How web bloat impacts users with slow devices • Hacker News Board

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#381

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 9:57 AM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #365

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…

> In these situations, companies frequently try to force an app down your throat instead. And who knows how much space that will take up on a space-limited device or how poorly it will run. And honestly, that app is going to be a browser shell with a (partially) offline copy of the website in it, 9 times out of 10...

> that app is going to be a browser shell with a (partially) offline copy of the website in it, 9 times out of 10

If you're lucky. The main UI may just be a website, but as a native app is has a greater ability to spam you, track you, accidentally introduce security vulnerabilities, etc.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#382

Post by bombela » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 9:59 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #272

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 had to upgrade my 12" Macbook because Youtube Music brought it to a crawl. I could play music or work, but not both.

That's absurd. I remember using winamp (and the skin compatible Linux clone, I forgot it's name) streaming internet radios while programing a toy OS in 2004. I could listen to music while compiling and running the BOSHS emulator on my AMD Atlon CPU with a whooping 256MiB of RAM.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#383

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:04 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #370

autoexec wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's better for the company that I don't try" seems like a convenient take for a dev without the skills to have. I'd argue that performance is a feature, and if someone can't deliver it their salary is being wasted already.

Performance is a feature and management often doesn't care to optimize for it. If the market valued performance more then we would probably see competitive services which optimize for performance, but we generally don't. I'm sure there's plenty of developers that could deliver improved performance, it's just a matter of tradeoffs. Maybe the people who care this much about performance should start competing services o…

Performance is not a feature. Decisions about performance are part of every line of code we write. Some developers make good decisions and do their job right, many others half-ass it and we end up with the crap that ships in most places today.

This “blame the managers” attitude denies the agency all developers have to do our jobs competently or not. The manager probably doesn’t ultimately care about source control or code review either, but we use them because we’re professionals and we aim to do our jobs right. Maybe a better example is security: software is secure because of developers who do their jobs right, which has nothing to do with whether or not the manager cares about security.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#384

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:12 AM UTC

gxs wrote: post #98

bluquark wrote: post #66

Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the exp…

Some of these sites are un-fucking-bearable on my gen old iPhone. And the if I’m in a place with a shitty signal, forget about it, this problem is 10 times worse. I’m not even talking about the cluttered UI where only a third of the page is visible because of frozen headers and ads, I’m talking about the size of the websites themselves that are built by people who throw shit against the wall until it looks like whate…

I really wish all software developers had to have 10 year old phones and computers and a slow 3G connection as their daily drivers. It might at the very least give them some empathy about how hard it is to use their software on an underspec machine.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#385

Post by ksec » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:12 AM UTC

>There are two attitudes on display here which I see in a lot of software folks. First, that CPU speed is infinite and one shouldn't worry about CPU optimization. And second, that gigantic speedups from hardware should be expected and the only reason hardware engineers wouldn't achieve them is due to spectacular incompetence, so the slow software should be blamed on hardware engineers, not software engineers.

Not just the quote but the whole piece. I am glad this was brought out by Dan, and gets enough attentions to be upvoted. ( Although most are focusing on Server Rendering vs Client Side Rendering; Sigh) A lot of what it said would have been downvoted to oblivion on HN. A multi billion dollar company CTO once commented on HN, why should I know anything about CPU or Foundry as long as they give performance improvements every few years.

Not only Jeff Atwood, there are plenty of other Software developers, from programming languages authors, backend and Frontend Frameworks authors, with hundreds of thousands of followers, continue to pump out views like Jeff on social media. Without the actual understanding of hardware nor the business or selling IPs or physical goods.

Hardware Engineers has to battle with Physics. And yet gets zero appreciation. Most of the appreciations you see now around Tech circle are completely "new". For a long time no one heard of TSMC. ASML wasn't even known until Intel loss its leading node. Zero understanding of CPU design nor even basic development cycles. How it will takes years just to get a new CPU out. And somehow hate Qualcomm because they didn't innovate. A company that spends the highest percentage of revenue on R&D in tech industry.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#386

Post by Jensson » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:14 AM UTC

rokkamokka wrote: post #372

zilti wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It usually requires less time, not more, to create a slim and efficient page.

Definitely not true in my experience, and I would think if it were true, most pages would be "slim and efficient". Where is the business value in doing anything else at that point?

> Where is the business value in doing anything else at that point?

You think developers prioritize business value? That isn't how employment works.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#387

Post by coolcoder613 » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

coolcoder613 wrote: post #301

Compare with one of my projects, [1] It is a minimal, though modern-looking web chat. The HTML, CSS and JS together is 5024 bytes. The Rust backend source is 2801 bytes. It does not pull in anything from anywhere. [1] https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/minchat

Clarification: The frontend does not pull anything, the backend pulls in libraries for websockets and json using cargo.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#388

Post by teamonkey » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

john61 wrote: post #344

porcoda wrote: post #313

I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies. No developers appear willing to admit that there is a large cohort of not that great web programmers who don’t know much (and appear to not WANT to know much) about efficiency. They’re just as to blame for the sad world of web software as the big boss or corporate overlord that forced someone to make bad software.

Usually bad web software correlates with bad content. Therefore having a slow device is an excellent filter helping to avoid garbage.

Unfortunately the modern web has consolidated to a point where you need to use them. For example, small local businesses that don’t have a web site but do have a Facebook page.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#389

Post by nolist_policy » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

Ruq wrote: post #231

Related: Too much of technology today doesn't pay attention or even care to the less technologically adept, either. Smartphones in my opinion are a major example of this. I can't tell you the number of people I've meet who barely even or don't even know how to use their devices. It's all black magic to them. The largest problem is the over-dependence on the use of "Gesture Navigation" which is invisible and thus non-…

I don't know, I've seen mature people who couldn't operate a cassette deck and likely would have trouble with a typewriter. These people definitely grew up around these devices.

I don't think (modern) technology is at fault here.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#390

Post by lukan » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

genewitch wrote: post #359

fbdab103 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the performance boost it could offer the unsavy user stuck on a HDD, it was probably worth it to many. Gross to be the middleman, but it is what it is.

Another computer shop i worked in charged $90 for virus removal, but we also eventually made it policy to just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap and fully update the OS. Prior to that the policy was "remove viruses, remove crapware, update OS", but we had a few customers that had machines with 30,000 viruses. I forget what the record was, but it was way up there in count. Trying to clean those machin…

"just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap"

And that is not more work?

It was usually the way I did it, too. But this requires checking with the owner what apps are important, saved preferences, where are the important files stored (they never know) etc.