How web bloat impacts users with slow devices • Hacker News Board

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#551

Post by crabmusket » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 5:28 AM UTC

idle_zealot wrote: post #293

crabmusket wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to me, as an outsider, that interfaces are designed with a "one size fits all" approach, at least at the prestige end of town. Instead of allowing the user to choose design and interaction that works for them, the designer (or product owner) acts as if they know what's best for all users.

What would the alternative look like? Applications shipping as a bag of arrangeable buttons and widgets that the user assembles into pages?

I think themes might be closer to what I'm imagining. For example, material versus skeumorphic. But as the OC was talking about interactions, I'd be interested in seeing a scale of assistance or explicitness. For example, at the "I've never used computers before" end of town, there should be lots of inline annotations about what buttons do, lots of dropdown lists, etc. At the "power user" end of the scale there would be keyboard shortcuts, icons, tooltips etc.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#552

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 6:13 AM UTC

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…

"Another issue is that some sites will complain if you are not using a "standard" browser and the site will become unusable for that reason alone."

This is where the blog post falls short. It assumes the software someone uses to access these websites is a constant, chosen from a small selection of browsers controlled by companies that seek to profit from proliferation of online advertising. The software used is not a variable in this "study".

Most of the sites on the list presented, namely the ones where we are just reading, listening or watching (cf. performing some commercial transaction), can be accessed using software not controlled by so-called "tech" companies on older hardware even with today's bloat and the experience will be faster than if trying to use the bloated software from so-called "tech" companies. (That software comprises both the browser and the gratuitous Javascript software that these browsers will run automatically without any input or choice from the user.)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#553

Post by deathanatos » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 6:17 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #245

deathanatos wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was 2001. Core frequencies aren't going up at 2001 rates anymore. (And although Moore's law has continued, it is only just. Core freqs have all but topped out, it feels like.) Memory prices seem to have stalled, and even non-volatile storage feels like it's stalled. My computer in 1998, compared to it's predecessor, storage was going up in size at ~43% YoY. It was an amazing time to be alive; the 128 MiB thumbdr…

> " And although Moore's law has continued, it is only just. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count has a table of transistor count over time. 2001 was Intel Pentium III with 45 million transistors and nVidia NV2A GPU with 60 million. 2023 has Apple M2 Ultra with 134 billion transistors and AMD Instinct CPU with 146 billion, and AMD Aqua Vanjaram CDNA3 GPU with 153 billion. That's some ~3,000x more, about a…

> has a table of transistor count over time

My comment explicitly notes this, and that I am not debating that transistor counts have continued to follow Moore's Law. They have. That's not the point.

> Core frequencies aren't going up, but amount of work per clock cycle is

[Citation needed]; this absolutely doesn't match my experience at all.

> You can get a 12TB HDD from NewEgg for $99.99

I looked at NewEgg specifically before I made that comment. (But for the pricing for 1 TiB, as that was comparable.) 12 TiB runs $250–400, with the absolute lowest priced¹ 12 TiB (internal desktop form factor) HDD being $201. So no, you cannot.

¹and the "features" of this "12 TB" HDD include "14TB per drive for 40% more petabytes per rack" (wat) "Highest 14TB hard drive performance" (wat)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#554

Post by StressedDev » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 6:22 AM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #114

Where "users with slow devices" equals "anyone trying to keep hardware running more than a few years", it seems. It's enforced obsolescence. I've said for a long time, devs should be forced to take a survey of their users' hardware, and then themselves use the slowest common system, say, the 5th-percentile, one day a week. If they don't care about efficiency now, maybe they will when it's sufficiently painful.

I have an iPhone 11 Pro. It is about 4.5 years old and still runs great. My guess is I can get another 1.5 to 2.5 years out of it.

My point here is not every phone which is more than a few years old stops working or cannot browse web sites.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#555

Post by sussmannbaka » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 6:48 AM UTC

lukan wrote: post #391

yawaramin wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the devices we're talking about, performance is effectively functionality.

The most performant site is a blank page.

Good news for bloated JS SPAs, since that is often what they look like :)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#556

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 7:12 AM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #552

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…

"Another issue is that some sites will complain if you are not using a "standard" browser and the site will become unusable for that reason alone." This is where the blog post falls short. It assumes the software someone uses to access these websites is a constant, chosen from a small selection of browsers controlled by companies that seek to profit from proliferation of online advertising. The software used is not a…

[deleted]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#557

Post by throwaway2037 » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 7:22 AM UTC

gcanyon wrote: post #445

pixl97 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

    > (insert doofenshmirtz nickel quote)

I had to Google for it: IMDB.com has the quote:

    > Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz : Wow, if I had a nickel for every time I was doomed by a puppet, I'd have two nickels - which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#558

Post by account42 » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 9:08 AM UTC

jwells89 wrote: post #214

freedomben wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, "infinite scroll" often is infinite, meaning it will load an ass load of data in the background and take up a ton of memory, and the user may never even end up looking at that data. I really hate the load on scroll (especially Google Drive's implementation which is absolute trash, and half the time I'll scroll too fast and it will just miss a bunch of files and I'll have to refresh the page and try again)…

In these situations what’s eating up your resources usually isn’t the data being represented but instead the representation. This is why native apps use recycler views for not just infinite scroll, but anything that can display more rows/columns/items/etc than can fit on screen at once. Recycler views only create just enough cells to fill the screen even if you have tens of thousands of items to represent, and when y…

These suck donkey balls because they break searching for keywords on the page.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#559

Post by nottorp » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 9:32 AM UTC

mattl wrote: post #489

nottorp wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's great.

But you just assumed that someone who uses these low end devices has heard of a raspberry pi, can afford one and even has wired internet to plug it into.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#560

Post by jamil7 » Mon, Mar 18, 2024, 9:57 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #370

autoexec wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's better for the company that I don't try" seems like a convenient take for a dev without the skills to have. I'd argue that performance is a feature, and if someone can't deliver it their salary is being wasted already.

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…

> If the market valued performance more then we would probably see competitive services which optimize for performance, but we generally don't.

I believe there is some nuance to this due to the winner-takes-all nature of modern software services. There simply isn't a lot of choice for users or switching is expensive so companies don't do it and employees are forced to suffer through horrible performance.