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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#111

Post by danappelxx »

zeveb wrote: post #61
Jakob wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

> You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy. I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'

Well, that's quite unfair. JavaScript is also used for creating interactive web applications - not just tracking users. Really your attitude comes off unnecessarily aggressive.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#112

Post by aembleton »

solidr53 wrote: post #70
minxomat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I get angry about this I'll open https://purecss.io/ or http://skytorrents.in and look at the source. It's a form of meditation to browse fast websites.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

That uses Google Analytics

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#113

Post by Terr_ »

geforce wrote: post #3

Sad thing is that most of the web sucks on rather fast connections too. Pages being almost 5mb of data, making multiple dozens of requests for librairies and ads. Ads updating in the background, consuming evermore data. I don't notice it much on my PC, since I've got a FTTH connection, but on LTE and 3G, it's very noticeable. Enough that I avoid certain websites. And that's nowhere near slow by his standards. I do ag…

I have Javascript off-by-default, and about 80% of the time it simply makes everything better.

Oh, sure, a few sites need JS (and get whitelisted) and some just have minor layout quirks... But I can actually scroll down and read the text of a news article rather than suffering through waiting times and input-latency as Javascript churns.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#114

Post by marssaxman »

Jakob wrote: post #49
Someone1234 wrote: post #21

I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

I use NoScript. The web is much less annoying by default, and I can still enable scripts for those sites where I think it might be useful.

There are a good number of sites now which have entirely given up on progressive enhancement and simply don't show you anything without JS... but I generally find I just don't care, and just close the tab and look at the next thing instead.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#115

Post by robocat »

schoen wrote: post #10

Joey Hess (joeyh) has been writing about this for a long time (because he uses dial-up at his home). Here is a recent thread about a 2016 blog post on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13397282

> Please, please, if your site requires AJAX to work at all, then retry failed AJAX queries.

Anyone here have information on the most reliable heuristics to do retries?

Or information on the implementations used by say Gmail or Facebook?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#116

Post by tmaly »

I remember dial-up on a really slow modem back in the bbs days.

I was reminded of the slow connection with T-Mobile 2 years ago while in the Philippines. They give you free data in 120 countries, but its throttled.

This was my main motivation for rewriting my side project using highly optimized css and not a large framework that uses web fonts and bloated libraries.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#117

Post by iLoch »

__jal wrote: post #84
iLoch wrote: post #16

> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…

> Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play. More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is…

> More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

Doesn't affect the vast majority of users.

> But I realize I'm in a minority.

Yes, your statements are pretty anecdotal and don't really relate to the vast majority of internet users.

I'm sure your setup works great for you, but it sounds like a ton of overhead, none of which is required if you have fast internet and don't give a shit about what's going on (like nearly everyone who uses the internet.)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#118

Post by roadbeats »

Not just web, mobile apps also suck when you have slow connection. For example, you can't open Itunes when you're on GPRS. It's trying to connect to Apple Music and locks you in a screen with a big Apple logo. Same as Spotify. Just try your apps with GPRS :) I camp every weekend so noticed how much they suck long time ago

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#119

Post by rhizome »

dba7dba wrote: post #107
ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California. When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city). When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within…

Braess' Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#120

Post by logicallee »

Tangentially related:

As affects web apps, some of this is a conscious choice by network designers. First, click on your profile on Hacker News and turn on Showdead. You can then read this thread and my comment in it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13597673

While the poster wasn't a web engineer specifically (or didn't say it) so much of the web architecture isn't built for front-loading payloads. But instead, on eventually getting there, through the magic of TCP/IP and letting users wait for a few dozen seconds as pages load.

I disagree with it and think these engineers are wrong and make the wrong decisions (optimize for the wrong things) and that this makes everyone poorer-off.

Thanks for listening. (Happy to discuss any replies here.)

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