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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

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Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#281

Post by anonymoushn »

teg4n_ wrote: post #223
hexage1814 wrote: post #162

>Many pages actually remove the parts of the page you scrolled past as you scroll There is a special place in hell for every web developer who does that.

It’s a performance optimization for rendering a large amount of html. If the DOM had all the items in memory it would perform much worse. Thankfully browsers are working on a feature where you can keep the markup in the DOM for things like CTRL-F without hurting performance. Granted the main reason such a technique is needed is designs that avoid pagination.

We had web pages with big lists and tables in the DOM 20+ years ago, they were fine. The difference is that now we use web frameworks that do work proportional to DOM size many times per second.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#282

Post by anon373839 »

joeblubaugh wrote: post #279
anon373839 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, exactly. It's fashion. FOUC-chic.

Dan’s site has been like this for over a decade. If it’s a fashion, then he’s one of the creators of it.

Brutalist web design has been a thing for a while: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...

Some of it can be appealing, when basic ergonomic needs are met (readable text size and line length, adequate margins, and so forth). Most is just brutally pretentious, IMO.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#283

Post by ericra »

anon373839 wrote: post #278
ericra wrote: post #8

As someone with recent experience using a relatively slow Android phone, it can be absolutely brutal to load some web pages, even ones that only appear to be serving text and images (and a load of trackers/ads presumably). The network is never the bottleneck here. This problem is compounded by several factors. One is that older/slower phones cannot always use fully-featured browsers such as Firefox for mobile. The ap…

I've got an old MacBook Pro from 2013 that I still keep around because the keyboard is the best Apple ever made. It's not fast by any means, but I haven't encountered any difficulty with websites whatsoever. They're not as snappy as I'd expect on new hardware, but perfectly usable. I do use uBlock Origin, however. Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

> Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

Yes. Definitely. a Macbook Pro from 2013 has between 4-16GB of memory for one thing. The lowest spec phone in the article (Itel P32) has 1GB. A 2013 Macbook Pro has a 4th gen i5 processor. This phone has a MediaTek MT6580. It's not even in the same ballpark.

This is a bit of an extreme example, but the fact is that a very large number of people in many areas of the world use phones like these.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#284

Post by willcipriano »

spintin wrote: post #189
mastazi wrote: post #178

> While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites. Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to impl…

PUBG is now a very special beast: It's CPU bound = we are unlikely to ever see a "AAA" game with anything beyond it's complexity for eternity. You can run it on a 1030 GPU at 60 FPS.

Somebody has to be working on a Simcity or Civilization MMO.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#285

Post by champtar »

dudul wrote: post #220
mastazi wrote: post #178

> While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites. Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to impl…

Just throw a ticket in jira for these stupid devs to "make it faster".

To make Jira faster ?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#286

Post by pooper »

sokz wrote: post #273
Aerroon wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it has more to do with the monstrous website design than the tracking scripts. New reddit vs old reddit or desktop reddit vs mobile Reddit shouldn't be that different in terms of tracking. But the newer ones run like ass.

Reddit doesn't even run satisfactorily in my gaming laptop. I can run AAA games but a website is noticeably slow.

Just curious, are you using old.reddit.com?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#287

Post by _heimdall »

Escapado wrote: post #267
_heimdall wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "they" here can't really coerce the dev team unless the dev team is willing to comply. Refusing to implement an unethical feature is always an option, and given that we're often considered engineers it is well within our right to deem something unsafe or against best practices.

I hate all that tracking and marketing bs as much as the next guy but if the marketing team is the main stakeholder and is responsible for the budget that won't work. I also might be a bit biased as a freelancer but every team I worked in so far had other freelancers on it and if we strongly recommend aginst a practice but the client insisted then we basically had the choice to either abandon the project (and therefo…

This thread really has no purpose if we don't see it as enough of a problem to stand against. I really don't mean that to sound like I'm on a high horse (I'm sure it still sounds that way). There's nothing wrong with being okay with the trade offs, but we don't get to implement these features and complain about how bad they are.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#288

Post by bitwize »

troupo wrote: post #7
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #3

I'm normally a fan of Dan Luu's posts but I felt this one missed the mark. The LCP/CPU table is a good one, but from there the article turns into a bit on armchair psychology. From some random comments coming from Discourse's founder, readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. Even Knuth gets dragged into the mud based on comments he made about single vs multi-core per…

> readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now says that 2.4 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is fast now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit... (this is from…

Usually the directive "don't worry about bloat" comes from above, or outside, the software engineering team. I'm a software engineer and I would love to fix performance problems so that everything runs Amiga smooth. But that takes time and effort to find, analyze, and fix performance issues... and once The Business sees something in more or less working order, implementing the next feature takes priority over removing bloat. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" and that. I know that's not what Knuth meant, he meant don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish when you do optimize. But much like "GO TO considered harmful", something approaching the stupidest possible interpretation of the maxim has become the canonical interpretation.

And that's before getting into when The Business wants that sweet, sweet analytics data, or those sweet, sweet ad dollars.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#289

Post by kalleboo »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #47
ryukoposting wrote: post #5

I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering. It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's not that old, and it still works like new. I know it's not just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the same struggles. I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's website is among the absol…

Interesting that you have such problems with Amazon. I‘m using an iPhone XR (5,5 years old) and don’t have any problems using Amazon in the browser (Safari). And I’m on the latest iOS (17.4).

The iPhone XR was 4x as fast as the Galaxy S9 in web browsing https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph13912/95169.png

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#290

Post by userbinator »

genewitch wrote: post #99

as a data point youtube is unusable on raspberry pi 3. This happened within the last year, because prior to that you could "watch" videos at about 10-15FPS which is enough, for instance, to get repair videos in a shop setting (ask me how i know). When the raspberry pi model B - the first one released - came out, you could play 1080p video from storage, watch youtube, play games . I'm not sure what youtube is doing (o…

I use Invidious for browsing the site, and watch the actual videos via a script that deobfuscates and gets the actual stream URL and then passes that to VLC.

As another data point, YouTube a decade ago would've been perfectly fine on that hardware too. The culprit is web bloat in general, and more specifically the monstrosities of abstraction that have become common in JS.

Even for those who don't believe at all in "climate crisis", there is something to be said for the loss of craftsmanship and quality over time that's caused this mess, so I think it's something everyone across the whole political spectrum can agree with.

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