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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

#321

Post by hexage1814 »

anonymoushn wrote: post #281
teg4n_ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a performance optimization for rendering a large amount of html. If the DOM had all the items in memory it would perform much worse. Thankfully browsers are working on a feature where you can keep the markup in the DOM for things like CTRL-F without hurting performance. Granted the main reason such a technique is needed is designs that avoid pagination.

We had web pages with big lists and tables in the DOM 20+ years ago, they were fine. The difference is that now we use web frameworks that do work proportional to DOM size many times per second.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it's all a plane to make it harder for people to save stuff. If the content just stays there after you loaded, you could just save the page as HTML and, if there wasn't a lot of javascript shenanigans, it should save it okay. When you add this element, this doesn't work anymore. I'm pretty sure instagram, for example, does that with the intention of making it harder for people to save profiles.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#322

Post by rustcleaner »

idle_zealot wrote: post #293
crabmusket wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Actually, I find this highly ideal. I wish there was a button to press which would switch the interface into an almost Visual BASIC GUI editor like thing, permitting me to edit the arrangements. Also, I would like it if such an OS was more strict on forcing its interface objects (think: SimCity 2000 for Win95 with GDI-integrated GUI good, SimCity 3000 with Fisher-Price full screen toy interface bad). Also throw out much of the post- Windows 2000/KDE 3.5 desktop user interface 'innovation' but make all things editable in layout. I WANT MY COMPLICATED BUTTON GRIDS! :^(

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#323

Post by ParetoOptimal »

skydhash wrote: post #226
mardifoufs wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that on mobile?

Who read article like this on mobile? In a pinch, I'd just activate Reader Mode (Safari, iOS), or more likely save it for reading on a bigger screen (tablet, laptop,…)

I just read it on Firefox mobile without reader mode.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#324

Post by rustcleaner »

rustcleaner wrote: post #322
idle_zealot wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, I find this highly ideal. I wish there was a button to press which would switch the interface into an almost Visual BASIC GUI editor like thing, permitting me to edit the arrangements. Also, I would like it if such an OS was more strict on forcing its interface objects (think: SimCity 2000 for Win95 with GDI-integrated GUI good, SimCity 3000 with Fisher-Price full screen toy interface bad). Also throw out m…

Siemens PLM NX 10 is another example of what I like in an interface. The GIMP big time as well for its customizability. You know what I don't like? Gnome. I curse Gnome 3 (namely, the design cancer Gnome fell to early on) for why KDE has yet to recover to the comfiness of KDE 3.5. Apple is another hate.

I want a computational environment, I am a cyborg! I build my environments to my specifications. I am a privacy and control absolutist with these devices, because they are cybernetic extensions of my mind. SV: Stop being over-opinionated pricks trying to monetize every last drop of attention for every bottom-pocket penny in microtransactions. What we develop here is far and beyond more spiritual than we can all imagine. The utter lack of owner/user sovereignty shown lately, basically since iPhone and Facebook, captured in the term Enshittification, is absolutely appalling.

Anyway, thank you for reading my unspellchecked schizo-ramblings. Now carry on with the great monetization, metatron hungers!

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#325

Post by hexage1814 »

publius_0xf3 wrote: post #221

He mentions Substack, which is maybe the most egregious example of bloat I regularly encounter. Like I cannot open Scott Alexander's blog on my phone because it comes to a crawl. But the Substack devs are aware of this . [They know it's a problem]( https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/sub... ). >I'm much more of a backend person, so take this with somewhat of a grain of salt, but I believe the iss…

>Substack

I don't access this site a lot, but I remember until very recently they had other front-end, it worked great. Honestly, I think they will follow the path of medium.com, and start to make the user experience worse and worse.

It's a site where people post text, a few images, maybe 1 or 2 videos per post. It shouldn't be complicated.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#326

Post by kcrwfrd_ »

jwells89 wrote: post #214
freedomben wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

There was a proposal for a browser-native virtual scroller: https://wicg.github.io/virtual-scroller/

Apparently it was abandoned (for now?) in favor of content-visibility / CSS containment primitives: https://web.dev/articles/content-visibility

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#327

Post by gmokki »

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…

I wrote code to main nokia.com site 10 years ago where it used few ways to detect slow loading of resources and set a flag to disable extra features from the site. This was done because the site had to work in every country and many of the slowest phones sold were from said company.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#328

Post by bombcar »

ericra wrote: post #256
mattl wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn’t there an old browser that would render the page on the server and just send down the result or something like that?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#329

Post by bombcar »

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…

Most of those users have the advantage of not using English - and so there are often sites in their native language that cater to lower power devices.

But if you’re in that middle world country AND your official language is English, you’re gonna have a hell of a slow time.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#330

Post by callalex »

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).

iPhone browser performance has run circles around android browser performance on equivalent hardware for like the last 10 years or so. It’s really the secret sauce of iOS.
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