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The 49MB web page

thatshubham.com

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Re: The 49MB web page

#241

Post by quectophoton »

DorkyPup wrote: post #232

Author here. Woke up in today to see this on the front page, thank you to the person who submitted it! Initially, my biggest fear was the HN "Hug of Death" taking it down. Happily, Cloudflare's edge caching absorbed 19.24 GB of bandwidth in a few hours with a 98.5% cache hit ratio, so the origin server barely noticed. The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the bur…

Out of curiosity, do you have (and want to share) stats about requests per second? It's always nice to know these things for future reference.

No worries if not :)

Re: The 49MB web page

#242

Post by eviks »

> users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare

Nice term!

> Or better yet, inject the newsletter signup as a styled, non-intrusive div between paragraphs 4 and 5. If the user has scrolled that far, they are engaged.

They're engaged with the content! There is no way to make some irrelevant signup "non-intrusive". It's similar to links to unrelated articles - do you want users to actually read the article or jump around reading headlines?

Re: The 49MB web page

#243

Post by nicbou »

renehsz wrote: post #135
nicbou wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still test mine on GPRS, because my website should work fine in the Berlin U-Bahn. I also spent a lot of time working from hotels and busses with bad internet, so I care about that stuff. Developers really ought to test such things better.

Thank you for doing this! I really mean it. We need more developers who care about keeping websites lean and fast. There's no good reason a regular site shouldn't work on GPRS, except maybe if the main content is video.

It's mostly just text on a page. It should be snappy!

Re: The 49MB web page

#244

Post by szszrk »

vunderba wrote: post #80
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…

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.

This made me chuckle.

I had a fairly large supplier that was so proud that they implemented a functionality that deliberately (in their JS) slows down reactions from http responses. So that they can showcase all the UI touches like progress bars and spinning circles. It was an option in system settings you could turn on globally.

My mind was blown, are they not aware of F12 in any major browser? They were not, it seems. After I quietly asked about that, they removed the whole thing equally quietly and never spoke of it again. It's still in release notes, though.

It was like 2 years ago, so browsers could do that for 10-14 years (depending how you count).

Re: The 49MB web page

#245

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jakub_g wrote: post #237

> 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people. Developers only add a single ` ` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine. Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can…

I tried to fight against the introduction of GTM in a project I worked on; we spent a lot of effort on coding, reviewing, testing, optimizing and minimizing client-side code before our end-users would see it, and the analytics people want a shortcut to inject any JS anywhere?

I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.

Re: The 49MB web page

#246

Post by int_19h »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
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…

> 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 pages without JavaScript. They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opport…

That's why we need to spread the word and get more people using adblockers. It's not even a hard sell - the difference is so striking, once it has been seen, it sells itself, even for the most casual users.

Re: The 49MB web page

#247

Post by leokennis »

Every time some site or person tries to make me feel bad for using AdGuard DNS, ad blockers etc. I read an article like this and I feel fine.

I see three options:

1. Show me reasonable ads and I will disable ad blocking

2. Do the crap described in this article and don't complain when I arm myself against it

3. Do a hard paywall and no ads; force me to pay to see your content

Re: The 49MB web page

#248

Post by littlecranky67 »

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…

Well as long as the website was already full loaded and responsive, and the videos show a thumbnail/placeholder, you are not blocked by that. Preloading and even very agressive pre-loading are a thing nowaadays. It is hostile to the user (because it draws their network traffic they pay for) but project managers will often override that to maximize gains from ad revenue.

Re: The 49MB web page

#249

Post by int_19h »

CalRobert wrote: post #21
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…

Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?

YouTube is already actively blocking alternative clients. that's why yt-dlp needs a JavaScript runtime these days: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

They are also not averse to using legal means to block them. For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone, Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to remove it from the store: https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...

Re: The 49MB web page

#250

Post by int_19h »

hilbert42 wrote: post #124
curtisblaine wrote: post #52

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.

People riot when they can't make ends meet, not when they can't install an app on their phone. Rioting is very costly.
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