The web sucks if you have a slow connection

by philbo • 9 years ago

1269 598 9 years ago

Swizec• 9 years ago

Slow connection is okay, it's just slow. Now spotty connection, or high latency, that's the killer.

Webapps that make 50 requests to download all the JavaScript and CSS and talk to the API and get 3 images really really really don't behave well when 12 of those 50 requests fail or take 30 seconds to complete. Honestly, I'd rather have slow internet than packet lossy internet.

Still don't know why, but my Xfinity router routinely gets into a state where it drops the first 10 or so packets of any request. The first `ping 8.8.8.8` takes 3 seconds, the rest are the usual 0.1 second. Terrible.

riskneural• 9 years ago

What do you mean by latency in this context?

richardwhiuk• 9 years ago

Probably really means highly variable latency, i.e. jitter, where the RTT spikes horribly, which will cause packets to assumed to be dropped.

geforce• 9 years ago

Sad thing is that most of the web sucks on rather fast connections too. Pages being almost 5mb of data, making multiple dozens of requests for librairies and ads. Ads updating in the background, consuming evermore data.

I don't notice it much on my PC, since I've got a FTTH connection, but on LTE and 3G, it's very noticeable. Enough that I avoid certain websites. And that's nowhere near slow by his standards.

I do agree that everyone would benefit from slimmer websites.

coldpie3• 9 years ago

Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.

MrRadar2• 9 years ago

I also use an add-on called Decentraleyes. It caches various common scripts from popular CDNs within the add-on itself so your device doesn't need to make any network requests for them. It was originally meant as a privacy to but the caching seems to be at least as valuable.

Terr_• 9 years ago

I have Javascript off-by-default, and about 80% of the time it simply makes everything better.

Oh, sure, a few sites need JS (and get whitelisted) and some just have minor layout quirks... But I can actually scroll down and read the text of a news article rather than suffering through waiting times and input-latency as Javascript churns.

dman• 9 years ago

Same here - I would highly recommend people to at least try this once and get a reminder of how fast sites can be.

ploxiln2• 9 years ago

I notice it in my browser's memory usage.

lucb1e2• 9 years ago

Figure out a few interesting/useful websites that work fine without Javascript. Try browsing those for half an hour, then switch Javascript back on and browse your usual websites. You'll probably notice it's so much slower, even with FTTH, because of network load but also CPU (and marginally RAM, though modern browsers are mostly to blame for that).

meriobrudar• 9 years ago

Wow, really? Who knew overuse of JS and fancy graphical effects where they're not needed could negatively impact user experience? Could it be that all the web devs using 20 CDNs, cramming 900 frameworks, 100 externally provided analytics, advertisement providers and fancy layout eye-candy were wrong all along? What a surprise!

I'm already sick when I have to visit a webpage and it won't even load ANYTHING if I don't enable scripts on it. At least load the god damn text, I don't care if it'll look like trash, just don't show me a blank page...

The irony is that everyone calls for people to not use Flash, and then they go out of their way to recreate the abysmal experience without it, so really nothing changed as far as UX goes. Remember when pages didn't load at all unless you had flash installed? Well here's some nostalgia for you, won't load unless you run all the JS on the page and then you have to "enjoy" a bloated joke of a website, but Jesus does it have eye-candy!!!

minikites4• 9 years ago

Wow, really? Who knew overuse of JS and fancy graphical effects where they're not needed could negatively impact user experience?

Clearly not enough people, because it keeps happening. I think it would also help if people kept in mind that the internet is global, it isn't just for developed nations.

jmcdiesel2• 9 years ago

It's not a matter of whether the internet is global, its who your audience is... if you audience is primarily in developed nations, then the rest of the world isn't much of an issue.

tomjen3• 9 years ago

Even if your audience members are global, the west is going to be where most of your revenue streams are going to be. If you are facebook it may be worth optimizing for rural India, because they have few places left to grow, but for most companies it is just not worth it - and companies exist to make money.

lotyrin• 9 years ago

Honestly, they don't even look that great. Lots of sites could be using lots of modern browser features to be fairly innovative from a visual design and user experience standpoint, but it's mostly just really inefficient (and inaccessible, with no compat fallbacks) implementations of the same old shit.

brilliantcode2• 9 years ago

yes lot of these web pages are the size of mp3 files. it's just fucked up.

we decided static html webpages are sooo 1999. Yet it remains the most secure and user friendly medium to deliver value.

bring back the 1999 frame side bar. what was wrong with that?

minxomat• 9 years ago

Every time I get angry about this I'll open https://purecss.io/ or http://skytorrents.in and look at the source. It's a form of meditation to browse fast websites.

solidr53• 9 years ago

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

chjh• 9 years ago

Thanks!! First I heard of purecss. Will use asap

discreditable• 9 years ago

https://bestmotherfucking.website

thinkloop• 9 years ago

JavaScript is not the enemy here, it's very possible and easy to make full SPAs with judicious use of micro libs, lazy loading of images/assets, non-blocking styles/fonts/code, and ad-free. The problem is just not caring or knowing - misuse of the technology, rather than the technology itself.

SquareWheel4• 9 years ago

Agreed. I really enjoy building static websites. With no databases, no server-side logic or caching, everything becomes extremely fast and simple. It does mean moving any logic to the client-side with Javascript though.

CaptSpify13• 9 years ago

As a JS hater....

I completely agree. I think the problem is that bad designers are misusing a good tool. It's like salt: If I add a little to my meal, it makes it better. If I add a LOT of it to my meal, it doesn't keep getting better.

Unfortunately this causes a knee-jerk reaction to anything JS. Although I don't think JS is to blame, I think the hatred of JS comes from a good reason.

j30977362• 9 years ago

Lazy loading really sucks when you're left with a blurry image because it timed out while serving the full image (can happen even with an acceptable connection).

Unless it's really clever I'd prefer if they just let the browser do it's thing with an img tag, because that worked fine in the 56K times.

w8rbt• 9 years ago

Many younger devs may have never lived outside of large, very-well connected cities (NY, Chicago, West Coast, etc.). They may assume that everyone has the connectivity and speeds that they do, or in the least they may not fully understand with 1.5 Mbps down really feels like.

flamedoge• 9 years ago

reminds me of node-noop

lordCarbonFiber• 9 years ago

I'm torn here, in a way. On the one hand light page weights and other such optimizations make the internet better for everyone, on the other, there's a certain point where designing your product to target 3 decades ago (we forget 1990 was 27 years ago) gets a little absurd.

I think the greater tragedy is not that the web is bloated (an issue for sure), but that so much of America has internet worse than 3rd world mobile 2G.

SerLava• 9 years ago

The bloat affects us today. A page that's impossible to load on dialup is also going to make broadband viewing extremely sluggish and unresponsive. Each click feels like a risk, especially when even the "back" button comes with 200 ad scripts that have to spin up again.

zokier• 9 years ago

56k modem spec (V.90) appeared in 1998, so that's just two decades ago. And of course 3G networks appeared mostly in 2004 (in Europe) with (very theoretical) data rates up to 384kbps. About that same era, I recall 256-512 kbps DSL subscriptions being very common. And I can promise that browsing modern web with <512k connection (possibly with quite a bit of latency) will not be very comfortable.

ploxiln2• 9 years ago

No need to "target 3 decades ago", just be reasonable.

Popular themes for many different kinds of blogging software and CMSs contain anti-optimizations so blatant that any programmer, even someone with no front-end experience, can find large gains by just pointing webpagetest at their site and looking at the output.

Esau• 9 years ago

Bloat: its not just for operating systems.

Filligree4• 9 years ago

Not related to the contents of the article, but please add a max-width styling to your paragraphs. 40em or so is good.

minikites4• 9 years ago

I don't disagree, but your web browser doesn't need to fill your entire screen.

Filligree4• 9 years ago

It, um, only fills two-thirds.

That's a compromise. Too many sites don't deal well with thin browsers, but I need space for my terminals. This width usually works, although I sometimes have to do a bit of horizontal scrolling to get the article fully visible. (As opposed to the sadly inevitable sidebars.)

Margins are good, though.

milesrout11• 9 years ago

My browser fills however much of my screen dwm tells it to fill.

zeveb4• 9 years ago

You're free to narrow your browser window — that's what I used to do, before all web sites decided that they know better than I do what width their text should be.

collinmanderson• 9 years ago

Agreed.

body{max-width:640px;margin:auto} The extra 33 bytes won't slow things down (unless you somehow hit the next ~1kb packet boundary)

line-height 1.5; would also make it more readable.

Filligree4• 9 years ago

640px would be a problem — that's approximately 15em on my screen. I don't think that unit is supposed to be about hardware pixels, but...

Well, that's how it seems to be implemented anyway. Ems usually do better.

vegabook• 9 years ago

you don't need to travel from Wisconsin to Washington to experience a slow internet connection.

Try any mainstream commute on the South West Trains Wimbledon to Waterloo (London) and you'll a) still get blackouts for about 1/4 of the 25 minute trip (this is one of the most densely populated areas in Europe - no excuses) and b) at 3 of the 4 stations you'll stop at, your vaunted 4g connection will drop to 1998 speeds due to contention. I generally curse the complex sites in these situations because you'll easily be waiting 30-90 seconds (firmly in your heatmap's red zone) for full load at least once per commute.

Incidentally, kudos on perfectly communicative yet lightweight web page (50Kb).

drjasonharrison• 9 years ago

Agreed. It's not just "third world countries" that have slow connections. Low powered devices have slow connections. Places where there are lots of people with portable devices have slow connections. This is now not a long time ago, nor far far away. The more wearables and IoT becomes a "thing" you're going to find that attempting to get more interactions by saving on transmission and client CPU load is worth the investment.

ldev• 9 years ago

Well 3G is as low as you can get somewhere deep in the woods, not really a problem...

ribasushi• 9 years ago

I take it you don't walk in the woods much...

bbcbasic2• 9 years ago

Did you read it?

schoen• 9 years ago

Joey Hess (joeyh) has been writing about this for a long time (because he uses dial-up at his home). Here is a recent thread about a 2016 blog post on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13397282

robocat2• 9 years ago

Please, please, if your site requires AJAX to work at all, then retry failed AJAX queries.

Anyone here have information on the most reliable heuristics to do retries?

Or information on the implementations used by say Gmail or Facebook?

niyazpk• 9 years ago

I have seen https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Exponential_backoff used pretty regularly in many places.

scaryclam3• 9 years ago

I'd say that blanket advice to retry is not terrible but not great either. First ask, is the ajax call important enough to warrent a retry at all, if it is, did the response give any useful information about why there was a failure? If yes, did it tell you that something was wrong with the request? Then don't retry as it's not going to work the second time, or third time either. Did the request timeout? Again, think about whether the request is important enough to hit a potentially already overloaded server.

