We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
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Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#2One more point I observed while UI performance debugging earlier: Even though JS are cached by browsers, still loading them from disk (cache) to memory during page load is actually slow. Of course it also depends on machine capacities.
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#3I’m curious about the HTTP/0.9 stuff. Last time I checked (four or five years ago, by making a trivial HTTP/0.9 server, as the first step of a “writing HTTP servers” tutorial series that never materialised), Firefox either wouldn’t render the output at all, or would render it as though it had been a text/plain response (can’t remember which it was). In other words, it’s not a real web page. I would expect precisely zero occurrences among the top million pages, not the thirty that 0.003% indicates. I think it’s far more likely (p≅0.9999) that these indicate some sort of error.
(For those unfamiliar with it, HTTP/0.9 is the label for a protocol where the client opens a TCP connection to the server and sends “GET /”, and the server responds with the body, verbatim, and closes the connection. No status codes, no headers, nothing.)
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#4Use an adblocker. I save about 25 gigs and hours of my time every month. *
* I block much more than ads.
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#5Not scope of this analysis, but my #1 regression is large PDF in tabs. It such a standard part of the web experience, especially in sharing academic research, that it feels like a legit pain point in dire need of an upgrade.
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#6Use an adblocker. I save about 25 gigs and hours of my time every month. * https://www.ublockorigin.com * I block much more than ads.
Out of curiosity, what else do you use it for?
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#7Burn the DOM with fire. I'm so allergic to it. I'd rather write my own 2D tile tree format, with a simple flex-like rendering layout, than to work with HTML and expect reliability. HTML was never designed for interactive applications.
The historic reality is that HTML served as a "backdoor"/gateway to let the linux community compete with microsoft: linux devs could ship their code for windows clients.
Now, HTML webapps cannot run properly on a mobile platform without depleting expensive batteries. So each mobile platform are making bucks on the back of developers who have to work twice as hard.
I have very high hopes that webassembly could somehow solve all those problems, but there are several problems:
* Not all browser vendors like WASM and I doubt that any WASM progress would be supported equally.
* WASM toolchains are not really mature for most languages. Compiler makers don't have a lot of incentive working with WASM.
* The DOM would still exist.
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#8Burn the DOM with fire. I'm so allergic to it. I'd rather write my own 2D tile tree format, with a simple flex-like rendering layout, than to work with HTML and expect reliability. HTML was never designed for interactive applications. The historic reality is that HTML served as a "backdoor"/gateway to let the linux community compete with microsoft: linux devs could ship their code for windows clients. Now, HTML webap…
> I'd rather write my own 2D tile tree format, with a simple flex-like rendering layout, than to work with HTML and expect reliability.
I suspect you'd quickly find there's a lot more complexity there than you predicted.
Anyway - if that's what you want check out Qt + QML. You can do it badly, but when you use it well it's the best declarative UI framework I know.
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#9Burn the DOM with fire. I'm so allergic to it. I'd rather write my own 2D tile tree format, with a simple flex-like rendering layout, than to work with HTML and expect reliability. HTML was never designed for interactive applications. The historic reality is that HTML served as a "backdoor"/gateway to let the linux community compete with microsoft: linux devs could ship their code for windows clients. Now, HTML webap…
what would hacker news here be helped by by removing the dom? do you think this website would be better with your solution? why?
Re: We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
#10Use an adblocker. I save about 25 gigs and hours of my time every month. * https://www.ublockorigin.com * I block much more than ads.
Out of curiosity, what else do you use it for?
Not a parent, but it's super-easy to block any element I find distracting with about two clicks.
For example looking at en.wikipedia.org I can just remove that COVID box. Scalable? No. Smart? Eeeyuh... Satisfying? Hell yes.