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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#31

Post by kisamoto »

scblock wrote: post #2

"It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger." This attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be fat and get fatter. That's a lie. Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in your hands, you just need to use it. No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking…

More often than not I feel these decisions are out of the developers hands.

As a dev, I want to use tree shaking to make my bundles small and optimize to make my website lighthouse score 100 across the board.

What happens? Marketing needs tag manager installed and then proceeds to async load 50 tracking scripts in the background.

Design wants the large hero images because on the high Res devices they use it looks slightly pixelated and when you push back, a quick screenshot to the PM will guarantee the ticket is added to the backlog.

Point being I'm not sure claiming that Devs hold the power is particularly constructive as there is a large portion on non-techies who have their own priorities to push.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#33

Post by Spooky23 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #18
Spooky23 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the shittiest laptop at Walmart. Like an HP stream. Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.

> Remember the low res 1366x768 screen. The low ... um. One of us is in a bubble. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine. Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade old)

I don’t know if bubble is the right term here. WXGA (1366x768) is more common and more fubar, as the horizontal may vary between 1360 and 1372.

The point is to feel the pain. By any modern sensibility both resolutions are pretty awful, and experiencing it on a $200 consumer laptop is icing On the cake. Although I have clients who routinely test applications on ancient 800x600 displays due to legacy constraints.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#34

Post by simonw »

It's not just performance here: colour grading is really important too.

Many years ago I had a fascinating incident with a client. We were building a custom skin for our product for them, and they had quite a striking brand identity that we tried to match. When we showed them what we had built they complained that it was illegible.

Eventually, after visiting their office, we found that they were all working on cheap Windows laptops attached to horribly configured monitors - and our site really was illegible. We had done our design work on an iMac!

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#35

Post by atoav »

scblock wrote: post #2

"It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger." This attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be fat and get fatter. That's a lie. Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in your hands, you just need to use it. No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking…

Cool bonus: if you skip a lot of that stuff you also wont need a cookie banner, your page will load faster and feel better

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#36

Post by dmalik »

kome wrote: post #14

I believe that most of the "web developers" have absolutely no idea of how to build a website using bare html+css. Actually, I worked with "web developers" that are basically not touching code much, but using all sorts of tools and framework - without fully understand what they are doing. And that's also why website looks like each other more and more. And that's the silent majority of the industry.

Websites look like each other because of Jacobs law[1]. Not sure how good the web developers you work with are if they don't understand HTML/CSS/JS.

[1]https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#37

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Gigachad wrote: post #24
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember the low res 1366x768 screen. The low ... um. One of us is in a bubble. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine. Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade old)

It’s low res relatively as it is roughy the lowest resolution still in use. Mid range laptops these days come with 1080p displays and high end is somewhere at or under 4K

Ah, you're right; if I look on Best Buy and Newegg I can buy new machines below 1080p but they're the very, very bottom of the barrel ($100 Chromebooks and those weird "technically a laptop" off-brand Android... things). Well, here's to a crisper future:) (That apparently arrived while I was distracted)

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#38

Post by Orphis »

At the beginning of the pandemic, my team worked on optimizations as priority number 1 as we got a lot of new users with terrible configurations who wanted to do a lot more that what ever intended for that same hardware.

I managed to find a crappy laptop to do some testing and work on optimizations, and it wasn't pretty. No development tool would work on it. My recommendation is thus: aim low, but not the lowest. You'll still be able to measure impact of your changes, and you'll be able to collect some data and other measurements about what is slow.

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