Page Weight Matters (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#31

Post by sirtastic » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #17

sirtastic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you can't always look at a single metric as a basis for success? This is rudimentary analytics here. Is there a single person who believes making client side code heavy is the way to go? Do people really think user experience should take a back seat to cool stuff on a site like YouTube?

Try "what makes a site merely inconvenient for some can render it completely unusable for others, and so one should not overlook minor issues because they don't seem worth fixing."

Excuse me. I didn't realize this wasn't obvious.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#32

Post by chrismbarr » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

gketuma wrote: post #5

As a web dev I always have this in mind but the challenge is convincing your client who wants a video background. Maybe we need a media query that detects internet speed.

I would love this. My company just updated their public-facing website and it has a 28MB 1080p video playing in the page header. The site was outsourced, but I work as a web developer for some of our products and was asked by the marketing team to give the new site a look over.

The marketing team was surprised to learn how big the file was since the outsourced team "ensured" them that the new website would be lightweight. Oh well... Now the video has been reduced to a 16MB at 720p, which is still ludicrous to me, but they just really like having the video on the home page more than they want a truly lightweight page.

And to be fair, the video does not load when viewed on a mobile device, so at least there's that.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#33

Post by Splines » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

If you're on Windows you can use the Network Emulator for Windows Toolkit (NEWT): http://blogs.technet.com/b/juanand/archive/2010/03/05/standa...

I've used it to emulate what it's like on a high-latency or high-loss network. Relatively easy tool to use.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#34

Post by kuschku » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

chrismbarr wrote: post #32

gketuma wrote: post #5

As a web dev I always have this in mind but the challenge is convincing your client who wants a video background. Maybe we need a media query that detects internet speed.

I would love this. My company just updated their public-facing website and it has a 28MB 1080p video playing in the page header. The site was outsourced, but I work as a web developer for some of our products and was asked by the marketing team to give the new site a look over. The marketing team was surprised to learn how big the file was since the outsourced team "ensured" them that the new website would be lightwe…

Have you looked into applying a blur filter in CSS and just reducing the bitrate of the video to a very low value?

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#35

Post by elorant » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:44 PM UTC

dpweb wrote: post #7

If you have an engineering mind and care about such things - you care about complexity. Even if you don't - user experience matters to everyone. Have you ever seen something completely insane and everyone around doesn't seem to recognize how awful it really is. That is the web of today. 60-80 requests? 1MB+ single pages? Your functionality, I don't care if its Facebook - does not need that much. It is not necessary.…

The fact that there isn't a daily drumbeat about how bloated, how needlessly complex, how ridicuous most of the world's web appliactions of today really are - baffles me

Well there is, or at least there used to be. The reason native apps in mobile became so popular is exactly because web sites are bloated. It might not matter in the PC but in a device running on batteries it matters a lot.

The real problem of web development is JavaScript. It’s a relic of the past that hasn’t caught up with times and we end up with half-assed hacks that don’t address the real problem. We need something faster and way more elegant.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#36

Post by untog » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #35

dpweb wrote: post #7

If you have an engineering mind and care about such things - you care about complexity. Even if you don't - user experience matters to everyone. Have you ever seen something completely insane and everyone around doesn't seem to recognize how awful it really is. That is the web of today. 60-80 requests? 1MB+ single pages? Your functionality, I don't care if its Facebook - does not need that much. It is not necessary.…

The fact that there isn't a daily drumbeat about how bloated, how needlessly complex, how ridicuous most of the world's web appliactions of today really are - baffles me Well there is, or at least there used to be. The reason native apps in mobile became so popular is exactly because web sites are bloated. It might not matter in the PC but in a device running on batteries it matters a lot. The real problem of web dev…

The real problem of web development is JavaScript. It’s a relic of the past that hasn’t caught up with times and we end up with half-assed hacks that don’t address the real problem. We need something faster and way more elegant.

I absolutely disagree. JS is plenty fast for >99% of the things being done with it. The DOM, and manipulations of it, is the slow part.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#37

Post by misterbwong » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

Isn't this phenomenon getting worse now that responsive design is in vogue? We've collectively decided to shoehorn a website designed for the connectivity and speed of a desktop browser into a lower powered device with slower/spotty connectivity.

Genuinely curious: Why is this better than a mobile-friendly site designed specifically with the constraints of a mobile device in mind?

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#38

Post by foxbarrington » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

If it takes two minutes to load a 100kb page, does it take twenty minutes to watch a 1MB video? Over three hours to watch a 10MB video?

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#39

Post by lnanek2 » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

Pretty funny story considering YouTube is back to unusable on slow connections. They used to buffer the full video, so you could load up a page, let it sit until the video buffers, then watch it eventually, maybe after reading your social news sites. Nowadays the buffering feature has been removed and you'll just come back, hit play, get a second or two of video, then it has nothing again for a long time.

Feels bad for the engineer who spent all that time reducing the size and finding out it made YouTube much more usable across the globe. Amusingly, disabling buffering was probably some penny wise pound foolish way to save bandwidth.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#40

Post by jfoutz » Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

jonahx wrote: post #6

This is a fascinating example of Simpson's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox It also reminds me of the phenomenon, in customer service, whereby an increase in complaints can sometimes indicate success -- it means the product has gone from bad enough to be unnoticeable to good enough to be engaged with.

In WW1, helmets were introduced to protect soldiers. Surprisingly the frequency of head wounds went way up. It took a little while to realize soldiers were "just" being wounded, rather than outright killed if they had no helmet.