Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 49MB web page

thatshubham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 389 posts

Re: The 49MB web page

#181

Post by xp84 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #143
PunchyHamster wrote: post #20

Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…

> We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit Marketing dept. too. They're the primary culprits in all the tracking scripts.

Reserve a huge share of the blame for the “UX dEsIgNeRs”. Let’s demand to reimplement every single standard widget in a way that has 50% odds of being accessible, has bugs, doesn’t work correctly with autofill most of the time, and adds 600kB of code per widget. Our precious branding requires it.

Re: The 49MB web page

#182

Post by userbinator »

psim1 wrote: post #164
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to see context aware pre-fetching done right go to mcmaster.com ... There are good reasons to have a small cheap development staging server, as the rate-limited connection implicitly trains people what not to include. =3

And this! https://www.mcmaster.com/help/api/ Linked from the footer of every page! I'm so happy to have seen their web site that I want to do business with them, even though I have no business to be done.

Making it easy to buy stuff from them definitely helps their bottom line. Unfortunately the few companies I've wanted to buy from but their website was horrible and made me go elsewhere, either completely ignored or dismissed my complaints about having just lost a customer.

Re: The 49MB web page

#183

Post by userbinator »

ajxs wrote: post #163
hilbert42 wrote: post #11

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed: They don't archive well. Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.

Depending on the site, unfortunately that might be interpreted as a feature and not a bug.

Re: The 49MB web page

#185

Post by khana »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #34
PunchyHamster wrote: post #20

Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…

If you want to see context aware pre-fetching done right go to mcmaster.com ... There are good reasons to have a small cheap development staging server, as the rate-limited connection implicitly trains people what not to include. =3

[dead]

Re: The 49MB web page

#186

Post by userbinator »

jiggawatts wrote: post #162
FridgeSeal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the web-dev-hype people told me that JS-heavy SPA’s (and associated designs) were faster and better for the user! I didn’t bother validating this, but I’m sure they wouldn’t lie or misinterpret!!

For me personally the most infuriating example of this is the Azure Updates[1] page, which in my job I need to check nearly daily to see what's reaching EoL, what's new, etc... A couple of years ago they redeveloped it as a SPA app. The original server-rendered version of it worked just fine , but it "had" to be made into an interactive client-side monstrosity that loads many times slower for "reasons". It doesn't ev…

GitHub also got infected with this horrible "JS SPA" disease shortly after MS bought them. Now you can't even browse files or view issues without it.

If they can't get it right, who can!?

Berkshire Hathaway, apparently: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Pure content, not fluff, and even has a small but unobtrusive ad.

Re: The 49MB web page

#187

Post by NegativeLatency »

FabHK wrote: post #172
6510 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that works beneficial on old computers that freeze up when you try load the GB js ad-auction circus news circus website. I want to browse loaded pages while the new tabs load. If the client just hangs for 2 min it gets boring fast.

Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004 Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of text. So painful.

Didn’t want to upgrade the memory?

Re: The 49MB web page

#188

Post by eru »

alanning wrote: post #175
FabHK wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004 Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of text. So painful.

One tool I've found useful in low-power/low-bandwidth situations is the Lynx web browser [1]. Used to be installed by default in most Linux distributions but I think that's probably not the case anymore. Wikipedia says its also available on OSX and Windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Links is a bit more usable than lynx, I found.

Re: The 49MB web page

#189

Post by BenjiWiebe »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #116
snickerer wrote: post #107

Allowing scripting on websites (in the mid-90s) was a completely wrong decision. And an outrage. Programs are downloaded to my computer and executed without me being able to review them first—or rely on audits by people I trust. That’s completely unacceptable; it’s fundamentally flawed. Of course, you disable scripts on websites. But there are sites that are so broken that they no longer work properly, since the deve…

There is obviously huge demand for scripting on websites. There is no one authority on what gets allowed on the web, if the existing orgs didn't implement it, someone else would have and users would have moved over when they saw they could access new more capable, interactive pages. The 49MB webpage just shows what our priorities are. It shows the target audience has fast internet that can load this without issues. O…

Is the page actually done downloading 0.3 seconds after it starts? Or is it just (your Internet speed) / 49MB = 0.3 seconds?

Re: The 49MB web page

#190

Post by biotinker »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #99
cjs_ac wrote: post #47

My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB. The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketpl…

I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.

2010 was a couple years after YouTube enabled 1080p uploads. 250MB a month was insanely small in 2010.
Post reply on HN