Also, as a side note, any page that becomes unusable because an ajax request failed to return has some really broken design. Ajax retries are not a solution for that, go fix the design instead.

stevoski• 9 years ago

My team has just started work on a new SaaS product. We are taking articles like this to heart and aiming to keep pages light and fast. We are using very little JavaScript.

Let's see if the market rewards us or punishes us for this approach...

tropo• 9 years ago

There are more than enough other ways for the market to punish you. :-/

Your approach helps with reliability (fewer 3rd-party and browser needs) and accessibility (workable with lynx and screen readers) too. Latency makes people want to scream.

It's also important to remember that, to the customer, you are just another browser tab. The customer's computer is not dedicated to you. They could have 100 or more other tabs open. The customer may even have reason to open more than one copy of your site simultaneously, with same or different login, and same or different browser. Bogging down their computer makes them unhappy and resentful.

warcher4• 9 years ago

I'm gonna read the article, I promise, but is the title really "If your internet is bad, the internet is bad"?

warcher4• 9 years ago

I'm not gonna lie, if my fat high-res site images make life a lil harder in Vanuatu but convert a bunch of black-turtleneck d-bags in San Francisco to customers, I know which side of the bread the butter is on.

warcher4• 9 years ago

I know I'm a dick, but I love all you guys and I thank you in advance for your forbearance. I need a sandwich.

legostormtroopr3• 9 years ago

I think thats probably part of the point of the article. I would read it less of a statement like "make you webpages smaller", and read it more as "be aware of the bloat of modern webpages".

If your target audience has great internet, then ignore optimising for size. But be aware that people travel, and your market may change, so what is ok in SF may become unusable if they go on holidays, move offices or need to work of roaming data due to an outage.

iLoch6• 9 years ago

Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection?

Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript.

No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands that it's total madness. The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable. The web has grown dramatically over the past 20 years both in terms of physical scale and supported media types.

The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life. I think there's a ton of value in this, perhaps more than as a platform for simple reading news and blogs.

I look forward to WebAssembly and other advancements that allow us to treat the web as we once treated desktop environments, at the expense of human readability. It doesn't mean we need to abandon older + simpler protocols, because they too serve a purpose. But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.

minikites4• 9 years ago

Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

Adding to your analogy, the JS bloat mentioned in the article is like driving a semi-truck carrying only one carton of oranges. It's a lot of extra waste for a very slight benefit.

ferbivore• 9 years ago

I don't think the point is that everything should be human parse-able. But most things on the web are not complex applications. Dan Luu isn't trying to use Google Maps over HSCSD, he's trying to read hypertext blogs and Twitter. Do you seriously think Twitter qualifies as a "complex application"?

iLoch6• 9 years ago

The concept behind Twitter? No. Twitter? Maybe..? They have a user experience they want to deliver to 9X% of their users, so they optimize for that. For most of Twitter's users, their connection speeds aren't the limiting factor in their experience. If you optimize for the lowest common denominator, that 9X% almost certainly gets a worse experience.

joeyh3• 9 years ago

For a long time, you had to load 2+ mb of data to see a 140 character tweet. Twitter actually recently fixed this; the tweet text is available in the title now, so will be available very early in page load.

Not only does this make twitter usable on dialup again (it was effectively unusable ever since they switched from a simple html page to a massive "application" that you have to re-download every time they deploy), but it lets you search through tweets you've read in the browser history.

Getting this stuff right is not rocket surgery.

legostormtroopr3• 9 years ago

Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases

Except if you are in a rural area of a developed country, or in practically any undeveloped country. Most of Africa, Asia and South America have abysmal internet connections, and rural parts of Australia (even a few hours drive from a major city) are only able to get satellite internet.

Tech people often fail to realise how divided and limited access to internet actually is once you leave 'tech hubs'.

iLoch6• 9 years ago

Absolutely, but those are secondary markets for most American businesses because there are an abundance of issues with delivering any application to those areas. Whether its political, cultural, financial, etc. Priority for most businesses and website owners is to serve the people you know you can serve first, then work on supporting those other areas.

Twitter, like most companies, exists to make money. If you're busy shaving off every bit you can from your requests, you're spending a lot of money. You're also losing money because I'd expect you wouldn't be serving ads, etc. as well.

Most blogs that exist to make money aren't targeting those without good internet either, so I don't really see the problem.

Animats• 9 years ago

The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications.

No, it's not. Yes, there are MMORPGs that run in the browser using WebGL.[1] But very, very few pages use all that capability. Most web pages today would work just fine in HTML 3.1.

And what is this thing with running over ten trackers on one page?

[1] http://www.webglgames.com/

iLoch6• 9 years ago

As soon as WebAssembly is stable and available I'm predicting we'll see a dramatic shift away HTML + JS as the target for most web apps. I don't mean blogs, I mean people who are trying to build websites that work like apps.

Most webpages today that would work fine in HTML 3.1 aren't built as massive JS web apps. If they are, it may serve a purpose (better UI/UX for most of their users being a major one.)

pbhjpbhj2• 9 years ago

That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" //

We do allow horses on our "highways" in the UK, not motorways but other highways. It's a terrible analogy though as you can't have progressive enhancement of a road for the vehicle capabilities as you can a website.

But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me. //

Not serving simple text, for websites where that's appropriate, and then offering enhanced capabilities when the web client can make use of them seems perverse to me.

You don't have to not advance the technology, having radio broadcasts doesn't hold back VR/AR, but if all you have to convey is able to be passed on in an audio stream then purposefully designing a site to be hostile to clients that can only consume an audio stream to me is wrong. Sure add on an immersive environment where one can play on a VR beach whilst listening to your "24/7 wave noises" but don't make it so that simple audio access is impossible if the primary content only requires that.

In other words don't require webgl so I can see your store opening times.

zeveb4• 9 years ago

The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable.

No, no it's not, it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with.

The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life.

True fact: learning, consuming & watching are all well-supported by static HTML.

But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.

Part of the problem is that we're not advancing technologically: we're getting bogged down in the La Brean morass which is modern web development. HTML is a terrible but acceptable markup language; CSS is an ugly but somewhat acceptable styling language; the DOM is as hideous as a Gorgon; JavaScript is approximately the worst language ever; the combination of all the above is grotesque, and an ongoing indictment of our entire industry.

A cross-platform application-distribution standard sounds pretty awesome, but that's not what web pages are supposed to be, and it's not what web browsers should deliver. The web is a web of hyperlinked documents. It's right there in its name. And anyone who demands that his readers enable a somewhat cross-platform, highly insecure, privacy-devouring application-distribution tool in order to read his text is welcome to take a long walk off of a short pier.

SquareWheel4• 9 years ago

The web is a web of hyperlinked documents.

The web used to be a web of hyperlinked documents. This has not been the case for a long time now. Webapps have evolved to enable widespread communication, collaboration, gaming, social media, and so much more.

It's the single-largest open platform that's available from nearly any device in the world. It's a little more than a document viewer.

milesrout11• 9 years ago

HTML is certainly not a 'terrible but acceptable markup language'. Used properly, it's a _fine_ markup language. CSS is brilliant, at least in its original incarnations: it's bloated beyond repair now.

Javascript, the DOM, yeah agreed.

__jal• 9 years ago

Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play.

More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

More generally, I find myself moving in the opposite direction. I find that many SaaS services' interests don't align with mine, so I'm going back to local applications. I don't trust others with most of my data, so the only service that sees much of it only sees encrypted blobs (for offsite backup). I've always run my own mail, and have slowly been expanding the services I host as I bring more of this stuff in-house. And so on. But I realize I'm in a minority.

But the nice thing is that it gives me an intranet and "other" grouping that is very straightforward, so that the browser instances that touch untrusted (not-mine) services can run in "bastion" VM, locked down nicely and reset to a pristine state at will, not to mention allowing some stupid networking tricks that are sometimes useful.

xxpor• 9 years ago

I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router.

To be pedantic, if you have a threaded server (thread per connection) slow clients can cause problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)

iLoch6• 9 years ago

More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

Doesn't affect the vast majority of users.

But I realize I'm in a minority.

Yes, your statements are pretty anecdotal and don't really relate to the vast majority of internet users.

I'm sure your setup works great for you, but it sounds like a ton of overhead, none of which is required if you have fast internet and don't give a shit about what's going on (like nearly everyone who uses the internet.)

Balgair• 9 years ago

Horses on highways would cause accidents.

You are right, they are not the best, but people make do: http://www.mapministry.org/news-and-stories/amish-buggy-acci...

howderek• 9 years ago

In the US, we do generally allow horses on our highways. https://asci.uvm.edu/equine/law/roads/roads.htm

The Amish frequently do so in my area.

interfacesketch2• 9 years ago

Text articles are probably the most widespread type of content on the web. Most web sites are not web apps. But many developers want to re-construct web sites into web app architectures even when there's no benefit to the end user.

I posted the links below on a previous discussion about AMP. They are two examples of basic, javascript-free web pages with text content. There's about 2500+ words on these test pages, but the page weight is still much smaller than, for example, a medium article with one tenth the number of words (250).

Try loading them on your mobile on a 3G (or slower) connection. Do they load fast or slow?

Version A: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html

Here is an identical version to the above but one that loads custom fonts (approx 40kb extra).

Version B: http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html

SquareWheel4• 9 years ago

Version B could probably be optimized here by not loading two very similar fonts.

You can also try loading the font locally first, to avoid the download if it's installed on the user's system.

Finally, unicode-range lets you avoid the download completely if that character isn't included on the page. Not a likely outcome on an English page, but a good practice regardless.

Webfonts are tough to optimize, but not impossible. Right now there's solutions of using Javascript to background the font so it's non-blocking (eg. loadCSS[1]), but it's not ideal when trying to keep overhead down. The situation should improve once font-display[2] becomes standardized.

For what it's worth though, I find Version B looks much nicer.

[1] https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS

[2] https://css-tricks.com/font-display-masses/

toast02• 9 years ago

Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

As a counterpoint, I have a 1G FTTH connection, 8GB of ram, but only a dual-core 1.4 GHz Haswell (Celeron 2955U) and an iffy SSD, so I get a terrible web experience if I have more than one tab open.

j30977362• 9 years ago

only

Sounds like you need an adblocker, Firefox ESR + ublock Origin should be enough to make a 10yo single-core machine usable for common web browsing

btschaegg3• 9 years ago

While I agree with others here that dial-up-friendly sites don't "collide" with complex web-apps (thus rendering this argument somewhat void), I sadly think the underlying problem is much more mundane:

Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Same reason. No one wants to pay the additional costs of achieving that.

Practically speaking, this means that either Random Local Newspaper Inc. knows their potential online reader base exactly and deemed the additional effort not to pay off, or they have no idea of their potential customers that would flock to their site if they did put in the effort, and thus don't miss them. Add on top of that the fact that much of the internet is based on (perhaps only assumed) prestige (or loss of it if your page doesn't have the most modern features A through Z or looks like its from the 90ies) or extremely short-lived (a newspaper doesn't care about yesterday's news) and this theory pretty much explains it all.

