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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

#351

Post by gruez »

MrVandemar wrote: post #341
gruez wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 has a cumulative effect and drives the continual "upgrade" cycle. When you consider the life-time of an average mobile device, and the resources required to manufacture and ship them, it's a not insignificant problem.

Random source from google[1]:

>Berners-Lee writes that in 2020, there were 7.7 billion mobile phones in use, with a footprint of roughly 580 million tonnes of CO2e. This equates to approximately 1% of all global emissions

Of course, not everyone is replacing their phones yearly. Another source[2] says the average consumer phone is 3 years old. That works out to 0.33% of global emissions, assuming the phones aren't recycled/reused to developing countries. Even if assume people are upgrading their phones for app/web performance reasons, the impact is far less than 1%.

[1] https://reboxed.co/blogs/outsidethebox/the-carbon-footprint-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon...

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#352

Post by YoshiRulz »

genewitch wrote: post #124
Devasta wrote: post #50

If you don't have a good phone and a high speed connection, you don't have any money to spend on either the sites products or the products of their advertisers. When looked at from that angle, bloat is a feature. It's not reasonable to have an expectation of quality when it comes to the web.

Virtually all pharmaceutical advertising is targeted at prescribers, yet we all have to watch/view them.

That's mostly an American thing.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#353

Post by ww520 »

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 has exceptional long lasting performance. I have a 5 year old iPhone and it still runs smooth like silk.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#354

Post by zilti »

bezbac wrote: post #342
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.

That's not fair. Sure, if there's an experienced dev who _values_ efficiency on the team, who pushes for the site to be more efficient or builds it more efficiently to begin with, the page would be better off. But it's mostly about incentives. If management doesn't care, they will likely not react well to programmers spending time making the site more efficient instead of spending half the time to just get it running…

It usually requires less time, not more, to create a slim and efficient page.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#355

Post by NicoJuicy »

SkyArrow wrote: post #280
mattl wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love something like it for all my older devices where I can set it and forget it.

NextDNS is pretty good for this - just change the DNS in your network settings.

You'll also need to add bundles to block dns names ( free fyi)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#356

Post by genewitch »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #352
genewitch wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually all pharmaceutical advertising is targeted at prescribers, yet we all have to watch/view them.

That's mostly an American thing.

As an american by accident, i apologize, you're right. More civilized countries have outlawed that sort of advertising.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#357

Post by nox101 »

pixl97 wrote: post #116
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…

> That means no ublock origin Talk about a catch-22 situation. The modern web is useless without adblocking. Especially when you get forever scrolling pages with random ads stuffed in there.

I just choose not to use it. if I follow a link and there is an ad per paragraph and video starts playing I close the tab. it's rare the page I was about to look at was actually important

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#358

Post by genewitch »

zer00eyz wrote: post #160
genewitch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last decade of my life has been a speedrun in "less than ideal conditions" for computing. CGNAT, 5mbit dsl, spotty "fixed wireless" and my latest debacle: starlink, although that seems to be getting better slowly; used to drop 15/60 seconds, now it drops more like 4/200 seconds. Constant power issues and lightning strikes - i only have 1 computer that has a working NIC, because evidently tiny power fluctuations a…

Do you have earth return on your power?

Yes, and it works, too. But i have outbuildings with servers and networking gear in them and metal conduit between buildings on/underground. Voltage potentials don't care, if there's a wet extension cord or something that's a less resistive path to start flowing and some gear is on that circuit or adjacent, it'll go.

Overall switching to fiber is cheaper than aggressive lightning protection, and i moved all the network gear to a commercial UPS, and the interconnect between the "modems" and the switches is media converted to fiber for 3 feet. any time i have to run networking further than 6' or so i run fiber and put a media converter or a single gbic switch there. I'm hoping i futureproofed enough to upgrade to 10gbit in a year or so. My backup NAS has 10gbit but nothing else is connected at that speed yet.

edit: One time lightning hit a pine tree in the back of the house, and it used my dipole antenna to reach a tree 80' away, and apparently there was an extension cable near there, which went back into the house, and it went all the way around the house, to reach the telco CPE box where DSL lived. the telco box and my mains earth are roughly 1 meter apart. That surge took out my main desktop computer, a washing machine (singed the dryer where it arced between it and the washer), the toaster oven, a microwave, my NAS, and my router connected to telco. It went two different paths inside the house, along both outside walls, one via mains copper and the other via cat5e copper. That was quite an expensive misadventure.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#359

Post by genewitch »

fbdab103 wrote: post #179
genewitch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a now-defunct electronics store (not fry's in this instance) in the early 2000s that offered this "tune-up" - it was to remove the stuff that HP and Dell got paid to pre-install, and to fully update windows and whatever else. Remove the mcafee nuisance popups and any browser "addons" that were badged/branded. and IIRC we charged more than $50 for that service back then.

For the performance boost it could offer the unsavy user stuck on a HDD, it was probably worth it to many. Gross to be the middleman, but it is what it is.

Another computer shop i worked in charged $90 for virus removal, but we also eventually made it policy to just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap and fully update the OS. Prior to that the policy was "remove viruses, remove crapware, update OS", but we had a few customers that had machines with 30,000 viruses. I forget what the record was, but it was way up there in count. Trying to clean those machines had a marginal failure rate, enough that it was costing the owner money to have us repeatedly clean them without payment.

No one wants to tell a customer that they need to find better adult content sites, and that we won't be cleaning their machines without payment anymore!

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