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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

#291

Post by userbinator »

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.

Then adjust your browser settings to your preference, because that certainly isn't mine either.

I've had to remove "max-width"'s from a ton of sites using my filtering proxy. My window is this big, I expect your content to fill it!

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#292

Post by moonchild »

yawaramin wrote: post #174
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…

> ...which is a long standing point of academic contention. What contention? If anything, Luu is being rather generous–Knuth was just whining that the decades-long free lunch program was being cancelled.

VLIW (Itanium is a VLIW arch) is what's contentious, not multiprocessing.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#293

Post by idle_zealot »

crabmusket wrote: post #241
Ruq wrote: post #231

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-…

It appears to me, as an outsider, that interfaces are designed with a "one size fits all" approach, at least at the prestige end of town. Instead of allowing the user to choose design and interaction that works for them, the designer (or product owner) acts as if they know what's best for all users.

What would the alternative look like? Applications shipping as a bag of arrangeable buttons and widgets that the user assembles into pages?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#294

Post by SadCordDrone »

_heimdall wrote: post #254
dogtierstatus wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sir, in most companies if you suggest something technical without having equivalent political power, at best, no one will listen to you. At worst you will create political enemies.

Probably there was an SDE-2 or SDE-3 who called bullshit on it and got ignored.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#295

Post by julianlam »

It's a shame that NodeBB was not included in the list of forums tested.

We worked really hard to optimize our forum load times, and it handedly beats the pants off of much we've tested against.

But that's not much of a brag, the bar is quite low.

Dan goes on and lambasts (rightfully so) Atwood for deriding Qualcomm and assuming slow phones don't exist.

Well, let's chat, and talk to someone whose team really does dogfood their products on slower devices...

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#296

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#297

Post by jhatemyjob »

Dan, I respect you and I feel your pain, but...

> Another common attitude on display above is the idea that users who aren't wealthy don't matter.

If you want to make money, then this is the correct attitude. You need to target the users who have the means to be on the bleeding edge. It may not be "fair" or "equitable" or whatever, but catering to the masses is a suicide mission unless you have a lot of cash/time to burn.

This post reminds me of the standard Stallman quip "if everyone used the GPL, then our problems would be solved"

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#298

Post by coolcoder613 »

keernan wrote: post #213

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…

> with 64kb of ram running windows 11

I hope you mean GB.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#299

Post by jwells89 »

ericra wrote: post #283
anon373839 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got an old MacBook Pro from 2013 that I still keep around because the keyboard is the best Apple ever made. It's not fast by any means, but I haven't encountered any difficulty with websites whatsoever. They're not as snappy as I'd expect on new hardware, but perfectly usable. I do use uBlock Origin, however. Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

> Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook? Yes. Definitely. a Macbook Pro from 2013 has between 4-16GB of memory for one thing. The lowest spec phone in the article (Itel P32) has 1GB. A 2013 Macbook Pro has a 4th gen i5 processor. This phone has a MediaTek MT6580. It's not even in the same ballpark. This is a bit of an extreme example, but the fact is that a very large number…

Additionally, weak Android devices are not necessarily old Android devices. New underpowered Android stuff is sold every day. Cheap tablets are particularly bad about this — I have a Lenovo tablet that I bought maybe a year ago which uses a SoC that benches a bit above a 2015 Apple A9.
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