Cynical, I know, but hey... :-/

Edit: Also: We can have nice things. No one with a 56k connection will honestly try to watch Netflix. A much more interesting question would be: How could we create incentives for big corporations to optimize their pages for connections with a small bandwith? After all, much of the web is also built on ad deals - which also almost certainly don't target those people.

dragonwriter2• 9 years ago

Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago?

Because even in the 1990s, word processors weren't orders of magnitude slower than the person sitting at the keyboard, which is the ultimate limiting factor on word processing speed.

milesrout11• 9 years ago

Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

More like 'why shouldn't we allow people on our streets?' Which is a good question. It's a question we answered. With a yes.

I look forward to WebAssembly and other advancements that allow us to treat the web as we once treated desktop environments, at the expense of human readability.

If you want to make a desktop programme, make a desktop programme. Don't ruin the web.

At my job, I work on a web app. It runs only on Android devices through a web view in a native app. It could have been a native app, and would have felt more natural on an Android device, been faster, and probably more secure too.

tmd832• 9 years ago

Its not just about plain text vs. content. Its about doing things at least reasonably efficiently. I commented about gmail taking 500MB on Chrome in another comment. I just checked Mail.app it started with 200MB. I wonder whats the energy budget of all the bloated website and their parsing is on millions of computers. The server side computation allows economy of scale and might have saved cpu cycles for the actual work but I'm sure many times more than that has been wasted by a bloated web.

I don't disagree that web and web applications provide a lot of convenience and I don't want to loose that. But I don't think for a moment that things can't be significantly more efficient.

Someone1234• 9 years ago

I found out this the hard way.

T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem.

While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exceed a few megabytes. I even had a few website block me because of my "ad blocker" because the adverts didn't load timely enough.

Makes me feel for people in like rural India or other places still only at 2G or similar speeds. It is great for some things, not really useable for general purpose web browsing any longer.

PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.

freehunter2• 9 years ago

Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

kuschku2• 9 years ago

What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.

rmc2• 9 years ago

What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds

5ilv3r3• 9 years ago

High paying customers are going to have high speed connections. No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. If you are on a slow connection, they don't want your kind on their site. If you try, they will mock you for not knowing your place.

Jakob• 9 years ago

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

zeveb4• 9 years ago

You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster.

And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy.

I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'

smoe• 9 years ago

I started using "Image On/Off" and "Quick Javascript Switcher" plugins to easily toggle images and js while traveling South America in 2014 to increase speed and save costly bandwidth.

Still using them for the side effects. Its nice to be able to start reading an article immediately without waiting for the jumping around of content to stop. And actually read until the end without having modal dialogs shoven down my the throat.

marssaxman• 9 years ago

I use NoScript. The web is much less annoying by default, and I can still enable scripts for those sites where I think it might be useful.

There are a good number of sites now which have entirely given up on progressive enhancement and simply don't show you anything without JS... but I generally find I just don't care, and just close the tab and look at the next thing instead.

acdha6• 9 years ago

This is the main reason why Brave is my default browser: you can set the default to disable JavaScript and enable it only on sites which actually do something useful with it. My data usage dropped something like 1GB the first month I switched.

swiley2• 9 years ago

hackernews even works without javascript, the whole page just reloads everytime you upvote something.

chalupa-man• 9 years ago

Note though that disabling JavaScript can also slow down many sites. One good use of JavaScript is to detect the speed of the user's connection and then load in smaller and lower-quality assets. Disabling JavaScript can result in the default assets being loaded, which rapidly offsets the benefit of not loading that JS. Other sites will load in portions of the content first and use JS to load in extra chunks as requested, but load in the entirety of available content if JS is disabled, slowing down initial pageload enormously.

photon-torpedo2• 9 years ago

FWIW, I just tried this in Firefox (set javascript.enabled=false) and went to my bank's website to see how it would fare. Firefox crashed. Tried again with no other tabs open, still crashed. Crash report sent.

OTOH, in Chrome the website actually works fine and feels more snappy with JS disabled. So, thanks for the tip!

23443463453• 9 years ago

It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices.

Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better solutions and thereby make your services better. The west and the tech centers in particular is really rather blinded by the glutinous bandwidth that keeps eating up greater and greater amounts of data with only marginal improvements in outcome or user experience.

CaptSpify13• 9 years ago

I say this so much that I should probably just copy/paste it in the future but...

I used to work at a place that had a <1mbps modem, and a ~7 year old destkop. If their software didn't work on that, it needed to be optimized. I wish more places would test this way. Your sight may work fine in downtown SF, but that doesn't mean it's going to work well anywhere else.

kps• 9 years ago

Chrome's Developer Tools has throttling options immediately available in the Network tab.

mfarris• 9 years ago

UX guy here. I've always kept performance in mind. One of my pet phrases is that speed is part of design.

I've gotten a lot of blank stares.

That's why more designers don't bother: decision makers usually respond only to look/flashiness/branding.

stuckagain2• 9 years ago

Having used both, I'll take the 2G mobile over the 56k modem every time.

ClassyJacket6• 9 years ago

I just looked up EDGE. It's crazy to think that the first iPhone topped out at double the speed of a 56k modem. And that I actually used my iPhone on that network sometimes, when 3G wasn't available.

_delirium• 9 years ago

PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.

I don't think this has changed, at least not in general. The included roaming package is still free international 2G roaming everywhere except Mexico and Canada (which get free 4G), with "high-speed data pass" upgrades available for a daily or weekly fee if you want faster. They did have a promotion for the 2nd half of 2016 (initially for the summer, then extended through the end of the year), where international 3G, and in a few areas 4G/LTE, was free without buying the upgrade passes for most of Europe and South America [1]. But that's now over, and I believe it's back to free 2G internationally now.

[1] https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/t-mobiles-endle...

virtuallynathan• 9 years ago

On the new "One Plan" it's now 128Kbps, and 256Kbps if you pay for the One Plus International plan ($25/mo).

CoolGuySteve• 9 years ago

I was in rural China with an EDGE connection on Google Fi last month.

Hacker News was pretty much the only site I visit that could reliably load quickly. m.facebook.com had a slight wait but was still bearable. I had to leave my phone for 10 or 15 minutes to get Google News.

WeChat and email worked well.

Everything else was horrible, especially ad networks that would ping pong several requests or load large images.

Opera has a compression proxy mode that helped a bit when it worked but it was still painful.

For search results, Stack Overflow, and YouTube, it was easier to easier to ssh into an AWS node and use elinks/youtube-dl.

Using SSH as a socks proxy/compression was insanely slow due to something with with the great firewall.

r00fus• 9 years ago

I mainly used it for things like slack, skype and emails, and mapping.

With iOS9+ content blockers and things like Google AMP, I think the web is a lot more usable.

Apps tend to be less bloated in terms of bandwidth as well, since they usually don't load as many assets on request.

megablast• 9 years ago

You have just discovered why apps are so good, they can download content in small amounts.

ClassyJacket6• 9 years ago

My 35Mbit cable got shaped down to 0.25 Mbit/s yesterday because we went over our download limit. It was like having no connection. I just gave up using it.

I hate the all-or-nothing approach to shaping. At least give me 5Mbit or something!

lucb1e2• 9 years ago

5mbps is a perfectly fine connection, they might as well not throttle you at all then. If they want to give you barely-usable internet, about 500kbps might be reasonable. 250kbps is quite slow indeed.

Figs• 9 years ago

I use T-Mobile as my ISP because the only landline choice in my apartment building is AT&T and I absolutely refuse to do business with them. I regularly hit the monthly bandwidth cap on my plan and get booted down to 2G.

I live in California -- this is not just something people internationally are dealing with.

Annoyingly, T-Mobile's own website doesn't work properly when you're throttled to 2G speed. Found that out the hard way when I ran out of minutes on Thanksgiving and couldn't talk to my family, and couldn't load their website to add more minutes.

archagon• 9 years ago

FYI, I had the same connection and I'm pretty sure T-Mobile simulates 2G by switching 3G on and off to get the correct speed on average. Breaks a lot of stuff. Almost unusable!

20years• 9 years ago

Most of the web really sucks on fast internet connections too. Thanks to so many web developers thinking every dang thing needs to be a single page app using a heavy JavaScript framework. Add animation, badly optimized images and of course ads and it becomes really unbearable.

We keep repeating our same mistakes but just in a different way.

amiga-workbench2• 9 years ago

I saw a sarcastic comment a while back saying that webdevs should be forced to work on a Pentium II machine and they would cut their bullshit, I laughed, and moved on.

But after seeing many examples where sites were built on huge iMacs with no care for users running off a battery, slower network connection or with an average 1366x768 display I somewhat agree with the sentiment.

scaryclam3• 9 years ago

I tend to run web frontends in lynx (or links) to see if they can degrade well enough. If the core user flows don't/can't work then there's a big problem with the UI.

mmagin• 9 years ago

The other issue I have with web page bloat: memory-constrained mobile devices are able to cache far fewer pages than a desktop computer, and navigating among multiple tabs, etc. gets slowed down to internet connection speed.

jmcdiesel2• 9 years ago

As someone who had fiber internet then had to spend a year and a half on 1.5MBPS DSL ... (hell) ... I can say I agree that it sucks...

I can also say that at no point did I feel entitled for it to work better for me. I don't understand this level of entitlement (i dont like your ads, i dont like your layout, i dont like your visual effect ...) ... just leave the site.

The modern web isn't simple static pages... its not going to revert to that, either. We're developing actual applications in the browser now... those aren't easily translated to static, simple pages...

This is today's "grumpy old engineer" argument...

E6300• 9 years ago

The main table in this post is almost 50kB of HTML

Just for fun, I just took a screenshot of that table and made a PNG with indexed colors: 21243 bytes.

chrismorgan2• 9 years ago

And converted to using single-character class names and reducing the CSS needed, it can be down to about 3KB, sans-compression.

(I manually minified the whole source; the original is 53313 bytes, 12438 gzipped, while my minified source is 25628, 10124 gzipped. Most of the bloat in the tables compresses really well, as is common with such things.)

wingerlang• 9 years ago

Out of curiosity, how did you do it? I did as well, and I used Sublimes multi-cursor functionality + some manual work to replace classes where it should be. Mainly because i saw an interesting problem and I like (love) using the psuedo automation tool that is Sublime 2.

Just curious how you went about it, if it was /all/ manual or some interesting technique.

My result was not too shabby, 7kb I think it was when I stopped due to the time cropping up.

atbentley2• 9 years ago

if we just look at the three top 35 sites tested in this post, two send uncompressed javascript over the wire, two redirect the bare domain to the www subdomain, and two send a lot of extraneous information by not compressing images

So uncompressed javascript and images are bad, but I thought apex domain to www subdomain redirection was an optimisation as the apex domain can often only point to a single server but the subdomain can point to a range of geographically well distributed CDNs. So rather than going to North America for every request, the browser only needs to do it once than the rest can come from a regional CDN. Am i misunderstanding something, does this also break down on a slow connection?

