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We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

itnext.io

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Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#41

Post by nicoburns »

jameslk wrote: post #27

It seems web performance is one of the least understood topics, even for engineers. Unfortunately even this author makes the mistake of confusing DOM Interactive[0] with Time to Interactive[1]. And yet this is a better analysis than what I often see repeated backed with no evidence. For example, the myths about page weight and big SPA JS websites being the source of web performance issues is one I see so frequently h…

Yep, we have an SPA at work. It's not even small - around 2MB - but it loads, parses, and renders almost instantly (say I have a WIP branch that caches things locally, but my boss tells me that the app is fast enough and I should be working on other things. And I'm loathe to sneak it in without proper testing as caching is something that has a tendency to break in horrible ways if you're not careful.

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#42

Post by jefozabuss »

ru552 wrote: post #32

https://catchjs.com/Blog/PerformanceInTheWild — actual link to the people that did the study. Itnext.io just ripped it off with a small credit at the bottom.

From what I see it wasn't "ripped off" if the original author submitted it to both places (see at bottom) https://medium.com/@larseidnes

Or am I missing something?

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#44

Post by pjc50 »

highstep wrote: post #35
mbirth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can afford it, I'd suggest switching to AdNauseam ( https://adnauseam.io ). They're using the same uBlock Origin engine, but ads are downloaded and clicked on in the background. This way you still generate revenue for site owners. But since this extension is banned from the Chrome Web Store, you'll have to install it manually there. On Firefox it's available from their add-on store.

This seems very hostile to small businesses who pay for those ads.

What percentage of google ads are from small businesses?

What percentage of google ads targeted to me are from small businesses?

(I've no way of guessing as I just block all of them)

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#45

Post by kaycebasques »

As jameslk also mentioned, this article mistakenly uses "dominteractive" interchangeably with "time-to-interactive". They are not the same metric. Lighthouse uses a different algorithm for computing TTI.

https://web.dev/interactive/#what-tti-measures

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Performance...

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#47

Post by [deleted] »

nicoburns wrote: post #41
jameslk wrote: post #27

It seems web performance is one of the least understood topics, even for engineers. Unfortunately even this author makes the mistake of confusing DOM Interactive[0] with Time to Interactive[1]. And yet this is a better analysis than what I often see repeated backed with no evidence. For example, the myths about page weight and big SPA JS websites being the source of web performance issues is one I see so frequently h…

Yep, we have an SPA at work. It's not even small - around 2MB - but it loads, parses, and renders almost instantly (say I have a WIP branch that caches things locally, but my boss tells me that the app is fast enough and I should be working on other things. And I'm loathe to sneak it in without proper testing as caching is something that has a tendency to break in horrible ways if you're not careful.

[deleted]

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#48

Post by yaccz »

jokoon wrote: post #7

Burn the DOM with fire. I'm so allergic to it. I'd rather write my own 2D tile tree format, with a simple flex-like rendering layout, than to work with HTML and expect reliability. HTML was never designed for interactive applications. The historic reality is that HTML served as a "backdoor"/gateway to let the linux community compete with microsoft: linux devs could ship their code for windows clients. Now, HTML webap…

> The historic reality is that HTML served as a "backdoor"/gateway to let the linux community compete with microsoft: linux devs could ship their code for windows clients.

lmao. sources?

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#49

Post by throwawayadtech »

mbirth wrote: post #31
ffpip wrote: post #4

Use an adblocker. I save about 25 gigs and hours of my time every month. * https://www.ublockorigin.com * I block much more than ads.

If you can afford it, I'd suggest switching to AdNauseam ( https://adnauseam.io ). They're using the same uBlock Origin engine, but ads are downloaded and clicked on in the background. This way you still generate revenue for site owners. But since this extension is banned from the Chrome Web Store, you'll have to install it manually there. On Firefox it's available from their add-on store.

This seemed really interesting, so I clicked through to their FAQ.

> Does AdNauseam's automatic Ad-clicking create billable events for advertisers?

> It depends on the advertising business model and the degree of effort they are willing to put into filtering. Some might, others would not.

So it seems like the extension only "generates revenue for site owners" if it's either

- small enough for ad selling companies to not know it exists (and sophisticated enough to defeat their baseline filtering measures) or - large enough for ad selling companies to notice it exists and sophisticated enough to defeat active attempts to filter clicks from AdNauseam specifically

I don't know how this arms race usually turns out, but it seems like there could be a chance that this is just a uBlock Origin that consumes more bandwidth.

Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow

#50

Post by greenshackle2 »

highstep wrote: post #35
mbirth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can afford it, I'd suggest switching to AdNauseam ( https://adnauseam.io ). They're using the same uBlock Origin engine, but ads are downloaded and clicked on in the background. This way you still generate revenue for site owners. But since this extension is banned from the Chrome Web Store, you'll have to install it manually there. On Firefox it's available from their add-on store.

This seems very hostile to small businesses who pay for those ads.

Yeah they didn't mention the stated purpose of AdNauseam, which is explicitly hostile to ad networks and advertisers.

EDIT: From their paper:

"The second goal is to provide a means of proactive engagement, allowing users an avenue for expression of their dissatisfaction with current advertising mechanisms to those in control of such systems. In the case of AdNauseam, this expression has an interventional aspect, as the software actively attempts to disrupt the economic model that drives advertising surveillance"

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf

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