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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

#461

Post by dazc »

john61 wrote: post #344
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.

Usually bad web software correlates with bad content. Therefore having a slow device is an excellent filter helping to avoid garbage.

A friend of mine who was a barber asked me how much it would cost to build him a website and I said I would do him a basic 3 page site for free, although he would need to let me know if his opening hours had changed or he needed to tell customers he was on holiday, etc.

He said, with no irony whatsoever, that he didn't realise it would be so complicated and decided not to take me up on the offer. I suspect this attitude is not the unusual with one-man businesses that have survived just fine thus far?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#462

Post by uaserussia »

I have modern I7, 64GB RAM, RTX3090, a 7gbps NVME SSD and a 1Gbps internet connection. Can run pretty much any game maxxed out in 4k with 100 fps. Download 100GB files in few minutes. Can do all sorts of tasks and workloads. Can calculate the 20th billionth number of PI in a microsecond. What I cant do however is use twitter without stutters and hitches, or windows, or any shopping website.

Nice work, webdevelopers!

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#463

Post by carlosjobim »

arp242 wrote: post #442
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 op…

The website was never intended for people in rural Africa, it was intended for donors and governments in Western countries, so that the company could get juicy grant money and pay themselves to pretend to empower African farmers.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#464

Post by erichdongubler »

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.

Funnily enough, Dan calls out the differences of opinion of the styling of his site starting at this paragraph:

> 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). …

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#465

Post by uaserussia »

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.

[flagged]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#466

Post by teamonkey »

geraldhh wrote: post #398
teamonkey wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the modern web has consolidated to a point where you need to use them. For example, small local businesses that don’t have a web site but do have a Facebook page.

seems fair to correlate "small local businesses that don’t have a web site but do have a Facebook page" with "bad content"

My local butcher provides good content without being terminally online.

Unfortunately this means needing to use Facebook to find out if they’re open on a national holiday.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#467

Post by uaserussia »

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.

[flagged]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#468

Post by azangru »

uaserussia wrote: post #462

I have modern I7, 64GB RAM, RTX3090, a 7gbps NVME SSD and a 1Gbps internet connection. Can run pretty much any game maxxed out in 4k with 100 fps. Download 100GB files in few minutes. Can do all sorts of tasks and workloads. Can calculate the 20th billionth number of PI in a microsecond. What I cant do however is use twitter without stutters and hitches, or windows, or any shopping website. Nice work, webdevelopers!

> or any shopping website

Could you give an example? I used a shopping website yesterday, both on a laptop and on an android phone, and apart from cookie banner popups (design choice, not hardware limitation), did not have any significant inconveniences.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#469

Post by nottorp »

Panzer04 wrote: post #449
nottorp wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

But at least that gets you tea, instead of engagement.

You've got to put X joules in to boil Y liters of water. No choice there, except giving up on the tea.

You can greatly reduce the joules necessary to see cat photos though. And you don't have to give up on seeing the cat photos.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#470

Post by literallycancer »

eviks wrote: post #312
Telemakhos wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even just the middle-income countries—I have an iPhone 13, so only three years old, on a US wifi connection with high speed broadband, and it can't handle the glitzy bloat of the prospectus for one of my ETFs. I don't understand why a prospectus shouldn't just be a PDF anyway, but it baffles me that someone would put so much bloated design into a prospectus that a recent phone can't handle it.

It shouldn't be a PDF because they don't reflow text, especially important for phones

Make 2 pdfs.
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