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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#251

Post by monocasa »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #206
antisthenes wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped install…

> While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. I vividly remember waiting hours to download a video in the '90s. The Spirit of Christmas short that spawned South Park, and that news story about the exploding whale, were viral videos that predated modern video sites by m…

Or that stupid dancing baby CGI that blew up in the late nineties for some reason.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#252

Post by Narretz »

swiley wrote: post #160
Jakob wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

hackernews even works without javascript, the whole page just reloads everytime you upvote something.

Well, that's just the default way interactivity in websites works - submitting forms.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#253

Post by toast0 »

j3097736 wrote: post #222
toast0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?" As a counterpoint, I have a 1G FTTH connection, 8GB of ram, but only a dual-core 1.4 GHz Haswell (Celeron 2955U) and an iffy SSD, so I get a terrible web experience if I have more than one tab open.

>only Sounds like you need an adblocker, Firefox ESR + ublock Origin should be enough to make a 10yo single-core machine usable for common web browsing

I work at a company whose revenue primarily comes from advertisements; it feels unethical to run an adblocker while ads are paying my salary. (And also would blind me to the experience that most users have; even ignoring the nice connectivity and ram that I have)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#254

Post by j3097736 »

thinkloop wrote: post #45
meriobrudar wrote: post #4

Wow, really? Who knew overuse of JS and fancy graphical effects where they're not needed could negatively impact user experience? Could it be that all the web devs using 20 CDNs, cramming 900 frameworks, 100 externally provided analytics, advertisement providers and fancy layout eye-candy were wrong all along? What a surprise! I'm already sick when I have to visit a webpage and it won't even load ANYTHING if I don't…

JavaScript is not the enemy here, it's very possible and easy to make full SPAs with judicious use of micro libs, lazy loading of images/assets, non-blocking styles/fonts/code, and ad-free. The problem is just not caring or knowing - misuse of the technology, rather than the technology itself.

Lazy loading really sucks when you're left with a blurry image because it timed out while serving the full image (can happen even with an acceptable connection).

Unless it's really clever I'd prefer if they just let the browser do it's thing with an img tag, because that worked fine in the 56K times.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#255

Post by chiph »

dba7dba wrote: post #242
chiph wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original designers of the interstates didn't want the roads to go through the downtown areas. The idea was for the high-speed roads to go near cities, and have spur roads (3-digit interstate numbers that start with an odd number) connect them - like the design of the original Autobahn. But there was a coalition of mayors and municipal associations that pressured Congress to have the roads pass through their towns…

They didn't really NEED cars to move people around because Los Angeles area already had a GREAT light rail system called the Red Line. The current walkway on Venice Beach was what's left of that line. Can you imagine? An above ground light rail system running parallel to a beach in LA? They RIPPED it out thanks to lobbying by car companies and tire companies. Yay to lobbyists. Now, it takes a billion to build a few m…

The Red Line is the new Metro system (which was destroyed in 1997's Volcano). The electrified light-rail from the 1930's was the LA Railway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway

GM, Firestone, and several other companies were indicted in 1949 for attempting to form a monopoly over local transit. The semi-urban legend part (it was never definitively proved there was a plot behind it all) was the ripping out of the streetcars, replacing them with GM-made bus networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#256

Post by zulln »

Narretz wrote: post #252
swiley wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hackernews even works without javascript, the whole page just reloads everytime you upvote something.

Well, that's just the default way interactivity in websites works - submitting forms.

You could have used an iframe for each button instead of a normal form to prevent the reload of the page. Using an iframe with data: should take no longer to load than a normal form.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#257

Post by tbrownaw »

diggan wrote: post #39

Something that sticks out looking at the table. How can some sites simply FAIL loading? I mean, there is something inherently wrong with our web today, where if my internet is very slow and _could_ load a page in 80 seconds if I just leave it like that, the server itself could have configured the timeout to be 60 seconds. So I can never load the page?! The assumption is here that both points of the connection is base…

how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species

I would not expect interactive anything when latency is 20min+. Usenet and listservs should work fine tho, maybe worth some tweaks to the underlying protocols if they're too chatty.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#258

Post by some-guy »

chiph wrote: post #203
antisthenes wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped install…

> almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. Umm. Porn?

RealPlayer video rips of my favorite TV shows for me, all in wonderful 160p!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#259

Post by nommm-nommm »

What really has baffled me lately is Chase's new website. They did a redesign around, maybe 6 months ago, to make it "more modern" or something, I guess.

Now the thing just loads and loads and loads and loads. And all I want to do is either view my statement/transactions or pay my bill! Or sometimes update my address or use rewards points. That's not complicated stuff. I open it up in a background tab and do other stuff in-between clicks to avoid excessively staring at a loading screen.

I just tried it out, going to chase.com with an empty cache took a full 16 seconds to load on my work computer and issued 96 requests to load 11MB. Why!?

I then login. The next page (account overview) takes a full 32 seconds to load. Yep, half a minute to see my recent transactions and account balances. And I have two credit cards with zero recent transactions.

I am just baffled as to who signed off on it!! "This takes 30 seconds to load on a high speed connection, looks good, ship it."

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#260

Post by dogma1138 »

hueving wrote: post #237
SilasX wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! A Jevons Effect[1] in a web site's bandwidth! [1] When an increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used causes total usage to increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I'm not sure why this gets a special term. It sounds like basic supply and demand. If you decrease the price of something by increasing the efficiency of production, you will obviously capture more of the demand curve. What am I missing?

Because it's easier to say somename effect than the half paragraph or so that describes it.

This is the basic reason for naming anything after all a car is just a fossil fuel internal combustion kinetic comvertion wheeled people and goods pilotable transportation platform but saying a car is just easier :)

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