Symbiote• 9 years ago

The apex domain can only use A records, i.e. point directly to an IP address. It can have multiple A records, ebay.com does so:

  host ebay.com
  ebay.com has address 66.135.216.190
  ebay.com has address 66.211.162.12
  ebay.com has address 66.211.181.123
  ebay.com has address 66.211.185.25
  ebay.com has address 66.211.160.86
  ebay.com has address 66.135.209.52

Without a CNAME (alias) record, eBay need to control the DNS resolution. Most people using a CDN don't, so they must use a subdomain.

atbentley2• 9 years ago

Ah, I was unaware that there could be multiple IPs on an A record, thanks for that. If I'm understanding this right though, the extra IPs would just be for redundancy and resilience and cannot be relied for geographic routing? In this case ebay.com redirects to www.ebay.com.

andrewstuart22• 9 years ago

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems? I'd argue that it didn't, and yet even with the light weight of pages back then, it was incredibly slower than today's pages (even heavy ones) load over our much-faster connections.

So really, I think what the author is observing is that having experienced high-speed reliable connections, it is very disappointing to move to a much slower connection. For the emerging tech markets, I can imagine the experience would not be great if the load was long enough to cause timeouts and connection failures, but at the same time, the 99% experience, as it probably was when the web was born, is "holy crap look at everything I have access to now!"

Yes, there are some really terribly optimized and redirect-happy sites out there and yes, you should do everything you can to make your page speedy. Everybody benefits when you do. I think, though, that this is more of a case of "let's be thankful for and aware of what we have," and "if you suddenly have a slower connection you might find yourself annoyed" more than "most sites suck on slow connections."

dragonwriter2• 9 years ago

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems?

Yes, lots of the early web sucked over dialup.

cgh• 9 years ago

While waiting for some JS-laden crapfest to load earlier, it occurred to me that I haven't heard the term "World Wide Wait" in many years. But here I am experiencing it all over again.

ffjffsfr• 9 years ago

I think average number of requests per site, and average page size in megabytes went up over time. It is much higher now and content we browse is actually very similar - people read news like they did 20 years ago, but now their news site requires 2mb of data when it required 100kb 20 years ago.

khedoros1• 9 years ago

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems?

I'd argue that it did, just like having 32MB of RAM and Windows 95 did. But almost everyone was in the same place, including the people making content for websites we went to, so page load times were as good for their minimal experience as the technology would let them be. Even in 2002, my family was still on dial-up, and it sucked because I knew how much was out there that just wasn't feasible for me to access.

eeZah7Ux2• 9 years ago

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems?

Yes! Pages loaded in 10 to 20 seconds.

andrewstuart22• 9 years ago

I think you've missed my point. Yes, that was slow, but if it was literally the best, then it was awesome. The same thing goes today for everybody out there with access to gigabit. There's no reason to complain about it even if downloading takes some time still, because it's not like there's anything better.

diggan• 9 years ago

Something that sticks out looking at the table. How can some sites simply FAIL loading? I mean, there is something inherently wrong with our web today, where if my internet is very slow and _could_ load a page in 80 seconds if I just leave it like that, the server itself could have configured the timeout to be 60 seconds. So I can never load the page?!

The assumption is here that both points of the connection is based on earth. When we have these hard timeout limits, how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species or even from orbit around earth?

andyana2• 9 years ago

He mentions packet loss of 10%. That's a different problem than a slow connection.

falcolas2• 9 years ago

High packet loss and slow connections frequently go hand in hand (TCP over cellular modems).

This effect is exacerbated if the web site you're connecting to changes congestion control and TCP ramp up settings.

mariusmg• 9 years ago

how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary

We won't be and aliens have better internet anyway :)

0xc0012• 9 years ago

read a fire upon the deep

joeyh3• 9 years ago

I chatted about just this timeout issue with an engineer from a major CDN while he was at my house enjoying the dialup. Seems like simply a matter of resource management; slow connections do use more resources. Most CDN customers don't care or don't know that a few percent of the US population is getting their web browsing broken by timeouts, so there's no push back.

(NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for ISS residents, something like VNC to a ground-based browser IIRC.)

derefr2• 9 years ago

That's pretty smart of NASA; things like a caching HTTP proxy still wouldn't work in some cases, given that sites can expect your browser to make a given AJAX request within X ms of requesting the page.

I wonder if there's still a more "API level" way to handle things, though, rather than making your computer into a dumb frame buffer client with extremely low responsiveness to typing/scrolling.

Maybe they could run a headless browser on Earth, and use a protocol like the Chromecast does to synchronize its DOM state to a "browser proxy" in space—like a higher-level, domain-specific version of the X11 protocol. That'd still have latency for JavaScript-based webapp UI, though... maybe the JS could be split and its state synchronized so that the "server" handles timer triggers, while the "client" handles input events.

bluGill2• 9 years ago

I'm surprised they need anything. I get my home internet from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and it works fine other than the latency. No human has got that far from Earth since Apollo in the 1970s, so my home internet has to be worse than anyone NASA cares give internet. (though I have no idea what bandwidth NASA has)

rmc2• 9 years ago

(NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for ISS residents, something like VNC to a ground-based browser IIRC.)

Wait, VNC? Won't that use oodles more bandwidth than proxying HTTP?

arohner• 9 years ago

how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species

IPFS or similar. Basically, make all public content content-addressed (give me the article with SHA 0xabcdef) rather than connection oriented (give me the bytestream that comes from http://news.ycombinator.com/foo/bar)

CaptSpify13• 9 years ago

I heard this somewhere on HN, but websites should fail like escalators, not like elevators. Too many people design sites like elevators though.

scoates2• 9 years ago

I love this visual, but elevators have way more safety mechanisms than poorly-designed web sites. Check out the source HTML of instagram.com for a great example. /-:

scaryclam3• 9 years ago

I'm going to steal this comparison :)

oconnor663• 9 years ago

Open connections take system resources. One way to DOS a website is to open a ton of connections and just sit on them. If the server allows extra long timeouts as long as some bits come in occasionally, then the attacker can send bits occasionally. It's a tricky problem. It might work to allow long turnouts as long as you don't have an ongoing DOS attack, but that sort of thing is hard to configure and test.

viraptor• 9 years ago

After Slowloris and other attacks, this is pretty much a solved problem. Minimise per connection memory, limit connections per IP, drop connections which don't finish the request in X seconds, and separate your app server from your front proxy. And for the front proxy, don't block on reads - do minimal event loop until you can dispatch the full request.

tbrownaw• 9 years ago

how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species

I would not expect interactive anything when latency is 20min+. Usenet and listservs should work fine tho, maybe worth some tweaks to the underlying protocols if they're too chatty.

DrScump2• 9 years ago

On the TV series Stargate SG-1, they envisioned using conventional EMR (like radio and TV signals) through wormhole connections.

Later plots faced invasion attempts through the stargates (permanent, direct-dial wormhole portals), so matter shielding was employed, and signals were used to authenticate who was on the other side of the connection before lowering the shield.

SwellJoe2• 9 years ago

I travel fulltime and my primary internet is 4G LTE. But, even though I spend $250 per month on data, I still run out, and end up throttled to 128kbps for the last couple days of the data cycle. The internet is pretty much unusable at that rate. I can leave my email downloading in Thunderbird for a couple of hours and that's usable (gmail, however is not very usable), and I can read Hacker News (but not the articles linked, in most cases). Reddit kinda works at those speeds. But nearly everything else on the web is too slow to even bother with. When I hit that rate cap, I usually consider it a forced break and take a walk, cook something elaborate, and watch a movie (on DVD) or play a game.

So, yeah, the internet has gotten really fat. A lot of it seems gratuitous...but, I'm guilty of it, too. If I need graphs or something, I reach for whatever library does everything I need and drop it in. Likewise, I start with a framework like Bootstrap, and some JavaScript stuff, and by the time all is said and done, I'm pulling a couple MB down just to draw the page. Even as browsers bring more stuff into core (making things we used to need libs for unnecessary) folks keep pushing forward and we keep throwing more libraries at the problem. And, well, that's probably necessary growing pains.

Maybe someday the bandwidth will catch up with the apps. I do wish more people building the web tested at slower speeds, though. Could probably save users on mobile networks a lot of time, even if we accept that dial-up just can't meaningfully participate in the modern web.

EvilTerran• 9 years ago

Incidentally, you may find GMail's "basic HTML view" works better when your connection's throttled:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049

And as for reddit, their old mobile view is still available at the "i." subdomain - it's so much lighter-weight than the dreadful JS-laden one they introduced a while back, it's the only way to use reddit on mobile IMO:

https://i.reddit.com

ashark• 9 years ago

I use gmail's Basic HTML interface all the time. AJAXy gmail and Inbox balloon to incredible levels of memory use pretty quickly, and are slower for most interactions than the full-page loads on Basic HTML, which means that someone somewhere lost track of WTF they were supposed to be doing all of this for.

It's easily worth the loss of a couple features.

dublinben• 9 years ago

It's a shame that their oldest mobile version, the original m.reddit.com is no longer available. It was truly the most compact way to experience the site. Barely more than a list of links.

ClassyJacket6• 9 years ago

Reddit appears to be actively trying to hurt the mobile experience. They bought the best iPhone reddit app, and removed it from the store entirely. They are also currently trialling a version of the mobile site that does not work at all if you aren't logged in.

Personally I'd prefer they just show ads on mobile than make the experience suck on purpose.

j_s2• 9 years ago

Any tips on low-bandwidth login pages for GMail?

Sometimes I can't even get to the HTML view because of the login process!

zanny• 9 years ago

I thought Sprint and T-Mobile had unlimited plans in the $60-80 range for LTE?

DrScump2• 9 years ago

They can still throttle you after a certain level of consumption. With a recent T-Mobile promo, you could have 4 lines for the price of 2, each with its own 4G allotment... so if I ever experience throttling, I can switch to an alternate device.

SwellJoe2• 9 years ago

Not really.

I have accounts with both. T-Mobile has "unlimited" for the phone, but for hotspots, there are no unlimited plans (this may not be true anymore; I think if you get the new One plan, and add the $25 international option, it includes unlimited 4G LTE data, even for hotspots). The unlimited plan for phones also de-prioritizes customers that use over a certain amount of data in a month; but it's never the device usage that is a problem for me.

Sprint is similar, only even more restrictive in their "unlimited" plans. After 28GB, they throttle the device. Hotspot usage is severely restricted (2GB in the default "unlimited" plan) unless it is specifically a plan for a hotspot (not a phone acting as a hotspot).

There was no unlimited hotspot plan on any carrier at the time I signed up for all of my plans.

