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The 49MB web page

thatshubham.com

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Re: The 49MB web page

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a sign of their incompetence, it's a sign of the realities of many corporate environments. But hey, if you want to rail against incompetent developers who exist in a make-believe world where they hold all the power are simply too lazy and incompetent to 'do the right thing' then go ahead!

There’s nothing “make believe” here, incompetent devs, and devs (regardless of competence) who don’t push back against silly requirements _absolutely_ exist.

I have tried push back but then the other guy that says "I can do it" gets the ticket handed to him.

Me: we cant do X bceause it has Y and Z implcations for end users

Manager: It fits our brand and we have to do it.

Dev: I can do it and the implications are mitigated by (handwavy explanation)

Maanger: sounds good. (To me) Maybe you can make a (useless) diagram for this featuer that will be realy handy for KT

--Days later--

Feature is delivered and the Y and Z were ethier not mitigated or there was a attempt-ish to mitigate them

Re: The 49MB web page

#222
post #53

This is just the top of the iceberg. Don't get me started on airlines websites (looking at you Air Canada), where the product owner, designers, developers are not able to get a simple workflow straight without loading Mb of useless javascript and interrupt the user journey multiple times. Give me back the command line terminal like Amadeus, that would be perfect. How can we go back to a Web where websites are designe…

> Don't get me started on airlines websites You can't beat China Southern . They have the most dog shit website I've ever seen. The flight was fine but I gave up doing online check in after 3 attempts. Never mind the bloat: - required text fields with wrong or missing labels. One field was labeled "ticket no.". It kept getting rejected. I randomly tried passport number instead. It worked. - sometimes fields only have…

Almost nobody uses websites in China. You're expected to interact with them via WeChat Mini-app where the experience is generally fine.

Re: The 49MB web page

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA for those who aren’t aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers have a Network tab in the developer tools where you can dial down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection. Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.

For Firefox users, here's where it's hidden (and it really is hidden): Hamburger menu -> More tools -> Web developer tools, then keep clicking on the ">>" until the Network tab appears, then scroll over on about the third menu bar down until you see "No throttling", that's a combobox that lets you set the speed you want. Alternatively, run uBlock Origin and NoScript and you probably won't need it.

What a weird comment, not sure what you are trying to achieve. Any web developer knows how to find the network tab of the web developer tools in any browser including Firefox, and then the throttle option is immediately there.

You can make it look like any feature in any UI is hidden by choosing the longest path to reach it, using many words to describe it despite the target audience already knowing this stuff, and making your windows as small as possible.

Moreover, that a developer tool is a bit hidden in submenus in a UI designed for nontechnical users is fair game.

Even considering this, right click > inspect or Ctrl+shift+k also gets you the web developer tools. Not that hidden.

And then usually the network tab is visible immediately, it is one of the first tabs unless you moved it towards the end (even then, usually all the tabs are visible; but it's nice you can order the tabs as you want, and that a scroll button exists for when your window is too small -- and if the web developer panel is too small because it's docked at the left you can resize it, dock it to bottom or undock it).

This stuff is pretty standard across browsers, it's not like Firefox's UI is specifically weird for this. I don't have ideas for improving this a lot, it looks quite well designed and optimized to me already.

And then no, ublock Origin and No Script can't help you optimize the size of the web page you are working on. You ought to unblock everything to do this. They are a solution for end users, who have very few reasons to use the throttle feature. And unfortunately for end users, blocking scripts actually breaks too much to be a good, general workaround against web pages being too heavy. I know, I browse the web like this.

Re: The 49MB web page

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalis…

Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.

> if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry)

Then the industry itself would not be very sustainable, wouldn't it? In that case, I would expect the industry to radically change or to disappear like many other industries whose expectations were made unsustainable by tech progress. For some reason, we're incredibly excited of it happening to coding, music, art, but not to journalism. Journalism must survive in its current form at all costs.

Re: The 49MB web page

#226
post #62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please stop blaming the devs. You're laundering blame. Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever up to the devs alone. If a bridge engineer is asked to build a bridge that would collapse under its own weight, they will refuse. Why should it be different for software engineers?

Because bridge engineers can be sued if the bridge kills people

I wish we could sue developers who create unusably bad software wasting time of millions of people.

Re: The 49MB web page

#227
post #160
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com

Love both of them. CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my taste, though. If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives. I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.

At least the BBC has RSS feeds for its stories, which avoids having to go through the dire news front page.

Re: The 49MB web page

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.

It doesn't have to be that way, you can only push people so far before they riot. History has thousands of instances and many have been very ugly, 1789 and 1917 for instance.

To be frank, I don't think the general public cares enough. And the other side is always ready to use children safety, foreign hackers and scam prevention as an argument. Nobody will riot over tech people losing the ability to run their own machines with their own software. It already happened to printers and, most importantly, phones. When 95% of normal activities happen on mobile devices anyway, they will come for computers. They'll run a campaign, they'll lobby politics, cartel chip vendors and start introducing small changes in hardware and OS that will make it always a bit more inconvenient running your own software. Until there's nothing left to defend, and the industry will move on.

Re: The 49MB web page

#230
post #2

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.

[flagged]
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