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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

#181

Post by bee_rider »

emseetech wrote: post #155
bluquark wrote: post #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 exp…

> an alternate "lite/basic" mode. In another world this mode dominated UI/UX design and development and the result was beautiful and efficient. Where design more resembles a haiku than an unedited novel. We don't get to live in that world, but it's not hard to imagine.

I think it is sort of hard to imagine; a world populated mostly by humans that appreciate that sort of simplicity is pretty different!

If we had modern computers in 200X, we wouldn’t just have music on our myspaces, we’d put whole games there I bet.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#183

Post by zzo38computer »

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 disagree. The user can change the window size, font size, colours, etc according to their own preferences.

> I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to make it readable.

You shouldn't have to. You should be allowed to add a CSS file which can apply to multiple files, and then use that, instead of having to do it for each file individually.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#185

Post by grishka »

That Discourse guy is a classic example of someone designing their product for the world they wished existed instead of the world we actually live in. Devices with Qualcomm SoCs exist in billions, and will keep existing and keep being manufactured and sold for the foreseeable future. No amount of whining will change that. Get over it and optimize for them. People who use these devices won't care about your whining, they'll just consider you an incompetent software developer because your software crashes.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#186

Post by Hackbraten »

Mind that not only low-end or old phones have slow CPUs.

Both the $999 Librem 5 and the $1999 Liberty Phone (latest models) have an i.MX8M, which means they have similar processing power as the $50 phones the article is talking about.

I tried to log into Pastebin today. The Cloudflare check took several minutes.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#188

Post by squarefoot »

pixl97 wrote: post #116
ericra wrote: post #8

As someone with recent experience using a relatively slow Android phone, it can be absolutely brutal to load some web pages, even ones that only appear to be serving text and images (and a load of trackers/ads presumably). The network is never the bottleneck here. This problem is compounded by several factors. One is that older/slower phones cannot always use fully-featured browsers such as Firefox for mobile. The ap…

> That means no ublock origin Talk about a catch-22 situation. The modern web is useless without adblocking. Especially when you get forever scrolling pages with random ads stuffed in there.

As a web developing illiterate, I wonder how hard would be writing a browser extension that loads a page, does infinite scroll in memory and in background, then while it is still loading the infinite stuff, splits the content in pages and shows them instead, so that the user can go back and forth to page numbers. This wouldn't reduce the network and system load, however navigating the results would be much more friendly.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#189

Post by spintin »

mastazi wrote: post #178

> While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites. Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to impl…

PUBG is now a very special beast: It's CPU bound = we are unlikely to ever see a "AAA" game with anything beyond it's complexity for eternity. You can run it on a 1030 GPU at 60 FPS.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#190

Post by paledot »

mastazi wrote: post #178

> While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites. Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to impl…

(But don't under any circumstances break the four other trackers already running on the site.)
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