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The 49MB web page

thatshubham.com

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Re: The 49MB web page

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for fancy computers. Dev on a fast one if you like, but test things out on a Chromebook.

“Craptop duty”[1]. (Third time in three years I’m posting an essentially identical comment, hah.) [1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/

I now wonder if it'd be a good idea to move our end to end tests to a pretty slow vm instead of beefy 8 core 32gb ram machine and check which timeouts will be triggered because our app may have been unoptimized for slower environments...

Re: The 49MB web page

#72

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript. They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opport…

> They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription

I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.

Re: The 49MB web page

#73

Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…

Same for fancy computers. Dev on a fast one if you like, but test things out on a Chromebook.

Music producers often have some shitty speakers known as grot boxes that they use to make sure their mix will sound as good as it can on consumer audio, not just on their extremely expensive studio monitors. Chromebooks are perfectly analogous. As a side note, today I learned that Grotbox is now an actual brand: https://grotbox.com

Re: The 49MB web page

#74
post #48

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com

https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS

Re: The 49MB web page

#75
post #2

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.

I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.

100,000 people clicking at $0.01 CPM is way worse for them than 10,000 people clicking at $2 CPM.

Re: The 49MB web page

#76

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

What does playing fair mean in this context? It would be one thing if you were a paid subscriber complaining that even paying sucks so you left, but it sounds like you’re not.

It is strange to hear these threats about avoiding websites from people who are not subscribers and also definitely using an ad blocker.

News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.

Re: The 49MB web page

#77
post #2

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.

49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.

If you can think of any, then congratulations! You've saved journalism!

You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die with you.

Re: The 49MB web page

#79
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.

I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalis…

Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.

Re: The 49MB web page

#80

Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit o…

PSA for those who aren’t aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers have a Network tab in the developer tools where you can dial down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection.

Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.

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