The web sucks if you have a slow connection

Post by crooked-v » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:23 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #194

joeyh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chatted about just this timeout issue with an engineer from a major CDN while he was at my house enjoying the dialup. Seems like simply a matter of resource management; slow connections do use more resources. Most CDN customers don't care or don't know that a few percent of the US population is getting their web browsing broken by timeouts, so there's no push back. (NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for IS…

> (NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for ISS residents, something like VNC to a ground-based browser IIRC.) Wait, VNC? Won't that use oodles more bandwidth than proxying HTTP?

Post by slededit » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #196

derefr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it'll take them OVER THREE HOURS I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then. + Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2G…

I think your memory of the late 90's is actually from the early 90's ;) I remember the first realtime mp3 player on Windows, Fraunhofer IIS' WinPlay3, which launched in '95. Then Winamp came out in '97 and blew our minds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

Post by SilasX » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

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…

Post by davesque » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #175

davesque wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically speaking, I think it's much more appropriate to just assume the admins are lazy.

I'll respectfully disagree with you. It takes more work to have a bloated JS mess of a site, than it is to have a small, simple, clean site. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot in the first place.

Post by SquareWheel » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:29 PM UTC

interfacesketch wrote: post #125

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…

Text articles are probably the most widespread type of content on the web. Most web sites are not web apps. But many developers want to re-construct web sites into web app architectures even when there's no benefit to the end user. I posted the links below on a previous discussion about AMP. They are two examples of basic, javascript-free web pages with text content. There's about 2500+ words on these test pages, but…