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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

481–490 of 613 posts

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that on mobile?

Who read article like this on mobile? In a pinch, I'd just activate Reader Mode (Safari, iOS), or more likely save it for reading on a bigger screen (tablet, laptop,…)

> Who read article like this on mobile?

The irony of this on an article about how developers ignore users on low-performance mobile devices

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 explanation…

Isn't that what the tracking stuff is supposed to track? Measure things like how 'annoyed' people get by bounce rate and whatever other relevant metrics.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#484
post #81

YouTube is one of the slowest websites I have ever used. It takes several seconds to load, even with moderate hardware and fast internet connections.

Reddit for me is the slowest site. And while old.reddit fixes this they try to steer you back to main reddit at any opportunity!

Same, but i'm using lemmy more

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#485

Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the exp…

Could you elaborate on features and polish, i.e. give some specific examples?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#486
post #249

> Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX But TeX was designed to run on a single CPU-core, so no surprise here. I wonder what TeX could become if all Knuth had at the time a multicore machine with cores managing maybe 0.1 MIPS each (or even lower). Like what the world would become if we lived in a counterfactual world where Intel and its buddies starting in 1970s boosted not the frequency and ins…

I assumed that to mean the layout work is limited to a single thread. You need to know what content made it onto page one before you can start working on page two, right?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that has been the standard for text since the type writers I have a feeling it was the standard because they used the minimum font size to make the letters readable, and that's how much it fit on the physical page width. Which was standardized before typewriters for unknown historical reasons? > You don't want to move your neck when you read a single line that's kinda silly. I don't have to move my neck to read the…

It's been this way forever because it's not particularly difficult science and is extremely easy to test for so there are probably thousands of papers covering this. Here's a good summary by Baymard Institute[1]. Also WCAG recommends line length set to 1 - https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability 2 - https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/visual-presentat...

> Also WCAG recommends

"recommends". Want to deny me the option of longer lines?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

But then you get the desktop version of the site. Never mind that Reddit has a mobile-friendly version (whose design Reddit has kept on bungling too).

The i.reddit mobile site sadly seems to have stopped working. At least for me.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#489
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you run all your traffic through a self-hosted pihole to avoid such things?

You're already too rich and too tech aware to qualify as the low end described in the article if you ask that question :)

Maybe so but I also test things in a variety of browsers and devices frequently to try and avoid the problems described in the article.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#490
> Something I've observed over time, as programming has become more prestigious and more lucrative, is that people have tended to come from wealthier backgrounds and have less exposure to people with different income levels. An example we've discussed before, is at a well-known, prestigious, startup that has a very left-leaning employee base, where everyone got rich, on a discussion about the covid stimulus checks, in a slack discussion, a well meaning progressive employee said that it was pointless because people would just use their stimulus checks to buy stock. This person had, apparently, never talked to any middle-class (let alone poor) person about where their money goes or looked at the data on who owns equity. And that's just looking at American wealth. When we look at world-wide wealth, the general level of understanding is much lower. People seem to really underestimate the dynamic range in wealth and income across the world.

Perhaps the falling salaries for programming in the US could be a good thing in that regard. So many people get into this career because they want to make it big, which seems to drive down the quality of the talent pool.

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