Sprint was the best deal per-GB when I hit the road this time around, so I have a 40GB plan on a hotspot from Sprint, and 16GB from T-Mobile spread across two devices (a hotspot and a phone that can act as a hotspot). I end up using all 56GB most months. Each provider gets about $125/month from me.

T-Mobile further complicates things by offering Binge On, which allows me to watch Netflix without burning as much data (the video itself doesn't use data, but all of the meta data, and browsing Netflix does, so once I'm out of data, it's impossible to actually watch anything, even with Binge On).

Data over 3G/4G is complicated as hell, is what I'm trying to say, and it's going to cost a fortune if it's your primary method of getting on the internet. I need to actually confirm with the T-Mobile folks that the One plan plus the International add-on provides actual unlimited data. If it does, it'll allow me to shrink my Sprint plan by a bunch, and stop running out of data.

Also worth noting: T-Mobile used to have a smaller network than Sprint (so much so that when I was traveling in the past, even though I had a grandfathered in unlimited plan on T-Mobile, that they finally made me switch off of a few years ago, I had a Clear hotspot, as well, to fill in the coverage gaps). But, the reverse is true now. T-Mobile's network is also faster in most locations. With the new bands they've put online, T-Mobile reaches further into out-of-the-way places.

In short, "unlimited" is a lie (or was; T-Mobile may actually have an unlimited data plan, now, though I wouldn't be surprised if it still de-prioritizes heavy users...and if "heavy" means some ridiculously small number like 28GB in a month).

Edit: It used to be possible to use a tethering app on a rooted phone to work around such limits. Both networks detect hotspot usage (somehow), even with a rooted phone.

jaclaz• 9 years ago

A unit of measure I find appropriate is the "Doom", 2015 prediction:

https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688

dsfyu404ed3• 9 years ago

What do we care? The vast majority of out target audience lives in a city with fast internet

(I'm not putting /s because there's actually people that think this is a reasonable opinion in the general case).

Spivak• 9 years ago

It seems totally reasonable if you're not operating a company to be altruistic.

* Pushing all the rendering to the client makes development easier, eases the transition to native apps, and uses fewer resources on the back end.

* The fancy site drives more conversions and makes the stakeholders happy.

* Not having fast internet is a crude filter for disposable income and losing those users probably goes unnoticed and might even increase the value of ad placements.

whiddershins• 9 years ago

After spending a month in Mexico, including regions with spotty/inconsistent service from one minute to the next, I think the problem goes deeper.

Browsers are IMO terrible at mitigating intermittent and very slow connections. Nothing I browse seems to be effectively cached other than Hacker News. Browsers just give up when a connection disappears, rather than holding what they have and trying again in a little bit.

The only thing I used which kept working was DropBox. DropBox never gives up, it just keeps trying to sync and eventually it will succeed if there is any possibility of doing so.

I understand the assumptions of the web are different than an app like Dropbox, but I think it might be a good idea to reexamine those assumptions.

emondi2• 9 years ago

Agreed, Dropbox is great in slow connections. Except when they auto update the client and you can't stop it. It tries to download 60 MB and you have to quit the client and restart it every time you need to upload or download a file until you can get the latest update.

kalleboo• 9 years ago

Back in my dialup days (90's), I used to use Opera since it had great tools for dealing with poor connections. E.g. IIRC you could have it only show images that were already cached, with a handy button to async load in new images that weren't already displayed.

crispyambulance• 9 years ago

Let’s load some websites that programmers might frequent... All tests were run assuming a first page load...

ehh, but is that really a good test for sites people "frequent" ?

What happens to the heatmap when we're talking about subsequent page loads!

smacktoward• 9 years ago

Looking at that first table, one question jumps out at me: what the heck is Jeff Atwood doing on pages at Coding Horror that makes them weigh 23MB?

I mean, I'm all for avoiding premature optimizations, but 23MB for one page is just... wow.

EDIT: As a sanity check, I just tried loading the CH home page from a cold cache myself. Total weight: 31.26MB. Yowch.

pbhjpbhj2• 9 years ago

Just been to Atwood's homepage, https://blog.codinghorror.com/.

Looks like there's some lazy loading of later content so I actually get accessible content very quickly, indeed I thought something was up as the page appeared to be only a couple-hundred kB, which didn't match your description.

Scrolling down I continue (in FF Network Monitor) to see content loading - reviewing I see that YouTube is responsible for over 1MB of "base.js" which gets downloaded 7 times, and ¼MB of CSS files (again 7 times over). Now Atwood may be to blame in part but Google ... shouldn't they at least do better?? CodingHorror is loading very large image files [1] (which get scaled) for me, perhaps a "retina" handling issue.

[1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/blog.codinghorror.com/d1x7zZBk

accountface• 9 years ago

Appears to be mostly lack of image optimization (and he loves gifs). A common issue with blogs.

codinghorror• 9 years ago

Images are meticulously optimized, problem is, retina is expensive in file size.

zeveb4• 9 years ago

Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.

slow clap

His data on steve-yegge.blogspot.com is particularly unfortunate: Steve's (excellent) posts are almost completely pure text, and there's no reason for them to fail to download or display, except that Google demands that one execute JavaScript in order to get a readable page.

if you’re browsing from Mauritania, Madagascar, or Vanuatu, loading codinghorror once will cost you more than 10% of the daily per capita GNI.

Maybe the social-justice angle can convince some people to shed their megabytes of JavaScript and embrace clean, simple, static pages? There's probably some kid in rural Ethiopia who might have been inspired to create great things, if only he'd been able to read Steve Yegge's blog.

The “ludicrously fast” guide fails to display properly on dialup or slow mobile connections because the images time out.

slow clap

Since its publication, the “ludicrously fast” guide was updated with some javascript that only loads images if you scroll down far enough.

Incidentally, is there any way we can enforce the death penalty against people who load images with JavaScript? HTML already has a way to load images in a page: it's the <img> element. I shouldn't be required to hand code execution privileges over to any random site on the Internet in order to view text or images.

ddebernardy2• 9 years ago

Try it with a bad connection and a 1st-gen iPad. :-)

You basically need to disable JS altogether to have a chance to even view many websites. And some, well, just crash the browser regardless.

It's amazing how much the web evolved in the past few years...

There used to be a time where supporting 10+ year old browsers was matter of factly. No longer.

dsfyu404ed3• 9 years ago

This applies server side too. Note what sort of sites do and don't go down when they make the HN or Reddit front page.

franciscop2• 9 years ago

I totally agree. I used to have a really bad mobile connection up until a few years ago (Spain), and still when I use up all my mobile internet it reverses to 2G.

So I know the pain and decided I wouldn't do the same to my users as a web developer. I created these projects from that:

- Picnic CSS: http://picnicss.com/

- Umbrella JS (right now website in maintenance): http://github.com/franciscop/umbrella

Also I wrote an article on the topic:

- https://medium.com/@fpresencia/understanding-gzip-size-836c7...

Finally, I also have the domain http://100kb.org/ and intended to do something about it, but then I moved out of the country and after returning things got much better and now I have decent internet so I lost interest. If you want to do anything with that domain like a small website competition just drop me a line and I'll give you access.

tluyben22• 9 years ago

Where did you live in Spain? In Spain my mobile internet is far better than, let's say, in parts of the UK I work, let alone in China. And I live in the mountains down south, an hour away from the nearest city. Best so far have been Thailand + Cambodia. Just blazing fast, even in the rainforest with multiple laptops/phones tethered and cheap as chips. If I can have anywhere between 3G/4G stable, everything I need (including almost all heavy sites work fine); in the south of Spain I get enough to load heavy sites and Skype, download torrents, watch Netflix per device connection. In Cambodia I could do all that in the rainforest, away from everything, for a fraction of the price, with 4 devices tethered. I was impressed. The connection here in Hong Kong I'm on now is worse than that, and that's in the middle of the city.

But yes, developers (including) me not accounting for slow connections is a pet peeve of mine. As I often do it myself, I do understand the issue; it is client constraints, time/money constraints and audience. But it does annoy me when often used sites (notably airline sites and banking sites) are top heavy and their apps time out because yes I do have a bad connection often.

franciscop2• 9 years ago

In Valencia, but this was around 4 years ago and I had a data plan that was also 3-4 years old because I used wifi almost everywhere. As I was a student back then the only problem was the bus from my home to the university and back.

I was with Hacker Paradise for 3 months through SE Asia and I totally agree. I have screenshots yet-to-tweet comparing the great packages from Thailand with the prices in Spain and it's absolutely ridiculous.

ikeboy4• 9 years ago

When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

Namrog84• 9 years ago

This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics.

A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.

castratikron• 9 years ago

This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics.

The average human has, on average, one testicle and one ovary, but there aren't many humans who can actually fit this description.

swanson• 9 years ago

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

antisthenes5• 9 years ago

One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video.

Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing.

You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.

dba7dba3• 9 years ago

Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California.

When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city).

When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within in a short period of time (much shorter than 100), the system is completely jammed.

Always look for unintended consequences...

rhizome2• 9 years ago

Braess' Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox

ggreer2• 9 years ago

Isn't that a good unintended consequence? They built out infrastructure which attracted lots of people & jobs. Today, SoCal is home to world-leading firms in entertainment & aerospace. They also have top-tier research and educational institutions.

chiph3• 9 years ago

The original designers of the interstates didn't want the roads to go through the downtown areas. The idea was for the high-speed roads to go near cities, and have spur roads (3-digit interstate numbers that start with an odd number) connect them - like the design of the original Autobahn.

But there was a coalition of mayors and municipal associations that pressured Congress to have the roads pass through their towns (jobs! progress!). President Eisenhower was not amused, but he found out too late to change the design.

A consequence of this was the bulldozing of historically black-owned property to make way for the new roads.

SilasX6• 9 years ago

Sorry for saying the same thing in two comments, but that (like the Google case) looks like a Jevons effect (where induced demand is a special case):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

Reading through some early texts on the coal and oil industry. One notes that at then-current rates of consumption, the coal reserves of the United States would supply over one million years' consumption.[1]

The current North American coal proven reserve is less than 300 years of current utilisation rates: http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...

It's amazing what a constant increase in growth rate can accomplish. Also the overwhelming tendency for lowered costs to induce an increased demand -- the Jevons paradox.

If you want people to use less of something, increase the cost, not the efficiency.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Henri Erni, Coal Oil and Petroleum: Their origin, history, geology, and chemistry, 1865. p. 15.

https://archive.org/stream/coaloilpetroleum00erni#page/14/mo...

flukus12• 9 years ago

This is known as induced demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

vorg• 9 years ago

One way to plan for the next 100 years when building roads but not cause people to buy cars is to have a 10-lane wide verge on one side of the road. Have a row of 30-storey buildings on one side of a 5 lanes each way road, but on the other side the buildings are all set back at least a 10-lane width which is used for car parking, 1-storey buildings, public spaces, etc.

