Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 613 posts

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#371

Post by d1sxeyes »

freedomben wrote: post #208
squarefoot wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a web developing illiterate, I wonder how hard would be writing a browser extension that loads a page, does infinite scroll in memory and in background, then while it is still loading the infinite stuff, splits the content in pages and shows them instead, so that the user can go back and forth to page numbers. This wouldn't reduce the network and system load, however navigating the results would be much more frien…

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)…

You don’t actually need to load everything, just the previous, current, and next pages.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#372

Post by rokkamokka »

zilti wrote: post #354
bezbac wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely not true in my experience, and I would think if it were true, most pages would be "slim and efficient". Where is the business value in doing anything else at that point?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#373

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

dijit wrote: post #338
gmokki wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I liked Meego and Maemo, I always felt that they were an expression of the idea that general purpose computing can work in the mobile form factor, which is something that tremendously appeals to me (I wish I still had my N900).

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#374

Post by zelphirkalt »

rokkamokka wrote: post #372
zilti wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Definitely not true in my experience, and I would think if it were true, most pages would be "slim and efficient". Where is the business value in doing anything else at that point?

The GP might not always be true, but no, we would not have slim and efficient sites, because of push web developers get to include all kinds of unnecessary tracking and in general bloat on websites.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#375

Post by amlib »

mik1998 wrote: post #37

I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged) and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my preference of using native software (non-electron), which generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more modern" computer.

I remember going trough a similar situation when using a netbook. At first they were ok for doing light work and even accessing websites, but as time went on websites and browsers became more and more heavy. Youtube was a struggle, even Google felt laggy. Want to browse a map? You are better off getting a physical one! But, no worry, it was still fine for other low intensity things and some programming projects I worked on. About two years later and both KDE and GNOME would struggle to run on it, it was painful. Maybe I should have switched to an all CLI/terminal workflow but eventually I bought a used thinkpad X220 which was like taking a breath of fresh air after holding it for years. But now I do see the same pattern emerging, much slower mind you, but it is surely happening. Some websites feel sluggish, some gnome apps also feel sluggish and I have to avoid electron apps like the plague. But at least it has enough brawn (16GB of RAM and an SSD) to cut trough the bullshit and work ok on most things. Maybe I should have embraced that terminal lifestyle after all...

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#376

Post by zelphirkalt »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #370
autoexec wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's better for the company that I don't try" seems like a convenient take for a dev without the skills to have. I'd argue that performance is a feature, and if someone can't deliver it their salary is being wasted already.

Performance is a feature and management often doesn't care to optimize for it. If the market valued performance more then we would probably see competitive services which optimize for performance, but we generally don't. I'm sure there's plenty of developers that could deliver improved performance, it's just a matter of tradeoffs. Maybe the people who care this much about performance should start competing services o…

One issue is, that the caring about performance is often not visible. How does management accout for or measure how annoyed people get visiting their bloated websites? How many people do not know better, how fast and snappy a not bloated website can be, because they apend all their time on Instagram, FB, and co? Even if a company does measure it somehow via some kind of truly well executed A/B test, other explanations might be reached for, to explain why a user left the website, than the performance.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#377

Post by zelphirkalt »

userbinator wrote: post #290
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…

I use Invidious for browsing the site, and watch the actual videos via a script that deobfuscates and gets the actual stream URL and then passes that to VLC. As another data point, YouTube a decade ago would've been perfectly fine on that hardware too. The culprit is web bloat in general, and more specifically the monstrosities of abstraction that have become common in JS. Even for those who don't believe at all in "…

Can you share that script? Also using invidious, but passing to vlc sounds good for saving cpu cycles.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#378

Post by coolcoder613 »

cuu508 wrote: post #310
coolcoder613 wrote: post #301

Compare with one of my projects, [1] It is a minimal, though modern-looking web chat. The HTML, CSS and JS together is 5024 bytes. The Rust backend source is 2801 bytes. It does not pull in anything from anywhere. [1] https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/minchat

Is there a demo site or screenshots somewhere? Add them to README :-)

I added a screenshot.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#379

Post by majewsky »

teg4n_ wrote: post #223
hexage1814 wrote: post #162

>Many pages actually remove the parts of the page you scrolled past as you scroll There is a special place in hell for every web developer who does that.

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.

I am usually just a backend developer, but for a little reporting application that I built, I couldn't get the UI team to do a UI in the short time that I had to build it, so I had it output some basic HTML. About 10000 list items. Rendered imperceptibly fast on my browser.

Then because of $mandate, the report was moved to the team's standard React UI frontend. Now it takes 5 seconds to load and only gives you like 100 items at a time, so Ctrl-F is broken. Also, filter dropdowns somehow did not work until they fixed it, so it appears like the select tag was not fit for their design and they rolled their own.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#380

Post by ksec »

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.

Probably a bit of both.

Client Side Rendering ( Regardless of Frameworks ) is hip, and gets more media attention. Sometimes backed by VC. It is new, it is complex. And fits both the hype cycle, software engineers complexity attraction, and Resume Driven Development model. And just like the article stated, it is suppose to bring so many good things in its idealogy to the table.

Since majority of software developers wants to works on it, so their Resume gets a tick and could jump to another job later. Management now faces lots of application for these technology and zero for old and boring tech.

>great web programmers who don’t know much (and appear to not WANT to know much) about efficiency.

Remember when Firefox OS developers thought $35 dollar Smartphone will one day take over the world and CPU will be so much faster due to Moore's law, performance will soon becomes irrelevant.

I mean that is like Jeff hates Qualcomm, without actually understanding anything about Mobile SoC business nor the CPU behind it. And how ARM's IP works. A lot of people dont want to know "why" either.

A more accurate description and also a general observation. Most software developers and especially those on Web Development have very little understanding of hardware or low level Software engineering. Cloud Computing makes this even more abstracted.

Post reply on HN