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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

#71

Post by liveoneggs »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #10
troupo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now says that 2.4 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is fast now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit... (this is from…

You're making the same mistake the post did. It depends on the reader already having sympathy for the idea that bloat is bad in order to make its case. I can read nerd site comments all day that lament bloat. For an article to stand on its own on this point it has to make the case to people who don't already believe this. Dan's articles have usually been very good at that. The keyboard latency one for example makes f…

State your case that bloat is good. I currently have a client who will do literally anything except delete a single javascript library so I'd like to understand them better.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#72

Post by AlienRobot »

I'm glad people remember what WW in WWW means. :)

It makes me very sad to see that reddit's new design is so heavy it can't even be accessed by part of the world. It's like parts of the internet are closing theirs doors just so they can have more sliding effects that nobody wants.

Or maybe I'm just a weird one who prefers my browser to do a full load when I click a link.

Btw there was a time everyone kept talking about "responsive" web design and, having used only low-end smartphones and tablets, I kept finding it weird that there was such focus on the design being responsive for mobile devices when those mobile devices were so extremely slow to respond to touch to begin with. Of course I know that's not what they meant, but it still felt weird.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#73

Post by blauditore »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #60
Devasta wrote: post #50

If you don't have a good phone and a high speed connection, you don't have any money to spend on either the sites products or the products of their advertisers. When looked at from that angle, bloat is a feature. It's not reasonable to have an expectation of quality when it comes to the web.

Huh? I have a 5 year old, mid range android, and I still buy things online. Not everyone cares about phones.

Also, there are some websites targeting users with little money as well.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#74

Post by lotsofpulp »

hinkley wrote: post #55
eric__cartman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed with two 7 year old Snapdragon 835 devices that RAM and running a recent Android version makes a huge difference. I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to replace the battery and disassembling phones…

This is what I miss from the removal of serviceable components on MacBooks. Was a time I would buy the fastest processor and just okay memory and disk, then the first time I got a twinge of jealousy about the new machines, buy the most Corsair memory that they would guarantee would work, and a bigger faster drive. Boom, another 18 months of useful lifetime.

Is the total useful lifetime more than MacBooks with non serviceable components? I see people around me easily using Airs for 5+ years.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#76

Post by hexo »

amelius wrote: post #11

Perhaps these people are better off by running a web browser on a remote machine and interfacing with it over VNC.

webdevs and their managers should use these web "apps" on bad machine over VNC on a slow connection for a few months. these javascript hellpages are basically crime against humanity and do contribute a lot to e-waste, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#77

Post by supertrope »

zac23or wrote: post #36

Nobody, nobody, nobody cares about old hardware, performance, users, etc. if anyone cared, React wouldn't be a success. The last time I tried to use the react website on an old phone, it was slow as hell. LetsEncrypt is stopping serving Android 7 this year. Android 7 will be blocked from 19% of the web: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration The option is to install Firefox. Users with old hardware…

I think Let's Encrypt made a heroic effort. They deployed a hack to support Androids long abandoned by the operating system maintainer and manufacturer. If you want to blame LE for the breakage then also blame: GOOG for using the IBM PC clone business model without a device tree standard, QCOM for selling chips but very quickly cutting support, the manufacturer, and cellular carriers who prefer to lock you into another 24 month installment plan than approve an update for your existing handset.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#78

Post by anthk »

jwells89 wrote: post #54
mik1998 wrote: post #37

I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged) and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my preference of using native software (non-electron), which generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more modern" computer.

Whenever I pull out old machines I’m a little shocked at how responsive they are running a modern OS (Win10 or Linux), so long as the modern web is avoided. Anything with a Core 2 Duo or better is adequate for a wide range of tasks if you can find non-bloated software to do them with. Even going back so far that modern OS support is absent, snappiness can be found. My circa 2000 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9.1…

A Core Duo it's perfectly fine with an ad blocker:

git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#79

Post by robocat »

zac23or wrote: post #36

Nobody, nobody, nobody cares about old hardware, performance, users, etc. if anyone cared, React wouldn't be a success. The last time I tried to use the react website on an old phone, it was slow as hell. LetsEncrypt is stopping serving Android 7 this year. Android 7 will be blocked from 19% of the web: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration The option is to install Firefox. Users with old hardware…

> PO

What's the acronym?

Unfortunately acronyms are context sensitive and many users here are not in your context... Maybe try to avoid using acronyms!

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#80

Post by afavour »

tdudhhu wrote: post #44

Not only the user is affected by this. The difference between a 2MB and a 150KB CSS file can be a lot of bandwidth. The difference between a bad and good framework can be a lot of CPU power and RAM. Companies pay for this. But I guess most have no clue that these costs can be reduced. And some companies just don't care as long as money is coming in.

Eh. Cloudfront pricing starts at 8.5c per GB and goes down to 2c. I think you’d struggle to use that pricing as a justification when compared to the software engineer hours required to shrink down a CSS bundle. (don’t get me wrong, 2MB is insane and ought to be a professional embarrassment. But I think you’re going to struggle using bandwidth bills as the reason)

I agree with you about frameworks, though. So much waste in creating everything as (e.g.) a React app when there’s no need. Sadly the industry heavily prioritises developer experience over user experience.

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