If there's ever a need to widen the road, it can be done without demolishing any tall buildings. I see this in new road layouts in China all the time. Of course, under the road will be a new subway system -- another disincentive for people to buy cars.

forrestthewoods• 9 years ago

Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

SilasX6• 9 years ago

Hah! A Jevons Effect[1] in a web site's bandwidth!

[1] When an increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used causes total usage to increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

hueving• 9 years ago

I'm not sure why this gets a special term. It sounds like basic supply and demand. If you decrease the price of something by increasing the efficiency of production, you will obviously capture more of the demand curve. What am I missing?

wyc• 9 years ago

Wow, uncanny resemblance to Giffen goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

agumonkey2• 9 years ago

Is there a negative counterpart for that ?

I remember turning an algorithm upside down, making it so fast, it went from "number crunching wonder" to "users saw nothing, this software is meh".

samuell3• 9 years ago

I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all.

This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps.

I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

[1] https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-a...

tangue2• 9 years ago

It's not only about connection speed but also about infrastructure. If you look at this map https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ you'll see that your packets have a looong way to reach their data center. AWS is no better than Google on this point. Guess it's not bankable

cozzyd• 9 years ago

Gmail worked surprisingly well from Antarctica

fegul2• 9 years ago

In Ethiopia's case, it's not so much the connection speed in Addis. There's a great deal of interference from the national Deep Packet Inspection filters that leads to timed-out requests, reset TCP connections, etc.

JS-heavy apps make a lot of requests to background servers and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang. It's quite frustrating and I would often load pages with the console open to see which requests have failed so I'm not left wondering what happened.

lmm2• 9 years ago

I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

How much disposable income will they have though? Most web products like those you describe are produced by businesses looking to make money.

etatoby2• 9 years ago

GMail has a HTML-only version that is much more lightweight and usable on slow / flaky connections.

It's worth it to memorize or bookmark the address, in case you ever need it:

http://mail.google.com/mail/h/

(on mobile browsers you need to "request desktop version" and then paste the address again, before you can see it)

sogen• 9 years ago

Read somewhere it was YouTube

markatkinson• 9 years ago

As someone who lives in Africa, hoorah! More of this please. For me the best feeling is visiting a web page that is almost entirely text based. It loads in a few seconds which feels like quite a rare feeling these days.

inian• 9 years ago

this was in relation to Project Feather of the Youtube - the Youtube website did not even load before for them and when it did, they started watching more videos even though it took more than 20 seconds to load!

joeyh3• 9 years ago

I'm very impressed with Dan's methodology here, and it matches my own experiences with dialup.

One thing I wonder about is, it seems many dialup ISPs these days provide some kind of "accellerator", probably a web proxy that avoids some of the issues with timeouts, perhaps compresses some content etc. So it might be that many of the remaining dialup users don't experience quite as many problems as Dan found.

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

Website I'm currently working on has no JS and weighs an average of 15 KiB per page. Loads in <20ms.

uvince• 9 years ago

Regardless of connection speed it also sucks if you try using LinkedIN's new website. Nothin' but progress bars.

tmaly• 9 years ago

I remember dial-up on a really slow modem back in the bbs days.

I was reminded of the slow connection with T-Mobile 2 years ago while in the Philippines. They give you free data in 120 countries, but its throttled.

This was my main motivation for rewriting my side project using highly optimized css and not a large framework that uses web fonts and bloated libraries.

roadbeats• 9 years ago

Not just web, mobile apps also suck when you have slow connection. For example, you can't open Itunes when you're on GPRS. It's trying to connect to Apple Music and locks you in a screen with a big Apple logo. Same as Spotify. Just try your apps with GPRS :) I camp every weekend so noticed how much they suck long time ago

logicallee• 9 years ago

Tangentially related:

As affects web apps, some of this is a conscious choice by network designers. First, click on your profile on Hacker News and turn on Showdead. You can then read this thread and my comment in it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13597673

While the poster wasn't a web engineer specifically (or didn't say it) so much of the web architecture isn't built for front-loading payloads. But instead, on eventually getting there, through the magic of TCP/IP and letting users wait for a few dozen seconds as pages load.

I disagree with it and think these engineers are wrong and make the wrong decisions (optimize for the wrong things) and that this makes everyone poorer-off.

Thanks for listening. (Happy to discuss any replies here.)

fenwick672• 9 years ago

By far the worst site I regularly use, from a page loading perspective, is my local newspaper.

It takes about 10 seconds before it loads to a usable state on a T1 connection.

If I pop open an inspector, requests go on for about 30 seconds before they die down. It's about 8MB.

http://www.telegraphherald.com/

ovulator• 9 years ago

My local paper is the same way, ublock origin blocks 50% of the requests coming from the site.

Builtwith.com shows 48 advertising libraries being used on the site.

The newspaper has a staff of less than 50, who even has time to look through and use all that advertising data?

The site is unusable.

cpobrien• 9 years ago

When I opened that page and emptied my cache, I got a lot more than 8MB...

http://imgur.com/a/qt0Zd (59.9MB)

I don't think JavaScript is really to blame for this though, the problem here is they're dumping a whole bunch of full sized images when they could have used thumbnails.

hvidgaard2• 9 years ago

If you wait 10 seconds to get the news you are more patient than me. I would quickly go elsewhere unless they deliver high quality news.

fenwick672• 9 years ago

Most of my news I do get from elsewhere, but it's really the only local news source.

julianj• 9 years ago

Why hasn't someone implemented a kind of low bandwidth accessibility option? (Or is there one?) I would imagine this would be akin to the multipart text only email.

gimagon• 9 years ago

Could a lighter weight website serve more users for the same dollar of bandwidth as bloated website?

It seems to me there's a business strategy, where rather than pushing for more ads, a website pushes for lighter weight and promises its few advertisers a wider audience.

yellowapple2• 9 years ago

I actually had a similar idea about radio stations.

Currently, FM radio stations are so typically clogged with commercials that I just switch back and forth whenever the music stops. The sole exception in my area is KZTQ "Bob FM", which has a neat policy: 60 minutes (ish) of nonstop music (aside from their normal station ID stuff), followed by at most two or three commercials, then repeat. I've found that the commercial breaks are short enough that I'm more willing to actually listen to them, since I know that the music will be back in less than a minute or so.

I reckon that has a significant value-add in terms of ad impressions, and thus could offset the normally-decreased ad revenue by charging more per ad.

gumby• 9 years ago

I was exasperated by his mobile example. Why? This is my life with Comcast (the faster of the two "choices"!) in Palo Alto. I also have Comcast in my ski house in the sticks and it's faster than Palo Alto. But my wired connection is so slow that I sometimes use my phone on LTE to read a page that hangs on Comcast.

0xc0012• 9 years ago

I think about this a lot. And I think it's really easy for a page weight argument to fall into an "old man yells at cloud" tone. But I also want the industry to move towards simpler HTML and such, so, I've been thinking up an argument that companies will buy. I'm really bad at it though. Maybe the extra African market will open up new ad revenue?

markplindsay• 9 years ago

See also: The Website Obesity Crisis[0] by Maciej Ceglowski

[0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

gabemart• 9 years ago

Something I have had at the back of my mind for a long time: in 2017, what's the correct way to present optional resources that will improve the experience of users on fast/uncapped connections, but that user agents on slow/capped connections can safely ignore? Like hi-res hero images, or video backgrounds, etc.

Every time a similar question is posed on HN, someone says "If the assets aren't needed, don't serve them in the first place", but this is i) unrealistic, and ii) ignores the fact that while the typical HN user may like sparsely designed, text-orientated pages with few images, this is not at all true of users in different demographics. And in those demos, it's often not acceptable to degrade the experience of users on fast connections to accommodate users on slow connections.

So -- if I write a web page, and I want to include a large asset, but I want to indicate to user agents on slow/capped connections that they don't _need_ to download it, what approach should I take?

gnud2• 9 years ago

Random idea: Get the current time in a JS block in the head, before you load any CSS and JS, and compare it to the time when the dom ready event fires. If there's no real difference, load hi-res backgrounds and so on. If there is a real time difference, don't.

curun1r2• 9 years ago

Wouldn't that be measuring latency more so than bandwidth? You'd run the danger of confusing a satellite internet connection (high(ish) bandwidth, high latency) with a third-world, low bandwidth connection.

neuland2• 9 years ago

One hack-y way to do it would be to load it via JavaScript. For example, see this stackoverflow [0]. Obviously not a great solution, but it works if your dying for something.

I bet people w/ slow connections are much more likely to disable javascript, though.

    let loadTime = window.performance.timing.domContentLoadedEventEnd- window.performance.timing.navigationStart;
    if (loadTime > someArbitraryNumber) {
        // Disable loading heavy things
    }

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14341156/calculating-page...

gnud2• 9 years ago

It's too late to disable loading heavy things at that point - the loading is already started.

Do the opposite, start loading heavy things if the page loaded quickly.

A clean way would be to set one of two classes, connection-slow or connection-fast, on the body element. Then you could use those classes in CSS to choose the correct assets for background images, fonts and so on.

chpill• 9 years ago

I think this is an important question.

Like another reply to your comment, I thought about having a very small js script in the header puting `Date.now()` in a global, then on page load, having another script checking the amount of time that had passed to see if it was worth downloading the "extra" at all. But then again where do you put the threshold? Has anyone tried this with some degree of success?

curun1r2• 9 years ago

This seems like the thing that we'd want cooperation with the browser vendors rather than everyone hacking together some JS to make it happen. If browsers could expose the available bandwidth as a media query, it would be trivial to have different resources for different connections.

This would also handle the situation where the available bandwidth isn't indicative of whether the user wants the high-bandwidth experience. For example, if you're on a non-unlimited mobile plan, it doesn't take that long to load a 10mb image over 4G, but those 10mb chunks add up to overage charges pretty quickly, so the user may want to set his browser to report a lower bandwidth amount.

rev_bird• 9 years ago

If browsers could expose the available bandwidth

I don't know why this seems like such an imposition, but I think I'd be uncomfortable with my browser exposing information about my actual network if it didn't have to. I have a feeling way more people would be using this to track me than to considerately send me less data.

That said, browser buy-in could be a huge help, if only to add a low-tech button saying, "request the low-fi version of everything if available." This would help mobile users too -- even if you have lots of bandwidth, maybe you want to conserve.

StavrosK7• 9 years ago

Here in Greece, the internet is plenty fast (in bandwidth), but everything is far away, so there's lots of latency in opening every page. Going to the US on a trip, it's striking how much faster every website loads, there's no 300ms pause at the start anywhere.

Because I got frustrated at fat websites downloading megabytes of useless things, I decided to start an informational site about this very thing:

http://www.lightentheweb.com/

It's not ready yet, but I'm adding links to smaller alternatives to popular frameworks, links to articles about making various parts of a website (frontend and backend) faster, and will possibly add articles by people (and me) directly on the site. If anyone has any suggestions, please open an issue or MR (the site is open source):

https://gitlab.com/stavros/lighten-the-web/issues

niutech2• 9 years ago

You can get the network type or downlink speed in Firefox and Chrome using NetworkInformation interface: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...

