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

441–450 of 613 posts

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#441

Post by rapnie »

LilBytes wrote: post #426
bboygravity wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you do use a standard browser, companies will force you to use an app by making there website broken (on purpose?). Random recent example: Nike. Popping useless errors upon checkout in the webshop. Support: "oh, we're so sorry, just try the app, k bye". Another example of major companies with broken websites more often than not: (European) airline booking websites. And major companies think this is totally fi…

Reddit is another example where they've broken the mobile browser experience, to send you to another app. Arguably broken, but in different ways.

LinkedIn, leaders in deceptive design (though given recent HN on internal situation, a more favorable interpretation may be that they can't handle their own bloat and it shows).

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#442

Post by arp242 »

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.

About 5 years ago I applied for a job at a company that enabled people in rural Africa to more easily sell the goods they produced (farmers, basket weavers, what-have-you).

If you mainly target people in the US or EU, there's perhaps something to be said for not optimizing too aggressively for low-end hardware and flaky low-bandwidth high-latency connections. But if you're targetting rural Africa fairly aggressive optimisation seems like a no-brainer, right?

Their homepage loaded this 2M gazillion by gazillion pixel image downscaled to 500 by 1000 pixels with CSS. It got worse from there. I don't recall the exact JS payload size, but it was multi-MB – everything was extremely frontend-heavy, which was double ridiculous because it was mostly a "classic" template-driven backend app from what I could see.

I still applied because I liked the concept but the tech was just horrible. I don't really know why it was like this as I never got to the first interview stage, but it's hard to image it's anything other than western European developers not quite realizing what they're doing in this regard.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#443

Post by Panzer04 »

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…

I think this tends to sound like a better idea than it is. It's good for power users who want to optimise their UI to suit, but regular users aren't going to do that.

Gesture navigation's lack of discoverability is a problem for sure, although I'm not sure how to best address it (people aren't likely to sit through tutorials...)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#444

Post by n_ary »

bboygravity wrote: post #399
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…

Even if you do use a standard browser, companies will force you to use an app by making there website broken (on purpose?). Random recent example: Nike. Popping useless errors upon checkout in the webshop. Support: "oh, we're so sorry, just try the app, k bye". Another example of major companies with broken websites more often than not: (European) airline booking websites. And major companies think this is totally fi…

I can show some forgiveness to airlines, because they simply outsource it to some agency somewhere.

But I have zero sympathy for giants, like Slack. If I do a "Request the Desktop Site", then it suddenly works(albeit with lot of scrolling) on my Firefox(iOS), but if I disable the "Request the Desktop Site", then it blocks everything and forces me to download the app from AppStore.

Sadly, the downloaded app looks like an optimized mobile version of the site.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#445

Post by gcanyon »

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 use ublock origin, and on literally more than one occasion (insert doofenshmirtz nickel quote) I've found a site that I quite like, think it's awesome to the point I actually write to the people who create it with suggestions, and then for whatever reason happen to load it without blockers and discover it's halfway useless with all the ads on it.

I fully support people being able to make some money off the useful things they build on the internet, whether it's some random person who built a thing, or the New York Times or even FB or Google, but there has to be a better local maximum than online advertising.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#446

Post by automatic6131 »

>Just as an aside, something I've found funny for a long time is that I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on this page (and a similar volume of appreciation mail)

Yes! I've definitely felt like this while using his website. Of course, today I just fixed it with

main { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto; }

but tbh, I don't want to install an extension to customise the css on this one site...

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#448

Post by danlugo92 »

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.

True but only if you know how to. Also slim will 99% of the time be less code too.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#449

Post by Panzer04 »

nottorp wrote: post #414
gruez wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer doesn't care either because a page that takes 5s longer to load on a 1W TDP SoC costs them around one-millionth of a penny. Even if you're refreshing 100 times per day it's only around 0.05 kWh per year, which at any reasonable electricity prices is a sum that's simply not worth worrying about. You'd get more savings from getting people to turn off their led light bulbs for a few minutes.

US centric electricity prices view :) Also, it's not just your site. It's every site. And the customer pays all those millionths of a penny added up out of their pocket. And all those 5 second delays out of their lifetime. Edit: btw at a quick glance you underestimated cell phone soc TDP by a 2-4 factor.

A single use of an electric kettle sounds like it would completely dominate this consumption.

The time cost is certainly the greatest expense here, power is cheap in consumer computing contexts, generally speaking (at least nowadays with most things racing to sleep), and is mostly relevant because of battery life, not power cost.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#450

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

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.

we need some html tag or attribute for slow network detection.

instead of this nasty js feature detection that 99% of time no one does.

prefers reduce motion was a good start. although its rarely respected.

Post reply on HN