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Page Weight Matters (2012)

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#151

Post by jlangenauer »

motoboi wrote: post #19

Coming from a low bandwidth, high latency part of the world, I can't confirm this enough. Today, I have 2 mbit and can use Netflix or Youtube just fine, but mere 4 years ago, I had 600k and, boy, that was hard. Hard as in loading youtube URL and go for a coffee. UPDATE: In case Duolingo developers are listening, please test your site on high latency and very low bandwidth scenarios. I just love your site, but lessons…

If you're looking for an alternative to Duolingo, give Memrise a try. It allows you to download entire lessons for offline use.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#152

Post by kuschku »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #143
4ad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, THANK YOU ! It blows my mind this is not advertised and not the default.

I'm curious, why would this be the default? For most users (the people not on HN) personalized search has increased the relevancy of results vs this.

- It’s 20k vs 190k for the same results page (loads faster, especially useful when on throttled 3G),

- It’s non-personalized – meaning you get less filter-bubble effect, which is useful when researching topics where you want to see opinions that oppose your own

- It has less tracking applied.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#153

Post by kuschku »

pswilson14 wrote: post #90
scrollaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then, it's fairly easy to load the video asynchronously and as part of the last assets, make its intro blend in to a single-color background, voila, problem "solved". I find video backgrounds ridiculous most of the time (though they can be done really well), but that's not the real problem here - the real problem is including 200-800kb javascript code that does nothing but track your user, and often enough doesn…

"Massive" JS frameworks aren't the issue, not by themselves. AngularJS, for instance, is only 39.5kb. Bloat sneaks into web applications in other ways, but merely bringing in a framework isn't enough to add a noticeable load on a web page.

I’ve seen sites loading Angular, React, jQuery(+jQuery UI) and some custom frameworks. Different parts of the site rendering in different frameworks.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#154

Post by SarahofGaia »

kuschku wrote: post #134
nostrademons wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the old rendering path for Google Custom Search Engines: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview?hl... Way back when Google first got VC, before they invented AdWords and got profitable, they explored a lot of custom business partner opportunities. So there were a number of specialized Google search endpoints like /linux, /bsd, /unclesam (search over Federal government websites). These were ma…

But, the advantage of /custom: It uses less personalized results, and it returns exactly 20KiB of data – which is why it still loads so fast. There was a day when I just wrote a small script to open all sites mentioned in Google’s robots.txt (which did not return 404) in a separate tab. That’s how I found it. As far as I know, some partners actually still embed /custom (I’ve only seen it at a newspaper a few months a…

I love you for using binary prefixes. <3

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#155

Post by secondwtq »

" I learned a valuable lesson about the state of the Internet throughout the rest of the world. Many of us are fortunate to live in high bandwidth regions, but there are still large portions of the world that do not. "

lol, I'm in China and all what you're discussing just does not exists here. What you'll get is just a "Connection Reset", no matter how compact the page is.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#156

Post by plonh »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #22
bsimpson wrote: post #11

Thought certainly an interesting anecdote, I don't understand how a video streaming site like YouTube would be useful in a market where a 100K download takes 2+ minutes. You'd have to open a page, walk away for an hour, and hope everything was OK when you got back.

Well think about it. Imagine you had no alternative to getting any video on the internet? After all, if not youtube, anything else was probably slower at the time. Obviously you wouldn't simply lose the desire to watch relevant videos, it'd be dimmed quite significantly sure but you'd still want to watch a video every now and then. Whether it's a music video, or a chess match or a farming lecture, there's just a ridi…

Still, I imagine it would be better to forget the 2MB page load issue, and drop frames/colors/resolution to cut 50MB off the video size.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#157

Post by plonh »

userbinator wrote: post #147

This is a bit tangential, but how did we get from "size" to "weight"? It seems a bit of an odd phrasing to me. With the exception of ESL mistakes, I don't know of anyone or any software which refers to "file weight", for example.

Because the weight is hidden behind the visible page content, which had a different size. Page weight is the sum of the sizes of the resources used to build the page.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#158

Post by titzer »

kragen wrote: post #133
jkaptur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think "a daily drumbeat about how bloated, how needlessly complex, how ridiculous most of the world's web applications really are" pretty much describes every HN conversation on any article with even a remote connection to web technologies.

What would be super awesome would be a daily drumbeat about how to slim down and simplify applications, with working, open-sourced code. Here, I'll beat a drum a little. Maybe it will inspire somebody. I just wrote this tiny text-rendering engine, mostly yesterday at lunch. On one core of my laptop, it seems able to render 60 megabytes per second of text into pixels in a small proportional pixel font, with greedy-alg…

Impressive!

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#159

Post by sanderjd »

Kluny wrote: post #125
draw_down wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez, you aren't kidding. It's as though, if we bitch enough about the technical deficiencies, the economic and social circumstances that cause them will, I dunno, vanish into thin air I guess. This topic is pretty much just red meat here

Well, bitching isn't that great. But as a web developer myself, it has affected the way I work. Like, there was an article just the other day about how to achieve "lightning fast page loads". I shared it around the office and as a result, 4 people have added new steps to their workflow to help reduce page load latency on our client sites. The author knew the article would get good reception here, because of how much…

This is a great point. As much as it can be a bit annoying to see the same conversations over and over again, and as much as we make fun of supposed groupthink, it's all a long slow process of consensus building and idea dissemination.

Thanks for reminding me of that; I was previously sitting here thinking, "oh geez, here we go again!".

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#160

Post by sanderjd »

joevandyk wrote: post #111
danneu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, I would think that gzip does a good job of factoring out repeatedly embedded user objects.

Don't forget it takes time to parse large json blobs.

And to serialize it from whatever the in-memory representation is.
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