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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

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Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#211

Post by ogurechny »

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?

Supposedly, the whole point of Google financing “open codecs” was for them to break free from MPEG codec licensing. I imagine the total amount of fees had a lot of zeros. So, yes, each time they don't serve H.264 (unless absolutely required) results in saving a lot of money.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#212

Post by spintin »

duck2 wrote: post #200
spintin wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like websites are GPU bound

No but most games are. Thus PUBG is an outlier.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#213

Post by keernan »

A problem that recently started in Feb 2024 for me is probably unrelated to the topic, but close enough that I'm posting in the hopes someone has an idea of what is happening.

I am running on a relatively new Lenovo Legion (~ 18 months old) with 64kb of ram running windows 11. About 6 weeks ago I began getting the BSOD every time I streamed a live hockey game (I watch maybe 3 games a week from Oct to Jun via Comcast streaming or 'alternative' streams).

The crashes happened multiple times every game. After maybe 10 games of this, I began closing and reopening the browser during every game break. I've experienced zero crashes since doing that.

When the crashes started, I was using Chrome - but I still experienced BSOD crashes when I switched and tested Fox and Brave. Just very odd to start happening suddenly without any changes to my machine that I could pinpoint - no upgraded bios or nvidia that I can recall.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#214

Post by jwells89 »

freedomben wrote: post #208
squarefoot wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frien…

Problem is, "infinite scroll" often is infinite, meaning it will load an ass load of data in the background and take up a ton of memory, and the user may never even end up looking at that data. I really hate the load on scroll (especially Google Drive's implementation which is absolute trash, and half the time I'll scroll too fast and it will just miss a bunch of files and I'll have to refresh the page and try again)…

In these situations what’s eating up your resources usually isn’t the data being represented but instead the representation.

This is why native apps use recycler views for not just infinite scroll, but anything that can display more rows/columns/items/etc than can fit on screen at once. Recycler views only create just enough cells to fill the screen even if you have tens of thousands of items to represent, and when you scroll they reuse these cells to display the currently relevant segment of data. When used correctly by developers, these are very lightweight and allow 60FPS scrolling of very large lists even on very weak devices.

These are possible to implement in JavaScript in browsers, but implementation quality varies a lot and many web devs just never bother. This is why I think HTML should gain a native recycler widget of its own, because the engineers working on Blink, Gecko, and WebKit are in much better positions to write high quality optimized implementations, plus even if web devs don’t use it directly, many frameworks will.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#215

Post by ogurechny »

jwells89 wrote: post #54
mik1998 wrote: post #37

I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged) and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my preference of using native software (non-electron), which generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more modern" computer.

Whenever I pull out old machines I’m a little shocked at how responsive they are running a modern OS (Win10 or Linux), so long as the modern web is avoided. Anything with a Core 2 Duo or better is adequate for a wide range of tasks if you can find non-bloated software to do them with. Even going back so far that modern OS support is absent, snappiness can be found. My circa 2000 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9.1…

“True UNIX way” solution to this would be getting the data from the Web non-interactively and redirecting it into some regular expressions to produce the only thing you want. Random example:

https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#216

Post by rmbyrro »

paledot wrote: post #190
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.)

You mean the four new ones they added last week alone, right?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#217

Post by aragonite »

> Another example is Wordpress (old) vs. newer, trendier, blogging platforms like Medium and Substack. Wordpress (old) is 17.5x / 10x faster (LCP* / CPU) than Medium and 5x / 7x faster (LCP* / CPU) faster than Substack on our M3 Max ...

It's a persistent complaint among readers of SlateStarCodex (a blog which made a high-profile move to Substack from an old WordPress site). Substack attributes the sluggishness to the owner's special request to show all comments by default, but the old WordPress blog loads all comments by default and was fine even on older devices.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/sub...

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b9p55g/any...

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#218

Post by ogurechny »

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…

YouTube was not tested because monitors can't handle CMYK, and we need a lot of that extra coal black to color the results.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#219

Post by csande17 »

bee_rider wrote: post #181
emseetech wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People did, in fact, embed games on MySpace, mostly using Flash if I recall correctly.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#220

Post by dudul »

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…

Just throw a ticket in jira for these stupid devs to "make it faster".
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