Then you can lazy load your assets depending on that condition.

splatcollision• 9 years ago

Design your UX so that any large assets can be requested at will by the user, and indicate the file size? That way it's the user's choice if they want to load that large video over their slow network, etc.

tempestn2• 9 years ago

Most users on fast connections are not going to enjoy explicitly clicking to download every background image, font, etc. For videos it might make more sense, but there are many more optional assets to deal with.

tommorris2• 9 years ago

There is a proposed API for that.

https://wicg.github.io/netinfo/

And like most such APIs, it has been kicked around for a long time and it has only been adopted by Chromium on Android, ChromeOS and iOS. It'd be great if it were more widely adopted...

disposablename• 9 years ago

Yay, more browser fingerprinting data points!

pilom• 9 years ago

We outsource this to CloudFlare and their Mirage service: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200403554-W...

Chyzwar• 9 years ago

Server side logs and sessions. You should be able to tell users devices/browser and what bandwidth they operate. Then calculate average speed they use. You could then create tiered service where media quality and JS features can be adjusted. You will periodically process logs to make sure that grouping is still correct. As additional feature users could choose in theirs setting what tier they want to use.

On client side, You can achieve some of this by heavy use of media queries. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh4535... You can basically manipulate resolution/disable of assets based on screens quality. This is under assumption that someone with retina screen will have decent internet.

gnarly• 9 years ago

Simple. Design your webpages to only load the functional lighter weight essential stuff by default. Then use javascript to add in all the large assets you want. Users with slow connections can browse with javascript turned off.

aethertron• 9 years ago

I like this solution.

Unfortunately there is little consistency in how well browsers accommodate JS-less browsing. Firefox removed the ability to switch off JS from its standard settings panel. Brave lets you switch JS on/off for each domain from the prominent lionface button panel.

gkya5• 9 years ago

Every time a similar question is posed on HN, someone says "If the assets aren't needed, don't serve them in the first place", but this is i) unrealistic, and ii) ignores the fact that while the typical HN user may like sparsely designed, text-orientated pages with few images, this is not at all true of users in different demographics. And in those demos, it's often not acceptable to degrade the experience of users on fast connections to accommodate users on slow connections.

This is prejudice. People use Craigslist, for example. If the thing is useful, people will use it. If there's a product being sold, and if it's useful to the potential clientele, they'll buy it. Without regard to the UI.

In the past ten years while my connection speed increased, the speed at which I can browse decreased. As my bandwidth increased, all the major websites madly inflated.

So -- if I write a web page, and I want to include a large asset, but I want to indicate to user agents on slow/capped connections that they don't _need_ to download it, what approach should I take?

Put a link to it with (optionally) a thumbnail.

sjy• 9 years ago

People use Craigslist, for example. If the thing is useful, people will use it. If there's a product being sold, and if it's useful to the potential clientele, they'll buy it. Without regard to the UI.

Craigslist achieved critical mass in the 90s, so it's not a good example. Many useful products disappear because they can't attract enough users to become sustainable. A nice UI can affect users' credibility judgments and increase the chance that they'll stick around or buy things.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1315064

aczerepinski• 9 years ago

I think srcsets are a reasonably proxy for this. Serve extremely optimized images to mobile devices, and the full images to desktops.

It isn't perfect - you'll get some mobile devices on wifi that could have consumed the hero images and some desktop devices still on dial up, but it's still a lot better than doing nothing.

erikpukinskis• 9 years ago

Which demographic likes large images that are not necessary for the task at hand?

greenyouse• 9 years ago

I don't think there is an easy way to tell the browser not to download something because the connection is slow. Progressive enhancement can work well for giving users a basic page that loads quickly with minimal assets while also downloading heavier content in the background that renders later. That's still different than putting a timer on a request to download the content (which would require JS to detect the slow connection).

If you make a page well it should render quickly under any network condition, slow or fast. As an example, you could try serving pictures quickly by providing a placeholder picture which uses lossy compression to be as small as possible. It could be byte64 encoded so it's served immediately even over a slow connection. Then after the page is rendered, a request could go out to download the 0.5Mb image and a CSS transition could fade the image in over the placeholder. People on fast connections wouldn't notice a change because it would load right away, while people on a 40kbit 2G connection would be OK with your page too.

The requests to download larger content will still go out over a slow connection but the user won't suffer having to sit through seconds of rendering. Maybe similar to how people have done mobile-first responsive design, people could try doing slow-first design. Get everything out of the critical rendering path and progressively enhance the page later.

avhon1• 9 years ago

In the ideal future, FLIF [0] would become a standard, universally supported image and animation format. Almost any subset of a FLIF file is a valid, lower-resolution FLIF file. This would allow the browser - or the user - to determine how much data could be downloaded, and to display the best-quality images possible with that data. If more bandwidth or time became available, more of the image could be downloaded. The server would only have one asset per image. Nice and simple.

[0] http://flif.info/

niutech2• 9 years ago

There are two ways:

1. Serve the AMP version of your page (https://www.ampproject.org) which uses lazy loading and other optimizations

2. Use the Network Information API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...) to load heavy assets only on high bandwidth connections.

ddebernardy2• 9 years ago

Here's a proxy: buy a 1st-gen iPad, turn JS off, and then use it to browse the site.

If it crashes the device, you're way off.

If it's appreciably slow or clunky, find ways to improve it.

Iterate until it's fast and usable.

andrewclunn• 9 years ago

reddit.com takes 7.5 seconds to load on FIOS? I must be reading this table wrong.

kordless• 9 years ago

I just realized this is why the growth of network speed is increasing at a lower rate than that of compute. Even though they both continue to grow in capacity, the accelerations are different.

LyalinDotCom• 9 years ago

YESSS!! ever have your 4G connection drop to shit? well imagine like that but like 24/7 on your wired connection, that's what many people live with today :(

jayajay• 9 years ago

Lately my Pixel has been achieving sub KBps speeds on very good Wifi connection (laptop in same room 100MBps), and it reminded me of the old days with dial-up on win 98 -- but worse. The estimated download-time for the LinkedIn app (70MB... gg) was a whopping 6 months! What a great way to get me to guzzle up my mobile data.

anigbrowl• 9 years ago

I really wonder how much time designers and developer actually spend on thoughtful testing vs. a/b or automated testing. Sometimes the problems on websites just seem so....clueless.

My current pet hate is news sites that float up a modal window asking me to turn off my ad blocker because bidness. OK, I turn off AdBlock Pro for that domain, turn off HTTP switchboard, and it still won't load. Why? I dunno, try again, still won't load. OK, guess I'm never coming back. Obviously it must be some other extension, but without any technical details how can I tell?

For that matter why did anyone think it was ever a good idea to float dialogs over web pages to get people to share (not submit) their email address? Has anyone ever looked at how poorly these display on mobile devices? Or how making it hard to close floating dialogs is a really good way to annoy people?

zump• 9 years ago

This guys posts are insufferable for constantly namedropping where he works. Ugh.

amelius• 9 years ago

But HN almost never sucks, even on slow connections. That's why, when I'm on mobile, I only read the comments and not the articles :)

By the way, here's how we can collectively make the web faster, safer and more fun to use: [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13584980

realPubkey• 9 years ago

And thats why we need to adapt offline-first.

amazon_not• 9 years ago

Do you know how to make the web not suck on a slow connection?

Ssh into a shell account and use a text based browser :)

tetha• 9 years ago

I might need a reality check here because this is feeling weird.

I'm currently building a web-based application to store JVM threaddumps. This includes a JS-based frontend to efficiently sort and filter sets of JVM threads (for example based on thread names, or classes included in thread traces). Or the ability to visualize locking structures with d3, so you can see that a specific class is a bottle neck because it has many locks and many threads are waiting for it.

I'm doing that in a Ruby/Vue application because those choices make the app easy. You can upload a threaddump via curl, and share it with everyone via links. You can share sorted and filtered thread sets, you can share visualizations with a mostly readable link. This is good because it's easy to - automatically - collect and upload thread ddumps, and it's easy to collaborate with a problematic locking situation.

So, I'd call that a fairly heavy web-based application. I'm relying on JS, because JS makes my user experience better. JS can fetch a threaddump, cache it in the browser, and execute filters based on the cached data pretty much as fast as a native application would. Except you can share and link it easily, so it's better than visualvm or TDA.

But with all that heavywheight, fast moving web bollocks... Isn't it natural to think about web latency? To me it's the only sensible thing to webpack/gulp-concat/whatever my entire app so all that heavy JS is one big GET. It's the only sensible thing to fetch all information about a threaddump in on GET just to cache it and have it available. It's the only right thing to do or else network latency eats you alive.

Am I that estranged by now by having worked on one low-latency, high-throughput application by now? To avoid confusion, the threaddump storage is neither low-latency, nor high-throughput. Talking java with 100k+ events/s and < 1ms in-server latency there.

nommm-nommm4• 9 years ago

What really has baffled me lately is Chase's new website. They did a redesign around, maybe 6 months ago, to make it "more modern" or something, I guess.

Now the thing just loads and loads and loads and loads. And all I want to do is either view my statement/transactions or pay my bill! Or sometimes update my address or use rewards points. That's not complicated stuff. I open it up in a background tab and do other stuff in-between clicks to avoid excessively staring at a loading screen.

I just tried it out, going to chase.com with an empty cache took a full 16 seconds to load on my work computer and issued 96 requests to load 11MB. Why!?

I then login. The next page (account overview) takes a full 32 seconds to load. Yep, half a minute to see my recent transactions and account balances. And I have two credit cards with zero recent transactions.

I am just baffled as to who signed off on it!! "This takes 30 seconds to load on a high speed connection, looks good, ship it."

sonar_un• 9 years ago

Chase's website is just awful for just about anything.

It's particularly terrible if you are ever trying to use award points. The site is painfully slow, even on the fastest of connections.

enobrev• 9 years ago

To be fair, the Chase website was awful before. It was just awful and slightly faster.

Pica_soO• 9 years ago

Wasnt this "backwards" compatability the reason blizzard was always so succesfull? Using old but sturdy tech, that would work on the slowest of machines.

Actually one could make a whole slowMo WebStandard from this. No Pictures, just svgs, no constant elaborate javascript chatter, no advertising. No videos, no music, no gifs, just animated svgs. Actually, that would be something lovely. Necessity begets ingenubeauty.

amiga-workbench2• 9 years ago

I've been very tempted to start publishing content on the gopher protocol, its immune to the cancers of the modern web.

0mp• 9 years ago

There is a project called txti which provides a free hosting for a simple websites edited in Markdown: http://txti.es

The idea is to make the content available to all the web users as the fast connection is not as common as we might think.

coin• 9 years ago

or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed ou

There's the root cause. Why do I need to download executables just to read static content?

