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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

#501

Post by Daddy_cat »

resource_waste wrote: post #425
ghaff wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I have a 2015 MacBook, a 2015 iMac, and a recent Apple Silicon MacBook. Of course I do Photoshop, Lightroom, Generative AI, etc. on the Apple Silicon system. But I basically don't care which system I browse the web with and, in fact, the iMac is my usual for video calls and a great deal of my web document creation and the like. I suspect that people who have somewhat older Macs (obviously there's s…

>I do Generative AI, This makes me call into question literally everything else in your post. You might be able to do CPU based for a few trials for fun, but you arent running LLMs on CPU on a daily basis.

[dead]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#502

Post by titzer »

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.

Is it really hard to believe that the solutions on offer are usually giant piles of steaming crap that do way more than they should but are nevertheless easy to get set up and get going? When programming ecosystems get big, they accumulate a ton of ways of doing things and people keep trying to put a layer on top on top of a layer on top of a layer (like floors in an old house). It doesn't matter if a thing underneath is O(n); someone will put another O(n) thing on top of that that represents all its data as strings and uses regex or horribly-inefficient JSON or something. Very few people ever think things from the ground up.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#503

Post by zelphirkalt »

orangevelcro wrote: post #483
zelphirkalt wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but how do you determin the actual reason for a bounce? The test would need to have all the same starting conditions and then let some users have a better performing version or something like that. But at that point one would probably rollout the better performing version anyway. Maybe artificially worsen the performance and observe how the metrics change. And then it is questionable, whether the same amount by which performance decreased would have the same effect in reverse, if the performance increased by that amount. Maybe up to a certain point? In general probably not. In general it is difficult, because changing things to perform better is usually accompanied by visual and functionality changes as well.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#504

Post by lozenge »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #436
bluquark wrote: post #66

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…

> For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs I live in a poor Southeast Asian country. People with small data plans don't use data from efficient websites, they use wifi which is omnipresent. 30GB of data on a monthly plan is $3.64. Which is about 4-6 hours of minimum wage (minimum wage is lower in agricultural areas). But more to the point, people don't use data profligately li…

"It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country."

You mean, the one developing country you live in.

You are also missing the full spectrum of users. People don't just browse the web for fun. They look for important information like health or finance information, they might not want to do that in a public place or they might not be able to put it off for when they next have wifi.

If you are building an e commerce website it might not matter, but you could be building a news site, or any number of other things.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#505

Post by kjkjadksj »

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?

Static html sites are so easy. You can write one by hand in five minutes and it can run on a toaster. There’s more business value in ads and dark patterns.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#507

Post by walteweiss »

sockbot wrote: post #270
Baguette5242 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amateur… I am using a 2009 15’ MacBook Pro Unibody, with a swapped SuperDrive to SSD, another main SSD and RAM boosted to 8Gb. OpenCore Legacy to update to a relatively recent version of MacOS. The only thing that is so annoying is the webcam that doesn’t work anymore, and a USB port is dead also. So sad this kind of shenanigans are not possible anymore.

I have one of these with a MacBook Pro 6,2 that I did the same upgrades to. However I finally decided to retire it when 2nd replacement battery swelled and Chrome stopped supporting OSX 13. It didn't look like a good candidate for OpenCore Legacy because of the dual video cards, but it feels so gross recycling a perfectly working computer.

I run the one from 2011 (16 Gb of ram though) and it runs highly minimalistic Arch Linux. So far so good.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#508

Post by npteljes »

It's interesting research, but at the end of the day, the websites are there to make money. Well, looking at the table, maybe the author's own isn't, but the rest is. And so, I think the businesses don't optimize more because there isn't much more money to be made that way. Instead, the same effort is better spent elsewhere, like marketing, having a software that's quickly adaptable, that's easy to get interchangeable developers for. So they are optimized, just not for the speed on low-end devices. Different goals.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#509

Post by lmpdev »

npteljes wrote: post #508

It's interesting research, but at the end of the day, the websites are there to make money. Well, looking at the table, maybe the author's own isn't, but the rest is. And so, I think the businesses don't optimize more because there isn't much more money to be made that way. Instead, the same effort is better spent elsewhere, like marketing, having a software that's quickly adaptable, that's easy to get interchangeabl…

I was thinking about this the other day

I’d happily pay $100/month to access the internet similar to that of pre-2005ish

As in, banning almost all commercial activity

I truly believe Google isn’t getting worse, just the incentives behind the creation of web content have become progressively maligned with that of the user’s desires

I want a high quality internet, and am willing to fork out large sums of money to access it

I hope I’m not alone

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#510

Post by walteweiss »

callalex wrote: post #330
zuhsetaqi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 browser performance has run circles around android browser performance on equivalent hardware for like the last 10 years or so. It’s really the secret sauce of iOS.

Yeah, by the way browsing on iPhone 6S Plus is quite okay, compared to even MacBook Pro (2011, but that’s a laptop!), I would say.
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