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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

#601

Post by ryukoposting »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #511
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…

Despite being a young person in tech, I find myself totally at a loss when presented with an iPhone. I gave one a try a few weeks ago (went with a Galaxy instead) and my fiancée had to walk me through in baby steps.

Android apps tend to be decent about giving a little tutorial when they open, highlighting buttons with little blurbs explaining their use. Is this a trend with iOS?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#602

Post by rustcleaner »

Panzer04 wrote: post #443
rustcleaner wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I find this highly ideal. I wish there was a button to press which would switch the interface into an almost Visual BASIC GUI editor like thing, permitting me to edit the arrangements. Also, I would like it if such an OS was more strict on forcing its interface objects (think: SimCity 2000 for Win95 with GDI-integrated GUI good, SimCity 3000 with Fisher-Price full screen toy interface bad). Also throw out m…

I think this tends to sound like a better idea than it is. It's good for power users who want to optimise their UI to suit, but regular users aren't going to do that. Gesture navigation's lack of discoverability is a problem for sure, although I'm not sure how to best address it (people aren't likely to sit through tutorials...)

You have to do tutorials. Actually, why isn't there a UI tutorial app which is basically just practice for all the different BS ways UI writers invent to do the same things? It should come pre-installed. Like a DuoLingo for user interfaces! Heck, make sure it covers as many common interface paradigms as possible!

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#603

Post by tracker1 »

Really need to see some lighter weight CSS tools combined with HTMX for a lot of general use.

That or better crafting for web applications. It feels painful to me when I see payloads in excess of 4mb of compressed JS. It makes me really want to embrace wasm frameworks like yew or leptos. Things are crazy and nobody seems to notice or care.

I run a relatively dated phone (Pixel 4a) with text set to max size. So many things are broken or unusable.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#604

Post by tracker1 »

bboygravity wrote: post #399
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…

Even if you do use a standard browser, companies will force you to use an app by making there website broken (on purpose?). Random recent example: Nike. Popping useless errors upon checkout in the webshop. Support: "oh, we're so sorry, just try the app, k bye". Another example of major companies with broken websites more often than not: (European) airline booking websites. And major companies think this is totally fi…

My response, "why should I trust you with greater access to my phone when you can't make your website work? How do I know you aren't bundling malware? Considering you are obviously using unqualified developers."

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#605

Post by janice1999 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #463
arp242 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 5 years ago I applied for a job at a company that enabled people in rural Africa to more easily sell the goods they produced (farmers, basket weavers, what-have-you). If you mainly target people in the US or EU, there's perhaps something to be said for not optimizing too aggressively for low-end hardware and flaky low-bandwidth high-latency connections. But if you're targetting rural Africa fairly aggressive op…

The website was never intended for people in rural Africa, it was intended for donors and governments in Western countries, so that the company could get juicy grant money and pay themselves to pretend to empower African farmers.

Believe it or not people outside the US actually buy and sell things too! Africa is a primarily mobile first continent with the fastest growing mobile infrastructure and 100 million new handsets sold a year (and that is predicted to double by 2025).

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#606

Post by carlosjobim »

janice1999 wrote: post #605
carlosjobim wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website was never intended for people in rural Africa, it was intended for donors and governments in Western countries, so that the company could get juicy grant money and pay themselves to pretend to empower African farmers.

Believe it or not people outside the US actually buy and sell things too! Africa is a primarily mobile first continent with the fastest growing mobile infrastructure and 100 million new handsets sold a year (and that is predicted to double by 2025).

You better believe that I believe it. However, if they were actually trying to get rural people with bad internet connections as customers, they would make a website that was fast and efficient.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#607

Post by B56b »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #10
troupo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now says that 2.4 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is fast now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit... (this is from…

You're making the same mistake the post did. It depends on the reader already having sympathy for the idea that bloat is bad in order to make its case. I can read nerd site comments all day that lament bloat. For an article to stand on its own on this point it has to make the case to people who don't already believe this. Dan's articles have usually been very good at that. The keyboard latency one for example makes f…

I think the article makes a pretty good case for bloat being bad for low-end users actually. His analysis demonstrates how many websites become genuinely unusable on cheaper devices, not just to techie standards, but for anyone trying to actually interact with the page at all.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#608

Post by inemesitaffia »

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 live in one. You're talking nonsense.

That 30GB plan is more than some people with phones earn here

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#609

Post by FabHK »

rapnie wrote: post #441
LilBytes wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is another example where they've broken the mobile browser experience, to send you to another app. Arguably broken, but in different ways.

LinkedIn, leaders in deceptive design (though given recent HN on internal situation, a more favorable interpretation may be that they can't handle their own bloat and it shows).

> LinkedIn, leaders in deceptive design

Oh, absolutely. One example: You want to connect with someone, and it'll throw up a dialog box on whether you want to add a note, with two buttons "Add Note", "Send". If you now decide that you don't want to connect after all, or want to look up something before composing the note, and close the dialog instead - it still sends the connection request.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#610

Post by FabHK »

anon373839 wrote: post #278
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…

I've got an old MacBook Pro from 2013 that I still keep around because the keyboard is the best Apple ever made. It's not fast by any means, but I haven't encountered any difficulty with websites whatsoever. They're not as snappy as I'd expect on new hardware, but perfectly usable. I do use uBlock Origin, however. Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

I was forced to use an old 2011 (IIRC) MacBook Air in 2020 (my replacement BTO MacBook Pro was stuck in China due to the pandemic), and the OS and local apps were fine and reasonably snappy, but oh boy, the web sucked so bad. Slow slow slow. Couldn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs of "modern" websites (HN was fine, yay). Virtually unusable. I was shocked.
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