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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

#251

Post by hotdailys »

When websites pack in too many high-res images, videos, and complex scripts, it’s like they’re trying to cram that overstuffed suitcase into a tiny space. Your device is struggling, man. It’s like it’s running a marathon with a backpack full of bricks.

So, what happens? Your device slows down to a crawl, pages take forever to load, and sometimes, it just gives up and crashes. It’s like being stuck in traffic when you’re already late for work. And let’s not even talk about the data usage. It’s like your phone’s eating through your data plan like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Now, if you’re on the latest and greatest tech, you might not notice much. But for folks with older devices or slower connections, it’s a real pain. It’s like everyone else is zooming by on a high-speed train while you’re chugging along on a steam engine.

So, what can we do? Well, we can start by being mindful of what we put on our websites. Keep it lean, mean, and clean, folks. Your users will thank you, and their devices will too. And hey, maybe we’ll all get where we’re going a little faster.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#252

Post by nicbou »

I travel a lot and experience a wide range of internet connection speeds and latencies. Hotel Wi-Fi can be horrible.

The web is clearly not designed for or tested on slow connections. UIs feel unresponsive and broken because no one thought that an action might take seconds to load.

Even back home in Germany, we have really unreliable mobile internet. I designed the interactive bits of All About Berlin for people on the U-Bahn, not just office workers on M3 Macbooks with fiber internet.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#253

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

mattl wrote: post #238
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?

Having a decent internet experience shouldn't require going through your own self-hosted server.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#254

Post by _heimdall »

dogtierstatus wrote: post #242
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…

One time long ago, e-commerce company i worked for decided to add tiktok analytics to the front-end. The dev team added the changes but were worried it might impact performance and UX. As a solution we were told to run the performance tests to check it. The performance tests were created to mimic user behaviour but only involved company APIs. Not third party requests. No one in the top level, cared about this bit of…

Did no one call bullshit on the test before running it? Personally I'd just flat out refuse to run the test, likely designing the proper test comparing while third party scripts where enabled.

Management and product owners should understand how these things work, and shouldn't ask for bogus data when they do. But teams implementing the changes should just flat out refuse when they know the request isn't reasonable.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#255

Post by hinkley »

wonnage wrote: post #240
hinkley wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The context above was exclusion of people based on income level.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#256

Post by ericra »

mattl wrote: post #238
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?

Certainly an option for me. But not a scalable solution for the large number of non-tech people with older devices.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#257

Post by _heimdall »

steve_taylor wrote: post #207
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…

These days they coerce the dev team into implementing a tag manager so they can add their filthy trackers without asking the dev team.

The "they" here can't really coerce the dev team unless the dev team is willing to comply. Refusing to implement an unethical feature is always an option, and given that we're often considered engineers it is well within our right to deem something unsafe or against best practices.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#258

Post by lmz »

hotdailys wrote: post #251

When websites pack in too many high-res images, videos, and complex scripts, it’s like they’re trying to cram that overstuffed suitcase into a tiny space. Your device is struggling, man. It’s like it’s running a marathon with a backpack full of bricks. So, what happens? Your device slows down to a crawl, pages take forever to load, and sometimes, it just gives up and crashes. It’s like being stuck in traffic when you…

Maybe we'll see the return of the proxy + lightweight browser model like Opera Mini.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#259

Post by gnicholas »

ordu wrote: post #243
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.

> In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it readable For cases when you don't agree with styles there is Reader Mode. Your way works also, but Reader Mode just simplier, it is just one click away.

True, although not all browsers have Reader Mode. Chrome didn't have it until last year, and the version they built is a sidebar, unlike most Reader Modes. This is probably because they want to make sure ads are shown alongside the Reader Mode.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#260

Post by mattl »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #253
mattl wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Having a decent internet experience shouldn't require going through your own self-hosted server.

Absolutely not but then I never thought I’d need a 20,000 entry hosts file either.
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