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The Bullshit Web (2018)

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Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#81

Post by icedchai »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #78
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

>> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now I remember taking 24 hours to download something like an IDE or the JDK. No way could I do a clean Maven build of one of the projects I work on now with late 90's download speeds.

In the late 90's, you would've been forced to have a smaller set of dependencies, both out of necessity and because they didn't exist. In the early Java apps I worked on, we downloaded all the dependencies manually, generally from a shared drive or CVS repo, and put them in our classpath.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#82

Post by 13of40 »

FredPret wrote: post #36
tracerbulletx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly wish I had the data to back this up, but in my memory the web is WAY WAY faster than it was back then even with all of the extra "bullshit". I mean the images were like 16 colors and 200X300, and even just text based sites were slower and latency was worse too. Am I crazy here?

I remember images loading one line at a time. Now I can stream 4k video. Not sure what OP is on about. There is lots of bloat but we are now on a jumbo jet and we used to be on a hot-air balloon

Somewhere around 1998 or 1999 I was working as a web developer and I listened to a pitch from a guy who wanted to build a video streaming site. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out who was going to pay a subscription to watch grainy, postage-stamp sized videos in a web browser, but apparently that sort of thing took off.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#83

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

Guess who is paying for all that increased nonsense. Hint: It is not the "tech" companies orchestrating its delivery.

It is true this problem is not limited to bandwidth. The same applies to RAM, secondary storage and in some cases CPU. Who pays for the increased nonsense that saps the computer owner's RAM, storage and CPU. Hint: It is not the companies that provide "free" software.

I initially experienced computing on a VAX at a university, before I ever owned a "personal computer". Perhaps it was only the program we were running, but the speed was faster than anything I ever experienced later on a PC. I worked continuously over the years to try to make the PC "user experience" as fast as that VAX "user experience" as possible, for myself only. It has worked quite well.

The web that the "tech" companies want, where websites can and do vary drastically in speed and design,^1 and the one I want are two different things. Under the text-only, no Javascript, no CSS, no DNS system^2 I have designed, all websites are more or less the same speed and they all present information in more or less the same format.

Like the parent comment, I like the web as a concept. However I dislike the "tech" company model for the web. I am not the only one. IMHO, adoption of the "tech" company model for the web, with its steadily increasing nonsense, relies on a world of computing without meaningful, informed choice and without feasible alternative options.

1. Or, as the author cites, one where the practical result is traffic being routed through Google, e.g., AMP.

2. NB. I am not against the use of such facilties. However, due to the way they are commonly used on today's web, and given the lack of user control over their use, eliminating them was necessary to achieve the speed I wanted.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#84

Post by rufus_foreman »

icedchai wrote: post #81
rufus_foreman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now I remember taking 24 hours to download something like an IDE or the JDK. No way could I do a clean Maven build of one of the projects I work on now with late 90's download speeds.

In the late 90's, you would've been forced to have a smaller set of dependencies, both out of necessity and because they didn't exist. In the early Java apps I worked on, we downloaded all the dependencies manually, generally from a shared drive or CVS repo, and put them in our classpath.

Yeah exactly, I would typically have a directory with all the dependencies that I downloaded one by one and use that as part of the classpath, whereas now I do mvn clean install --download-the-internet

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#85

Post by ineedasername »

Cyberdog wrote: post #66
ineedasername wrote: post #24

>A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load The Hill is what finally pushed me to install an ad blocker. Before that it didn't bother me too much to get served ads etc that I filtered out of my awareness anyway, but The Hill was unusable. So, I installed an ad blocker and immediately realized how negligent I had been-- in terms of quality of web browsing experience-- in not doing so earlier. The Hill loaded n…

For what it's worth, AdGuard still seems to be holding its own against ad blocker blockers. Unlike other blockers, AdGuard is a paid service, but well worth it in my opinion and I'd recommend it in an instant. The only place where AdGuard has been failing recently is blocking Twitch ads, unfortunately.

I really don't like paid services, not the cost but the mental friction and the fact that you can easily accumulate so many of them... Anyway, I'll at least check them out during the trial they offer to see how much of an improvement it is over UblockOrigin.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#86

Post by wildrhythms »

Cyberdogs7 wrote: post #34
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

Your screen name forced me into a double take, as it's very rare for me to come across a similar name. On topic, the idea of performance optimization seems to be completely lost in large sectors of modern day computer science. My recent experience being windows. I have several old laptops that had been rendered completely unusable through windows updates [one even stopped charging]. However, once replacing windows wi…

When product managers come to me and demand I make the look a certain way to fit in with the rest of the "design language", I end up having to re-write all of the base and edge cases and accessibility and theming of what's already a perfectly functioning UI component. That code gets shipped to every user. And that's just one component... tomorrow I will make the look a certain way. Probably hundreds of KB just building these base UI components to fit in with some "design goal" that will change again in 6 months. If it makes the app unusable for some (unmeasured) percentage of our users on featurephones in developing countries, they don't care, because the product managers making these decisions will be gone in 6 months too, replaced with another with the same attitudes. At least the app "looks nice"!

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#87

Post by everyone »

I think engineers can sometimes become hyper-focused on a single metric eg. speed. A webpage in 1992 or today just needs to load fast enough. Theres a whole rake of other factors that may be more important than speed.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#88

Post by Fargoan »

dilyevsky wrote: post #19
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection

When I was a kid we had 28.8 for a couple years then 56k a couple years later. I remember frequently leaving the room and coming back to check and see if the page loaded. I convinced my parents that if we got DSL I would spend less time online because I wouldn't have to wait for websites to load. Hahaha

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#89

Post by wildrhythms »

at_a_remove wrote: post #68
javajosh wrote: post #30

Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…

You think I wanted 10MB of fonts? Nope. Talk to Public Affair's design team. You believe I wanted 200MB of images? Wrong. I wanted text, maybe some thumb-nails with pop-up images. But the photography group has to exist for a reason. 20MB bundles of Javascript? Sorry, but between the trackers marketing wanted and the fact that my boss' boss wants to have some hip new framework on his resume means I'm stuck when maybe…

Bingo. The technical decisionmaking has been delegated to product managers with business degrees who have probably never even used the product they're demanding be riddled with hundreds of KB of digital litter, much less written a single line of code. Capitalism will kill us all.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#90

Post by wildrhythms »

gusbremm wrote: post #77

Back in 2008 I was doing a lot of flash banners. Some clients would request the swf file to be as small as 9kb for a multi-scene banner.. It was a pain in the ass but we managed it most of the time with no design changes. We would spend a lot of time tunning image compression params to get the smallest swf possible. Sometimes the image quality would get awful. Today, my clients just don't care at all if the frontpage…

How the hell have we managed to relegate every step of our application design and decisionmaking to people whose technical expertise starts and stops at "it works on my machine" ... we are doomed
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