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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

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Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#401

Post by nottorp »

gruez wrote: post #316
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…

>If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as plastic straw or bag bans.

> By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change.

It adds up? How many devices are there? Tens of billions?

Web 345 devs just don't care because the costs are borne by the customer.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#402

Post by atahanacar »

apatheticonion wrote: post #360

This is why I'm excited for Web Assembly. Writing an efficient high performance, mutli-threaded GUI in Rust or Go would be awesome. Just waiting on it to be practically usable

Because non-web applications are always very efficient and high performance, right?

The problem isn't the technologies available to us. Majority of devs just have no desire to write efficient code.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#403

Post by gruez »

nicce wrote: post #397
gruez wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random source from google[1]: >Berners-Lee writes that in 2020, there were 7.7 billion mobile phones in use, with a footprint of roughly 580 million tonnes of CO2e. This equates to approximately 1% of all global emissions Of course, not everyone is replacing their phones yearly. Another source[2] says the average consumer phone is 3 years old. That works out to 0.33% of global emissions, assuming the phones aren't re…

Isn’t that quite huge number to be fair?

Compared to a single person's emissions? Yeah sure, but that's because anything multiplied by 8 billion people is going to be huge. The same could be said for plastic bags and/or straws. In relative terms it's absolutely minuscule, and in terms of low hanging fruit it's definitely not the top. You'd be far better off figuring out ways to decarbonize the electricity grid (40%) or the transport system (20%)

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#404

Post by jenadine »

apatheticonion wrote: post #360

This is why I'm excited for Web Assembly. Writing an efficient high performance, mutli-threaded GUI in Rust or Go would be awesome. Just waiting on it to be practically usable

I wouldn't be so sure. The browser ultimately need to render the UI from the DOM which is intrinsically linked with JavaScript. Wasm can help for some of the application logic maybe. But it also comes at a cost of some fixed overhead to bring up the wasm blob. JavaScript performance aren't that bad for UI.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#405

Post by cettox »

This is one of the reasons I've started building https://formpress.org. Seeing the bloat in many form builder apps/services, I've decided there is need for a lightweight and open source alternative.

How we achieve lightweightness? Currently our only sin is, our inclusion of jquery, that is just to have some cross browser way of interacting with DOM, then we hand craft required JS code based on features used in the form builder. We then ship a lightweight runtime, whose whole purpose is to load necessary JS code pieces to have a functional form that is lightning fast. Ps: we havent gone to the last mile in optimizations, but we definteley will. Even with current state, it is the most lightweight form builder out there.

It is open source, MIT licensed, built on modern stack(react, node.js, Kubernetes and Google Cloud) and we are also hosting a freemium version.

I think, there will be ever increasing need and market for lightweight products, as modern IT means a lot of products coming together. So each one should minimize their overhead.

Give our product a go and let us know what you think?

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#406

Post by wraptile »

nottorp wrote: post #400
lelanthran wrote: post #126

This article is basically unreadable for me 48 y/o on desktop). In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it readable: font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.5em; max-width: 38rem; Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is. I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to make it readable. Seriously, techies, it's an extra 64 Bytes to make your page more readable.

> max-width: 38rem; Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is. How is it readable when you're limiting text width and not taking advantage of the whole screen you paid for? [Turning 48 next month and wearing glasses.]

FYI the optimal line length is 50-75 characters and that has been the standard for text since the type writers. You don't want to move your neck when you read a single line that's kinda silly.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#407

Post by nottorp »

zbrozek wrote: post #100

There's also a huge tendency to design for fast, high quality connectivity. Try using any Google product on airplane wifi. Even just chat loads in minutes-to-never and frequently keels over dead, forcing an outrageously expensive reload. Docs? Good luck. I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet loss are real.

I call this "Designed in California" like some fruity company proudly says on their devices.

For software this means designed on top of the line hardware, with fast low latency internet. TFA describes the consequences.

For hardware it means designed inside climate controlled dust free offices and cars for people with long commutes to work on straight roads where you don't have to pay much attention.

Think phones shutting down if you have a real winter. Think smart turn stalks that can't signal a left turn on a crossroads that's not at 90 degrees. Think ultra thin laptops where the keyboard is so dust sensitive it lasts 3 months if you use them outdoors. Think a focus on audiobooks and podcasts because you're stuck in traffic so much.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#408

Post by gruez »

nottorp wrote: post #401
gruez wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as plastic straw or bag bans.

> By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. It adds up? How many devices are there? Tens of billions? Web 345 devs just don't care because the costs are borne by the customer.

The customer doesn't care either because a page that takes 5s longer to load on a 1W TDP SoC costs them around one-millionth of a penny. Even if you're refreshing 100 times per day it's only around 0.05 kWh per year, which at any reasonable electricity prices is a sum that's simply not worth worrying about. You'd get more savings from getting people to turn off their led light bulbs for a few minutes.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#409

Post by geraldhh »

Retr0id wrote: post #119
LM358 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other codecs a while ago.

I have no idea if it still works, but the "h264ify" browser extension used to be great for working around this issue (by forcing youtube to serve h264) https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

ytdl-format=best[vcodec!*=vp9]

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#410

Post by geraldhh »

userbinator wrote: post #290
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 use Invidious for browsing the site, and watch the actual videos via a script that deobfuscates and gets the actual stream URL and then passes that to VLC. As another data point, YouTube a decade ago would've been perfectly fine on that hardware too. The culprit is web bloat in general, and more specifically the monstrosities of abstraction that have become common in JS. Even for those who don't believe at all in "…

'apt install yt-dlp mpv'

then put this in '.config/mpv/mpv.conf' to twart hw requirements

ytdl-format=best[height=vp9]/bestvideo[height=vp9]+bestaudio/best[vcodec!*=vp9]/best

and pass url's to it (i use 'play-with' ff extension)

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