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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

#511

Post by kjkjadksj »

Ruq wrote: post #231

Related: Too much of technology today doesn't pay attention or even care to the less technologically adept, either. Smartphones in my opinion are a major example of this. I can't tell you the number of people I've meet who barely even or don't even know how to use their devices. It's all black magic to them. The largest problem is the over-dependence on the use of "Gesture Navigation" which is invisible and thus non-…

It doesn’t help when you get a new iphone it doesn’t ship with its documentation. You have to get to the actual documentation page on apples site, and then dig a little to get to a page that looks like this (1) that merely outlines a few possible gestures. Not which ones to use when beyond a one sentence example. And this is just for the OS. What apps ship with documentation that outlines how these gesture functions are used in their app?

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/learn-basic-gestures-...

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#512

Post by kjkjadksj »

mardifoufs wrote: post #203
chmod775 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went with the other techie solution: resizing my browser window.

How do you do that on mobile?

Its already perfectly readable on mobile either vertically or horizontally (a rare affordance these days)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#513

Post by kjkjadksj »

literallycancer wrote: post #499
gnicholas wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I saw this blog posted on HN I wondered how it could possibly be popular with such horrendous layout. The conclusion I came to is that the audience is very tech-savvy and is used to activating Reader Mode when they encounter pages like this.

The text fills the entire screen on mobile. That's a lot better than reading something where there's 50% of whitespace.

Or better yet a postage stamp of text between two ad players and a header and footer banner

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#514

Post by teg4n_ »

raybb wrote: post #438
teg4n_ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the feature called?

Its content-visibility. It’s already in Chrome but not Firefox or Safari: https://caniuse.com/css-content-visibility

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#515

Post by [deleted] »

keyringlight wrote: post #491
amlib wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I'm sure there's an odd parable with netbooks, around the time they first started appearing as a hacky project and early commercial products they were lean and mean. Lightweight local software to do things online, compact flash IDE converters versus HDDs (which seems like a precursor to SSDs by proving a market), bare bones linux and there was a new wave of web standards and performance which non-IE browsers were lea…

[deleted]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#516

Post by kjkjadksj »

zbrozek wrote: post #100

There's also a huge tendency to design for fast, high quality connectivity. Try using any Google product on airplane wifi. Even just chat loads in minutes-to-never and frequently keels over dead, forcing an outrageously expensive reload. Docs? Good luck. I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet loss are real.

I live in some hills and some days I need to fully drive out of them to get google maps to load the map. The map I am using half a gb to cache locally on my phone already. Whats even the point of that cache? Same thing with spotify. Why is there latency searching my downloads library in offline mode?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#517

Post by Aerbil313 »

I believe HTML, CSS and JS needs an overhaul. There’ll be a point where maintaining backwards compatibility will result in more harm than benefit. Make a new opt-in version of the three which are brutally simplified. Deprecate the old HTML/CSS/JS, to be EOL’d in 2100.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#518

Post by Nextgrid »

nicbou wrote: post #272
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 had to upgrade my 12" Macbook because Youtube Music brought it to a crawl. I could play music or work, but not both.

I used a 12" Macbook as my main development machine. It ran IntelliJ with Python/Django applications, Postgres & Redis running in parallel (along with Safari, Mail, etc) around 2018-2020 just fine.

Tried it somewhat recently around Ventura and the machine clearly appeared to be struggling with the OS alone. So we had a machine that used to be capable of actual, productive work, and is now seemingly struggling at idle? It doesn't look like the new OS brought anything new or useful to the table (besides copious amounts of whitespace) either.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#519

Post by npteljes »

lmpdev wrote: post #509
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 acces…

Well, that's not the pre-2005 internet I remember. What I remember are popups, pop-unders, poisoned search results due to crude SEO tactics like including small background-colored text on websites, endless rings of web pages referring to each other, heavily blinking banners, and even the best ad blocker being so slow on the machine that it's no joke. And this is the commercial abuse only, there was a lot of other types going around.

I do despise many aspects of the current internet, but I think that it's the fallibility of man that poisons the nice things, and I don't think that it was ever too much different in this regard.

For a different internet, there are ways to go about it. I'm not sure how much of it you already know.

Millionshort provides alternative search results to queries. I think this is similar to what you're looking for, and it's free.

Alternative networks spring up from time to time, like the Gemini network. I'm not sure how much of a content desert they are, as I'm not a frequent user.

Generally if you hang around in free software / open source spaces, they have a lot of people with an alternative take on the modern things, including people taking part of an internet that's not mainstream, for example by excluding running any JavaScript. This can lead to other places, forums, and so on.

I wish you luck. But be prepared that the past is gone. Maybe never existed in the first place.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#520

Post by dmwilcox »

MrVandemar wrote: post #341
gruez wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as plastic straw or bag bans.

It has a cumulative effect and drives the continual "upgrade" cycle. When you consider the life-time of an average mobile device, and the resources required to manufacture and ship them, it's a not insignificant problem.

I would imagine for phones and laptops the extraction of materials (rare earth metals to make fancy new chips, lithium for batteries,etc) is probably the bigger issue.

Having gotten away from 500+ watt desktops as the standard for light non-gaming computing has been a win in the energy consumption court.

I think there are lots of good reasons to avoid the upgrade cycle but energy consumption of the end device itself probably isn't it. (Embodied energy of the devices, environmental impacts of mining, no good EOL story for ewaste, etc)

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