to the days when we had 800x600 monitors and 16px tended to be just the right size for that. ;-)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#147

Post by hinkley »

gerdesj wrote: post #128
LM358 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They encode videos ahead of time and they likely decided that whatever hardware you’re judging them by is only .9% of the market so fuck those guys.

Big companies use percentages in places they shouldn’t and it gets them in trouble. .1% when you have a billion users is a million people you’re shitting on.

For me that might be a dozen people. Very different.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#148

Post by gerdesj »

lelanthran wrote: post #126

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.

I'm 53 and I'm at least five years behind getting my specs sorted out - they are currently perched right on the end of my nose now and I have to get the angle right sometimes (astigmatism).

That page is nearly fine for me but I just hit CRTL + to scale up. That works for me.

That page is pure text with no or at least minimal fiddling. You have your solution for your use case and I have mine. A blind reader will also have their solution, so they can even access it. Thanks to the simplicity of the source: all solutions to accessibility are also going to be reasonably simple.

I think that Dan understands how to communicate effectively - keep it simple and don't assume that eyes will read your words. You can trivially (and you do) fiddle with the presentation yourself for your own purposes.

I think that if you don't like the presentation of something like this then you could reformat it yourself, prior to engagement. Dan has kindly provided his message as a simple text stream that can be trivially fiddled with.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#149

Post by hagbard_c »

Baguette5242 wrote: post #108
kome wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2014) is my only computer. I still don't feel like changing it so far...

Amateur… I am using a 2009 15’ MacBook Pro Unibody, with a swapped SuperDrive to SSD, another main SSD and RAM boosted to 8Gb. OpenCore Legacy to update to a relatively recent version of MacOS. The only thing that is so annoying is the webcam that doesn’t work anymore, and a USB port is dead also. So sad this kind of shenanigans are not possible anymore.

Pfah, showoff. My 2005 Thinkpad T42p crawls circles around that thing - slowly. Maxed out to 2GB, Intel 120GB SSD with a PATA->SATA adapter (just fits if you remove some useless bits from the lid) and - what keeps this machine around - a glorious keyboard and 1600x1200 display. It even gets several hours on the battery so what more could you want?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#150

Post by chmod775 »

gnicholas wrote: post #140
lelanthran wrote: post #126

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.

The first time I saw this blog posted on HN I wondered how it could possibly be popular with such horrendous layout. The conclusion I came to is that the audience is very tech-savvy and is used to activating Reader Mode when they encounter pages like this.

I went with the other techie solution: resizing my browser window.
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