This is bad from a global warming perspective.
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
151–160 of 613 posts
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#152Relating to the aside about opportunities in different countries: the comparison between potential programming career prospects between a poor American and middle class Pole feels reasonable for someone born around the same time as the OP (early ’80s I guess) but I suspect it’s since shifted in Poland’s failure.
I think the relative disadvantages of a poor American compared to their wealthier peers have increased as there’s more competition (as the degree is seen as more desirable by motivated wealthy parents) and the poor student likely won’t even have a non-phone computer at home where all their wealthier peers probably will. Possibly they could work around the competitiveness of computer science by going via some less well-trodden path (eg mathematics or physics) except that university admission isn’t by major. They may also be disadvantaged by later classism in hiring. Meanwhile a middle class Pole will have access to a computer and, provided they live sufficiently near one of the big cities, access to technical schools which can give them a head start on programming skills (and on competitive programming which is a useful skill for passing the current kind of programming interview questions). To get the kind of good outcome described in the OP, they then need to get hired somewhere like Google in Zurich (somewhat similar difficulty to in the US except the earlier stages were easier (in the sense of being more probable) for the hypothetical Pole) and progress from there (maybe impeded by initially not being at the headquarters / fewer other employment opportunities to get career advancement by changing jobs). Class will be less of a problem as the hypothetical middle class pole isn’t so different in wealth from other middle class Europeans and you get much less strong class-selection than when (e.g.) Americans are hiring Americans.
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other codecs a while ago.
I have no idea if it still works, but the "h264ify" browser extension used to be great for working around this issue (by forcing youtube to serve h264) https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify
i did a full apt dist-upgrade to try and get the h264ify plugin to install and if i remember correctly i never was able to get it to install. I upgraded from "chromium" to "chromium-browser" and set all the compositing and other settings recommended for the RPI.
and to reply to another sibling, "yt-dlp" isn't workable, this is for a senior citizen that does small motor repairs.
I got an HP elitedesk that's a few years old coming in monday to replace the RPI; hopefully that will last another 3 years before google et al decide to "optimize" again.
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#154Is this new or old reddit being benched? That would be an interesting direct comparison.
New Reddit, per the appendix. I think that Old Reddit is likely to be fairly competitive (I would guess placing near Wordpress), and yeah I agree it would be interesting to have in the table to see how far it's fallen.
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#155Dan'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…
> an alternate "lite/basic" mode.
In another world this mode dominated UI/UX design and development and the result was beautiful and efficient. Where design more resembles a haiku than an unedited novel.
We don't get to live in that world, but it's not hard to imagine.
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the total useful lifetime more than MacBooks with non serviceable components? I see people around me easily using Airs for 5+ years.
My MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2014) is my only computer. I still don't feel like changing it so far...
My air isnt that old, and I'm eyeing a new one...
I find that a lot of my work is "remote" at this point. Im doing most things on Servers, VM's, and containers on other boxes. The few apps that I do run locally are suffering (browser being the big offender).
Is most of what you're doing remote? Do you have a decent amount of ram in that air?
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#157If one cares about accessibility of a website to people with much slower devices, particularly living in less developed parts of the world, I guess there are more considerations: - using more clear English with simple sentence structures should make the content more accessible to people who don’t read English with the fluency of an educated American - reducing the number of requests required to load a page as latency…
> reducing the number of requests required to load a page
In practice this pretty much requires pure SSR and "multiple page" design, given the amount of network roundtrips on typical SPA sites. (Some lightweight SPA updates may nonetheless be feasible, by using an efficient HTML-swapping approach as seen in HTMX as opposed to the conventional chatty-API requests and heavy DOM manipulation.)
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#158Not only the user is affected by this. The difference between a 2MB and a 150KB CSS file can be a lot of bandwidth. The difference between a bad and good framework can be a lot of CPU power and RAM. Companies pay for this. But I guess most have no clue that these costs can be reduced. And some companies just don't care as long as money is coming in.
Eh. Cloudfront pricing starts at 8.5c per GB and goes down to 2c. I think you’d struggle to use that pricing as a justification when compared to the software engineer hours required to shrink down a CSS bundle. (don’t get me wrong, 2MB is insane and ought to be a professional embarrassment. But I think you’re going to struggle using bandwidth bills as the reason) I agree with you about frameworks, though. So much was…
This, although I often feel near modern web frameworks (React, similar) do not provide better developer experience.
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#159This article is basically unreadable for me 48 y/o on desktop). In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it readable: font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.5em; max-width: 38rem; Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is. I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to make it readable. Seriously, techies, it's an extra 64 Bytes to make your page more readable.
I'd prefer to see the grey text trend die honestly. I think my number one style-rewrite is just setting `font-color: black` on things.
Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
#160There's also a huge tendency to design for fast, high quality connectivity. Try using any Google product on airplane wifi. Even just chat loads in minutes-to-never and frequently keels over dead, forcing an outrageously expensive reload. Docs? Good luck. I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet loss are real.
The last decade of my life has been a speedrun in "less than ideal conditions" for computing. CGNAT, 5mbit dsl, spotty "fixed wireless" and my latest debacle: starlink, although that seems to be getting better slowly; used to drop 15/60 seconds, now it drops more like 4/200 seconds. Constant power issues and lightning strikes - i only have 1 computer that has a working NIC, because evidently tiny power fluctuations a…
Do you have earth return on your power?