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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

#571

Post by aembleton »

solatic wrote: post #440
gerdesj wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 53 and I'm at least five years behind getting my specs sorted out - they are currently perched right on the end of my nose now and I have to get the angle right sometimes (astigmatism). That page is nearly fine for me but I just hit CRTL + to scale up. That works for me. That page is pure text with no or at least minimal fiddling. You have your solution for your use case and I have mine. A blind reader will also…

> That page is nearly fine for me but I just hit CRTL + to scale up. That works for me. How do you do CTRL++ on a mobile phone?

Click on reader view. Then you can customise reader view from the menu and set it to how you want it. Then every time you click on reader view you can read in the font and size that works for you.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#572

Post by julianlam »

julianlam wrote: post #295

It's a shame that NodeBB was not included in the list of forums tested. We worked really hard to optimize our forum load times, and it handedly beats the pants off of much we've tested against. But that's not much of a brag, the bar is quite low. Dan goes on and lambasts (rightfully so) Atwood for deriding Qualcomm and assuming slow phones don't exist. Well, let's chat, and talk to someone whose team really does dogf…

Well, to Dan's Credit, he kindly re-ran a subset of the tests for NodeBB:

https://community.nodebb.org/post/98597

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#573

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #505
rokkamokka wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing prevents adding adds, trackers and dark patterns in a static website, I would assume most of it is served by 3rd party servers that handle the dynamic widgets. Isn’t that easy to insert in an otherwise the static site?

To be clear, not saying this is a good thing, just don’t see what prevents avoiding much of the bloat on top of that which supposedly adds “business value”.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#574

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

jamil7 wrote: post #560
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #370

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…

> 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.

Or switching happens for 90% of the feature and is called good enough, which results in now having 2 systems to maintain because the old deprecated one actually still has critical edge cases depending on it…

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#575

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

aembleton wrote: post #563
zelphirkalt wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Add a 500ms delay for group A and compare to group B who don't have the delay. After a week of this compare the sales figures.

I doubt a company would be willing to deliberately risk losing sales by testing a worse version. AB tests are great in theory, but in practice, to test the current slow system against a faster one, you have to do the optimization work which the test is supposed to justify. That’s why AB testing is often used for quick wins, pricing points or purchase flows, but rarely the big costly questions.

Surveys could be used to explain the bounce rate, but getting feedback from people who leave is one of the hardest the recruit well for. Usability tests could help with that though.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#576

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

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.

>I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies.

It ALWAYS starts at the top, no matter how you slice it. Why are the incompetent devs there in the first place?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#577

Post by kevincox »

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…

> I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up their data too fast.

Is this because the website usage doesn't add up or because they don't have the tools to track which sites are using how much data?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#578

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

john61 wrote: post #411
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.

Having only a facebook page and forcing people on that toxic platform, is a strong indication that they do not value freedom (of the web) and ethics. Again a good filter for business / people I want to avoid.

I don’t think lack of technical skill implies not valuing freedom. There isn’t really alternatives that are as easy to use and have their clients already on it. They are as much a captive audience as anyone else.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#579

Post by Tainnor »

_flux wrote: post #364
thaumasiotes wrote: post #311

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. It's also an infinitely worse user experience and prevents you from holding your place in whatever is being scrolled. Are there advantages? Why is infinite scroll used in any context?

Personally I prefer infinite scroll, versus the alternative of finding the "next page" button at the bottom, waiting for the content to load (preloading could help here) and sometimes navigating to the beginning of actual beginning of the content I was viewing. I even used a browser extension that matched "next" buttons from pages and loaded the next page content automatically, but the extension (can't recall its nam…

Infinite scrolling, at least in most implementations, makes it almost impossible to find historic content. This could be useful e.g. to journalists and researchers, but even as a private individual I would sometimes love to be able to see what person XY posted in, say, 2019.

In other words, infinite scrolling works in "pure consumption" contexts. You'd never want to add infinite scrolling to some backoffice admin interface.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#580

Post by dleink »

eric__cartman wrote: post #545
dleink wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to research this route more but the camera is an important component to me. I suspect their is a model of phone from 5-10 years ago that has a an under-the-radar stellar camera and I would find "perfectly adequate". ("perfectly adequate" is my favored state for most tech solutions.)

Yeah the camera is the only feature that would really make me want to switch phones. In my case it's more about being a broke CS student without a job lol. But the low-end device thing still stands. At least here in Argentina where I live most people can't buy a $1000+ phone without going into debt or saving money for a stupid amount of time to get it. Some people that really can't afford to do so still buy them thou…

Same! The camera is the only part of the phone I want to spend real money on.

Beyond personal preferences, I live and work in an area of California where people could greatly benefit from easily accessible phones so I'm interested in what's possible.

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