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Engineering for Slow Internet

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Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#401

Post by arp242 »

malinens wrote: post #387
arp242 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When used well, JS will improve the experience especially for high-latency low bandwidth users. Not doing full page refreshes for example, or not loading all data at once. So no, "no JS at all" is not "by far the lightest weight" in many cases. This is just uncritically repeating dogma. Even 5K to 20K of JS can significantly increase performance.

I always ask people to give example of real world SPAs where JS is "used well" and nobody could give me an example

FastMail is pretty good; that's my go-to example.

However, you don't need to go full SPA. "No JS at all" and "SPA" are not the only options that exist. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40541555

Sites like Hacker News, Stack Overflow, old.reddit.com, and many more greatly benefit from JS. I made GoatCounter tons faster with JS as well: rendering 8 charts on the server can be slow. It uses a "hybrid approach" where it renders only the first one on the server, sends the HTML, and then sends the rest later over a websocket. That gives the best of both: fast initial load without too much waiting, and most of the time you don't even notice the rest loads later.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#402

Post by inferiorhuman »

kellpossible2 wrote: post #346
inferiorhuman wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between massacring the UX and copilot I've more or less stopped engaging with github. I got tempted the other day to comment on an issue and it turns out the brain trust over at Microsoft broke threaded comment replies. They still haven't fixed keyboard navigation in their bullshit text widget. I could put up with the glacial performance if it actually worked in the first place, but apparently adding whiz bang "AI" f…

Surprisingly my experience of GitLab is even worse! How's yours? BitBucket wasn't much better from memory either. Seems like most commercial offerings in this spaces suck.

I've been using Sourcehut. I respect Drew's commitment to open source, but I think that a lot of the UX misses the mark. For most things I really don't want an email based work flow and some pieces feel a bit disjointed. Overall though it has most of the features I want, and dramatically less bullshit than Github.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#403

Post by _feynon »

For the last three years, Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega have sailed the Pacific Ocean on Pino, a sailboat turned mobile studio, making videogames, art, and music with their own homegrown software. Off-grid for long stretcheS they’ve built a custom OS for their needs: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

Talk: https://youtu.be/BW32yUEymvU?si=YGsc3A3oAzowKbRU

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#404

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #191
padolsey wrote: post #43

A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…

Chrome dev tools offer a "slow 3G" and a "fast 3G". Slow 3G? With fresh cache on "slow 3G", my site _works_, but has 5-8 second page loads. Would you have consider that usable/sufficient, or pretty awful?

It depends if you are ok with 1/3 to 2/3rds of your visitors bouncing due to loading times and losing 3 to 5x of convertion rate depending on sources...

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#405

Post by jrochkind1 »

BehindBlueEyes wrote: post #404
jrochkind1 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome dev tools offer a "slow 3G" and a "fast 3G". Slow 3G? With fresh cache on "slow 3G", my site _works_, but has 5-8 second page loads. Would you have consider that usable/sufficient, or pretty awful?

It depends if you are ok with 1/3 to 2/3rds of your visitors bouncing due to loading times and losing 3 to 5x of convertion rate depending on sources...

No need to be sarcastic. What page load speed at "slow 3G" speeds do you believe is necessary to avoid that?

(I work for a non-profit cultural heritage organization, we don't really have "conversions")

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#406

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #405
BehindBlueEyes wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends if you are ok with 1/3 to 2/3rds of your visitors bouncing due to loading times and losing 3 to 5x of convertion rate depending on sources...

No need to be sarcastic. What page load speed at "slow 3G" speeds do you believe is necessary to avoid that? (I work for a non-profit cultural heritage organization, we don't really have "conversions")

I didn't mean this sarcastically, it is a decision and may not apply to all situations.

You can see these kinds of differences with just a few seconds difference, ideally I aim to stay under 2s, even on the slowest connection type. 2s is already very long for a user to wait and many will not.

Non profits are tricky. You could see volunteer sign ups and donations as conversions. I manage a non profit site as well and unfortunately I don't have a good solution that is both fast and approachable for our staff to use, so we had to make that compromise as well.

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