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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

#331

Post by maigret »

gruez wrote: post #316
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…

>If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as plastic straw or bag bans.

IT is emitting around as much as aviation, and that was a surprise to me, most of it are due to client devices. Don’t have the source at hand at the moment though. And of that, most emissions are upfront until you buy it. Buying a new device because it’s not fast anymore causes emissions, not running it. Think about e-waste as well.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#333

Post by maigret »

nolist_policy wrote: post #142
goalieca wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what attitudes software engineers supposedly have I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company take performance seriously. No one scoffs when a simple API service for frontend has 500ms response time! How many engineers even know or care how much their cloud bill is?

I'm sure Google invests a lot of resources in making Google Search load fast. AFAIK they serve a specialized version for each user agent out there.

One the best counter examples to the rule. I tried running Lighthouse on a few Google services that are less prominent and had a few good laughs.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#334

Post by kreddor »

bombcar wrote: post #328
ericra wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The old Opera for mobile did that. I think Chrome had something similar at one point.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#335

Post by jamiek88 »

bombcar wrote: post #328
ericra wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Opera!

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#336

Post by progval »

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.

You can change your browser's default font size if you find it too small. It's in Firefox's main settings page. Websites shouldn't force "font-size: 18px;" because it then makes the font smaller for users who picked a larger font in their browser.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#337

Post by Nemo_bis »

pixl97 wrote: post #143
supertrope wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of companies don't care about end user performance experience. Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus, endpoint monitoring, TLS interception, Microsoft Teams, etc. If there's no explicit responsiveness goal, then performance dies by a thousand cuts.

>Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus, Ugh, bane of my day job. I work with two companies in particular that have high security requirements in their environments and very similar total workloads with our software. One spends around $250k (ish) a year in self hosting costs, the other over a million to get the same throughput. The less costly one worked with us as a vendor to get anti-virus/endpoin…

Worst is, nowadays such bloated "security" software is being forced onto Linux servers too... every time I check why something feels slow, Microsoft Defender is hogging resources.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#338

Post by dijit »

gmokki wrote: post #327
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.

I also worked for Nokia 13 or so years ago, though not on Nokia.com

Thanks for your work, one of the things that I really liked about Nokia was the passion for performance.

On the flip side: I was on the Meego project and we joked that we had the most expensive clock application ever created, because it kept being completely recreated.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#339

Post by dijit »

porcoda wrote: post #313

I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies. No developers appear willing to admit that there is a large cohort of not that great web programmers who don’t know much (and appear to not WANT to know much) about efficiency. They’re just as to blame for the sad world of web software as the big boss or corporate overlord that forced someone to make bad software.

"it's better for the company that I don't try, my time is expensive and any minute not spent on a feature is a waste of my salary" - is a common justification that I hear all too often.
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