I actually find Chrome's developer tools quite handy for this: for example, emulating slow Internet connections, checking your Lighthouse score, simulating different geographies, being able to adjust between many responsive device dimensions etc. Super worth it to get familiar with the whole host of tools that come installed with your browser.
Test your product on a crappy laptop
101–110 of 321 posts
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#102Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.
Just go to Walmart or Best Buy or your local equivalent and buy a cheap laptop, something that’s $600 tops and feels like the plastic is just barely held together.
$600 would be a prime dev laptop for me. I use the cheapest, non-chromebook, I can find then throw FreeBSD or Linux on it. I prefer desktops and spend much more money when I build one of those.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#103There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…
Explain Gmail.
Group 3, clearly. With a bit of the "minimal oversight" thing.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as a dev, I make none of those decisions.
Also as a dev, I don’t really care. It’s not my money on the line, it’s the companies. If the site sucks and users don’t like it, the company loses profits and they will be forced to change. The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not my problem.
I agree. The few times I've cared fell on deaf ears.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#105It's not just developers, and it's not just about speed, it's also designers / UX bods who need to heed this. My decently powered work laptop from job 1 has a fairly rubbish screen, which means that a lot of the subtle hover effects, 1 pixel light grey on lighter grey divisions and skinny fonts either aren't visible or are incredibly difficult to see. A good trick if you're working on a large, hi res screen is to have a small and crappy second monitor hooked up if you're doing any UI work so you can see what it will actually look like to a lot of your users.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#106Or, do not endorse people's bad buying patterns. I do care about crappy network and load times. But there's some laptop that have worse performances than three years old tablets, and there seems to be no end to what scummy companies sell at low end. At some point down the crappy pit, there's a line where it's no longer my problem.
"If it isn't broken, don't fix it"
There's an argument for rampant consumption as a toxic buying pattern. If we are upgrading our systems just to use bloated webpages - webpages that offer nothing of substance over webpages circa 20 years ago, then it is worth asking what we are really gaining.
In any transaction it is important to distinguish between what is being sold, what is actually delivered and the utility provided.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#107I will if I want to target that kind of user. Personally I much prefer targeting people who have nice laptops. Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you’re getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in that case you only have to please the buyer not the user. So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
I'd come to the realisation a while ago that, deliberate or otherwise, limiting website usability or accessability to recent / high-performance kit is quite possibly an effective market-segementation tool in a space in which physical location (e.g., an up-market high-street address) is not a viable differentiator.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410503
I'm not a fan of this, mind. Just aware that it's a possibility. And you're giving voice to that as a deliberate choice.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#108I will if I want to target that kind of user. Personally I much prefer targeting people who have nice laptops. Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you’re getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in that case you only have to please the buyer not the user. So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
B2B apps whose customers may be small businesses may be surprised at just how low-grade some of their hardware is. For example, a small mail and parcel store (many of my employer's customers) Additionally, apps designed to be used in the field by top-tier customers often fail basic requirements. (Funny how many apps and sites fall apart on my iPhone 12 Pro in places where the connection drops down to LTE)
Big businesses too. In job 2 my employer provides services to pharma, medical and biosciences corps and our users are almost invariably using terrible hardware despite being senior scientists heading up labs.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#109Oh God yes. Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud. We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers. When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I woul…
I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#110Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.
Try the shittiest laptop at Walmart. Like an HP stream. Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.
Even a low-end modern system only takes you so far back in time.
Keep in mind that hardware improves roughly on line with Moore's Law. The gradation from low-end to mid-market might only be a few years of development.
The 10-year-old system is probably going to be much worse than a current low-end buy.