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Page Weight Matters (2012)

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#41

Post by jonahx »

misterbwong wrote: post #37

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?

Simple answer: Writing a responsive site is much faster and easier to maintain than creating two versions of the same site. And it wouldn't it be just two, you also have to support tablets, various desktop sizes, and various mobile sizes. Custom versions for each one isn't feasible.

Also, if you care about page and weight and optimization, your site will be light everywhere, and the criticism of shoehorning a big bloated desktop site into a phone won't apply. This is not that difficult to achieve.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#42

Post by spion »

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…

JavaScript isn't the problem, but it seems to always take the blame. And its not even slow.

Here are a couple of real culprits:

* Advertising / analytics / social sharing companies. They deliver a boatload of code that does very little for the end-user.

* REST and HTTP 1 in combination. A page needs many different types of data. REST makes us send multiple requests for different kinds of data, often resulting with those 60-80 requests mentioned above. We could be sending a single request for some of them (e.g. GraphQL) or we could get HTTP 2 multiplexing and server push which completely fix that problem.

* JSON. Its simple but woefully inadequate. Has no built in mechanisms for encoding multiple references to the same object or for cyclic references. Want to download all the comments with the user info for every user? You have a choice between repeating the user info per comment, requesting the comments first then the users by id (two requests) or using a serialisation mechanism that supports object references (isn't pure JSON)

* The DOM. Its slow and full of old cruft that takes up memory and increases execution time.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#43

Post by coldpie »

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.…

I took this screenshot yesterday. This was a page showing a news article (text). http://i.imgur.com/hmFaW3M.png

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#44

Post by phamilton »

spion wrote: post #42
elorant wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

JavaScript isn't the problem, but it seems to always take the blame. And its not even slow. Here are a couple of real culprits: * Advertising / analytics / social sharing companies. They deliver a boatload of code that does very little for the end-user. * REST and HTTP 1 in combination. A page needs many different types of data. REST makes us send multiple requests for different kinds of data, often resulting with th…

> * Advertising / analytics companies. They deliver a boatload of code that does very little for the end-user.

That's not quite fair. They subsidize the content for the end-user. Perhaps that's a crappy status quo, but in many cases without the advertising and analytics the content wouldn't exist in the first place.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#45

Post by coldpie »

thewarrior wrote: post #30
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.…

Well damn. I'm in Bangalore and being forced to use mobile 3G for now. The data charges are atrocious and each page load saps an MB.

Maybe you have taken these steps already, but uBlock Origin works great, and NoScript works okay, in Firefox for Android. They may get your page size down by significant fractions.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#46

Post by tolmasky »

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…

> 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.

I think you'd find a much easier case made that its because:

1) discoverability and distribution through app stores,

2) access to native features that took years to be enabled in the mobile web (for example access to photos..)

3) ability to make games (access to graphics, etc -- this also kind of hampers the case being made about "bloated" sites when people seem very willing to download 100MB games)

4) access to ease-of-payment (CC info stored on people's phones that you can in app payment, vs having to type info into a web form).

So we could try to focus on clear issues the web has vs native, or I guess we could design yet another language that is theoretically faster thanks to >insert pet feature here< and hope that fixes the web.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#48

Post by motoboi »

bsimpson wrote: post #11

Thought certainly an interesting anecdote, I don't understand how a video streaming site like YouTube would be useful in a market where a 100K download takes 2+ minutes. You'd have to open a page, walk away for an hour, and hope everything was OK when you got back.

I lived like that for some years.

My friends sent me e-mail with a youtube link and I literally waited one hour or so to view that. Just let it loading while reading something else.

So, the trouble here is not me having low bandwidth, but having connections on broadband places.

And even people with no connections in the first world want to see video clips online.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#49

Post by spion »

phamilton wrote: post #44
spion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript isn't the problem, but it seems to always take the blame. And its not even slow. Here are a couple of real culprits: * Advertising / analytics / social sharing companies. They deliver a boatload of code that does very little for the end-user. * REST and HTTP 1 in combination. A page needs many different types of data. REST makes us send multiple requests for different kinds of data, often resulting with th…

> * Advertising / analytics companies. They deliver a boatload of code that does very little for the end-user. That's not quite fair. They subsidize the content for the end-user. Perhaps that's a crappy status quo, but in many cases without the advertising and analytics the content wouldn't exist in the first place.

Perhaps. But maybe, if you add googleads, amazon adsystem, moatads, rubicon project, taboola, scorecardresearch, krdx etc [1], then you start wondering why are users using adblockers, so you add pagefair, and at that point you want to find out what works better so you add optimizely... maybe, just maybe, at that point, you're actually losing money because your page is so damn slow, rather than getting more because of your efforts to perfectly monetise it.

[1]: Just copied them from coldpie's news site screenshot comment. That was about 1/2 of them, there were many more.

Re: Page Weight Matters (2012)

#50

Post by gwern »

foxbarrington wrote: post #38

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?

Probably not. Downloading the video is going to depend more on throughput than on latency. The initial connection & page load, as it hits all the domains and resources, is going to be much slower because it relies more on latency and roundtrips.
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