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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

#301

Post by btschaegg »

dragonwriter wrote: post #277
btschaegg wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with others here that dial-up-friendly sites don't "collide" with complex web-apps (thus rendering this argument somewhat void), I sadly think the underlying problem is much more mundane: Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Same reason. No one wants to pay the additional costs of achieving that. Practically speaking, this means that either Random Local Newspaper…

> Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Because even in the 1990s, word processors weren't orders of magnitude slower than the person sitting at the keyboard, which is the ultimate limiting factor on word processing speed.

Which is, essentially, the same explanation. I would very much like a fast, Vim-style modern word processor (the new cursor behavior in Word drives me insane btw). But I'm not the main target. I alone wouldn't pay the bills.

The same goes for almost any website: People with 56k don't consume much digital goods and returns from ads are most likely almost non-existent (especially if the ads are huge themselves). That easily explains a huge part of the web.

Thus, either the connectivity around the globe has to be improved (thats the route Facebook seems to choose, albeit with debatable conditions for their new "customers") or create other incentives for anyone hosting something on the web to attract people with low bandwith connections.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#302

Post by grzm »

Shalhoub wrote: post #234
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…

> Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Someone doesn't agree with your comment, but rather than come back with a refutation they voted you down instead :) And someone else don't agree with my comment .. modded down -4

Likely because your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation, and the guidelines ask not to comment on downvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#303

Post by virtuallynathan »

_delirium wrote: post #148
Someone1234 wrote: post #21

I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…

> PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time. I don't think this has changed, at least not in general. The included roaming package is still free international 2G roaming everywhere except Mexico and Canada (which get free 4G), with "high-speed data pass" upgrades available for a daily or weekly fee if you want faster. They did have a promotion for the 2nd half of 2016 (…

On the new "One Plan" it's now 128Kbps, and 256Kbps if you pay for the One Plus International plan ($25/mo).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#304

Post by StavrosK »

Nas808 wrote: post #249
slededit wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

I used a Pentium 100 MHz and it would play just fine. Encoding them would take real-time (i.e. a 3 minute song would encode in 3 minutes), but playing back was fine. I even listened to music while doing other things. This was with Winamp.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#306

Post by 72deluxe »

Nas808 wrote: post #249
slededit wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

Yes I remember using mods and xm files instead as attempting to play a low bitrate MP3 on a Pentium 100 (I think?) Elonex laptop meant 100% CPU.

Even tried it on mpg123 and mpg321 on RedHat on a 486 DX66 - I was poor. Didn't fare any better.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#307

Post by megablast »

Someone1234 wrote: post #21

I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…

You have just discovered why apps are so good, they can download content in small amounts.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#308

Post by bigger_cheese »

Nas808 wrote: post #249
slededit wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

I played MP3's on a 486 DX4/100mhz. There was a setting in winamp I had to turn on (I think it was quality related) otherwise it would stutter and be generally unlistenable. Even with that setting turned on it pegged the CPU at about 100% the computer was unusable for anything else while the mp3 was playing. Trying to seek in the track would sometimes crash winamp.

My Pentium 166 on the other hand was much more capable I could multitask while playing Mp3's (I used to play mp3's and Quake at the same time).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#309

Post by 72deluxe »

rmc wrote: post #170
freehunter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that s…

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works? The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds

Yes and the average page size has sky-rocketed, despite there being no more actual content (i.e. text). Instead we have animations of images or text fading in as we scroll down a page and lots of Javascript to do things I do not know.

Kind of makes me miss the old plain HTML days - much less CPU intensive too.

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