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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

#231

Post by Ruq »

Related: Too much of technology today doesn't pay attention or even care to the less technologically adept, either.

Smartphones in my opinion are a major example of this. I can't tell you the number of people I've meet who barely even or don't even know how to use their devices. It's all black magic to them.

The largest problem is the over-dependence on the use of "Gesture Navigation" which is invisible and thus non-existent to them. Sure, they might figure out the gesture bar on an iPhone, but they have no conception of the notification/control center.

It's not that these people are dumb either, many of them could probably run circles around me in other fields, but when it comes to tech, it's not for a lack of trying, it's a lack of an intuitive interface.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#232

Post by Ruq »

dsr_ wrote: post #195
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…

To be fair, it is usually difficult to tell the difference between 243 tracking scripts and 244.

Modern webdev is fugged

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#233

Post by ryukoposting »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #47
ryukoposting wrote: post #5

I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering. It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's not that old, and it still works like new. I know it's not just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the same struggles. I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's website is among the absol…

Interesting that you have such problems with Amazon. I‘m using an iPhone XR (5,5 years old) and don’t have any problems using Amazon in the browser (Safari). And I’m on the latest iOS (17.4).

OS version may have an impact. The Galaxy S9s both run Android 9. That LG phone is stuck on Android 8 because AT&T sucks and never got around to updating their shitware-riddled Android fork. If they had, I wouldn't have needed to spend spend $800 on a new phone. I'm not bitter about it at all, though.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#234

Post by ryukoposting »

Accacin wrote: post #65
ryukoposting wrote: post #5

I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering. It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's not that old, and it still works like new. I know it's not just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the same struggles. I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's website is among the absol…

Did you try disabling JavaScript on Amazon? It actually doesn't function too badly. I know, I know, you shouldn't need to do it and I agree.

I fiddled with NoScript but I must have done something wrong because I broke the site entirely.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#235

Post by II2II »

goalieca wrote: post #102
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…

> 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 I’m in Canada and have a single digit plan and I just upgraded from an almost decade old flagship. Most websites are torture.

I'm in Canada and have a triple-digit plan, in MBs. It's for emergency use only. It would be nice if something as simple as checking on power outages didn't chew up a good portion of the data plan.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#236

Post by ryukoposting »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #101
ryukoposting wrote: post #5

I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering. It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's not that old, and it still works like new. I know it's not just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the same struggles. I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's website is among the absol…

I recently visited Brazil and had my shiny new phone snatched from my hand ... now with my spare 4 years old phone, frankly dont see any difference. But I use Firefox with all the ad blockers, maybe that helps.

I run Firefox with uBO and NoScript. Based on the other replies, OS version may play a role.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#237

Post by gnicholas »

chmod775 wrote: post #150
gnicholas wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since I have a ton of tabs open and jump between them, this ends up not being a solution I use anymore.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#238

Post by mattl »

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…

Can you run all your traffic through a self-hosted pihole to avoid such things?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#240

Post by wonnage »

hinkley wrote: post #147
gerdesj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Encoding and storing billions of videos in a format used by 0.1% of users feels like a waste though
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