SnowingXIV• 9 years ago

I feel a good solution to this problem, or at least covers a fair amount of users is having your website work well with safari reader. Anytime even on fast connections, I often find myself loading up a page with reader instead.

georgehaake• 9 years ago

Out in the country enough that I have 3 meg area wifi with a wife who enjoys streaming and Facebook and two boys who enjoy online gaming and streaming. Not much left for me. All you can eat at least and avoiding satellite.

Oh, we find Amazon, IMDb and Facebook are the biggest pigs on a slow connection.

nedt• 9 years ago

One thing that isn't mention is webfonts. On 2G I can load the whole page, CSS, JS and some images, but can't read anything because the fonts aren't loaded yet. Here is a gallery of a couple of examples: https://imgur.com/gallery/wfjoT

Lxr• 9 years ago

We need more sites like this! Absolutely no bloat, so nice to use.

noway421• 9 years ago

This post can be seen as exceptional even because of the fact that that page loads instantaneously. Nothing extra. Bravo.

kyleblarson• 9 years ago

I live in a very remote town in the North Cascades in Washington state and work remotely in development. I'm on a 1.5mb DSL connection and while it's slow it's consistent and I rarely have issues with Skype / Hangouts / Slack / Git / normal work. Downloading large data dumps is another story, but you learn to plan ahead.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

I will be blunt, you would be amazed at the sites that suck even when you have 1g. I used to always think, damn my DSL is slow until I was at 1g and some sites did not improve and how many of the applications I have which can update are throttled

Tade0• 9 years ago

Kudos to the author for making the post readable using a 32kbps connection.

My apartment does not have a landline, not to mention any other form of wired communication, so my internet connection is relegated to a Wi-Fi router that's separated by two walls(friendly neighbour) and a GSM modem that, after using the paltry 14GB of transfer it provides, falls back to a 32kbps connection.

Things that work in these circumstances:

- Mobile Facebook(Can't say I'm not surprised here).

- Google Hangouts.

- HN (obviously).

- A few other videoconferencing solutions(naturally in audio only mode).

Things that don't work, or barely work:

- Gmail.

- Slack(ok, this one sort of works, but is not consistent).

- Most Android apps.

- Github.

EDIT: added newlines.

Karrot_Kream• 9 years ago

- Slack(ok, this one sort of works, but is not consistent).

Use the IRC bridge. It's a lot easier on your bandwidth/resources.

pmlnr• 9 years ago

gmail _could_ work: use the IMAP endpoint with an offline client. If you need to use mailing on an 56k connection, it's either Squirrelmail or regular mail clients.

molsongolden• 9 years ago

Have you tried the HTML version of Gmail?

https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

I've used this on my kindle keyboard while traveling but the free data speed might still have been faster than 32kbps.

hnarn• 9 years ago

A lot of people here are talking about how 2G connections are "almost unusable" and how this should be optimized server-side and so on. I'd just like to point out that there are browser that cater to this specific demographic (slow connections).

Ever since the days of running Java applications on my old Sony Ericsson phone, Opera Mini has been my favorite. As far as the browser is concerned, the website can be as heavy as it wishes -- it will pass through Operas proxy and be compressed according to user preferences. This could include not loading any images (nothing new), or load all images with very low quality. You can also select whether you want things like external fonts and JS to load, or if you want to block that too. When I moved to a new country my first SIM card had one of those "unlimited but incredibly slow" plans. Opera Mini was a life saver.

I guess my point is that we shouldn't get stuck in optimization paralysis if there is no sound and standardized server-side way to solve this issue (and there doesn't seem to be). It would be nice if browsers had a way to tell web servers that they're operating under low bandwidth, like the do-not-track flag, but AFAIK this does not exist.

Until that exists, and I don't mean to suggest we go back to the days of "Made for IE9" here, maybe some responsibility needs to be shifted to the client side. As long as you design your websites in a sane way, they will pass through these low bandwidth proxies with flying colors. Maybe you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of man-hours optimizing your page when you could insert a discrete indicator at the top of the screen for anyone taking longer than X seconds to load that there are many browsers available for low bandwidth connections, and that they might want to try them out?

bsukn• 9 years ago

It only sucks if you've experienced a fast connection.

We generally don't target hardware from 98, why should we target bandwidth from 98? Current smartphones and computers are really powerful, and most applications are targeted towards those devices. Native apps don't have this insane requirement to support hardware from 2 decades ago.

The web is so much more than text in 2017. And before you whine about the ads and useless stuff, go read a tabloid and whine about the waste of paper, or try to watch tv and whine about the electricity and time you're wasting watching advertisements.

Media has and always will be like that.

The time spent on backwards compatibility and optimizations are usually not worth it anyway.

Do I think mostly text sites should be 5mb? Obviously not.

therealmarv• 9 years ago

For you it's bandwidth from 98. If you go outside your obviously modern country it's a 2017 problem and it will stay this way for a long time. It's not so much about backwards compatibility... it's more like "keep it working" with slow bandwidth. Posting this from Philippines where I'm currently happy with a stable 750Kb/s connection.

tlanc• 9 years ago

It does. I'm on 2G and HN and the article site are the only usable things I've encountered today [on TMobile's intl roaming thing]

dangoldin• 9 years ago

Shameless plug but I did something similar in 2014 and used PhantomJS to analyze the content of the top 1000 Alexa sites: http://dangoldin.com/2014/03/09/examining-the-requests-made-...

songco• 9 years ago

And the GFW(great fire wall)...

bambax• 9 years ago

A pure HTML minifier can’t change the class names because it doesn’t know that some external CSS or JS doesn’t depend on the class name.

After everything has been parsed, it would know (the browser knows).

Couldn't a proxy service produce super lightweight, compiled web pages? I seem to remember Opera used to offer something along those lines, but I may be wrong.

Would there be commercial value in building such a tool?

oregontechninja• 9 years ago

My main source of clients are people suffering from website bloat because they have no idea how to build a website. They jump on every shiny JavaScript library they need and load 8 different versions of bootstrap and then 5 fonts from various sources, all from CDNs. I wish I were exaggerating, but it's such a mess. In every single case, 90% was garbage, and all they really needed was a nice semantic css sheet. Unless you are developing a web-app, or 100% need you ajax calls, you don't need JavaScript. Is this the same for others or am I just in a less technically inclined area?

EGreg• 9 years ago

I have a different suggestion.

Build software that can work on a distributed architecgure. So people in Ethiopia can run their stuff on intranets and mesh networks and only occasionally send stuff around the world.

What broadband has really caused is this assumption that the computer is "always online". Apps often break when not online. When in reality there shouldn't even be "online/offline" but rather "server reachable/unreachable". And you should be building offline first apps, with sync across instances.

samuell3• 9 years ago

The flaw in the “page weight doesn’t matter because average speed is fast” is that if you average the connection of someone in my apartment building (which is wired for 1Gbps internet) and someone on 56k dialup, you get an average speed of 500 Mbps. That doesn’t mean the person on dialup is actually going to be able to load a 5MB website.

As someone mentioned below too, the median value would make much more sense in this case (which it often does, it seems).

AstralStorm3• 9 years ago

Median also does not make sense. Dialup is not as common as other connections anymore. You would get pretty high ADSL Mbps as the median.

Generally the distribution of bandwidth is multimodal, similarly of latency.

known• 9 years ago

AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

ainiriand• 9 years ago

The web sucks, but it sucks less if you have a fast connection.

mathgenius• 9 years ago

I wonder if there is room for a product, a kind of browser-in-a-website, that would eat those big-ass webpages (server-side) and spit out just the text and (heavily compressed) jpegs. With a little layout to match the original website. Something like how streaming services adaptively subsample data, or like how NX tries to compress the X window protocol. Obviously this would be patchy, but it could be much better than "FAIL".

kzrdude• 9 years ago

Posting from wifi on a plane over the UK: this is apparently not slow internet, I can read the usual bloated news and blog pages.

mueslix• 9 years ago

Instead of making sites that try to predict the unpredictable, I'd rather ask the question if TCP is still the right tool to use.

There shouldn't be a reason for a big page with many resources to not load - it should just be slower. Yet I can make the same observations as soon as my mobile signal drops to EDGE: the internet is essentially unusable as soon as there's packet loss involved and the roundtrip-times increase. Interestingly mosh often still works beautifully in such scenarios. So instead of focusing on HTTP2 or AMP (and other hacks) to make the net faster for the best-case scenario, I'd rather see improvements to make it work much more reliably in less than perfect conditions. Maybe it's time for TCP2 with sane(r) defaults for our current needs.

Uristqwerty• 9 years ago

Rather than a "TCP2" that, based on name alone, would be far too likely to aim for semi-backwards compatibility but tweak a few things to be slightly better in general but mostly just better for the specific use cases of the one or three top contributing companies, why not just push for the adoption of one of the existing alternative transport layer protocols?

For example, there's SCTP. From what little I've read about it, it seems as if it has most of the benefits of both TCP and UDP, with the main downside that some firewalls and routers may need to be upgraded. Being an existing protocol, however, there are already working implementations and some amount of network support. Maybe it's even fully usable as-is today!

tepmoc• 9 years ago

SCTP can't go through NAT (there is ietf draft in works for that). But SCTP already exist in your favorite browser Chrome, Firefox both use usrsctplib (https://github.com/sctplab/usrsctp) to provide sctp over udp for webrtc signaling.

But there also need to be sctp over udp over dtls (or just sctp over dtls) happen as you can't use TLS with SCTP unordered mode or multihoming.

SCTP slowly gain traction in userspace besides being only in mobile operator networks (lte)

Aoyagi• 9 years ago

But like, if you don't fill your website with megabytes of useless bloat, you'll get called out, because "it's 2017".

k__• 9 years ago

What is the size per page one should not overstep?

I mean, yes as small as possible. But are there some size-budgets?

For 3G, 2G etc.

dwighttk• 9 years ago

how much weight would a little css to make the text not full-width add to that page?

etatoby2• 9 years ago

I design and write my company's framework, that other devs use to write websites and webapps.

I base my work on existing technologies (lately Laravel, which means Symfony, Gulp, and hundreds of other great libraries) but I always strive to:

1. Reduce the number of requests per page, ideally down to 1 combined and compressed CSS, 1 JS that contains all dependencies, 1 custom font with all the icons. Everything except HTML and AJAX should be cacheable forever and use versioned file naming.

2. Make the JS as optional as possible. I will go out of my way to make interface elements work with CSS only (including the button to slide the mobile menu, various kinds of tooltips, form widget styling, and so on.) Whenever something needs JS to work (such as picture cropping or JS popups) I'll make sure the website is usable and pretty, maybe with reduced functionality or a higher number of page loads, even if the JS fails to load or is turned off. Also, the single JS file should be loaded at the end of the body.

2b. As a corollary, the website should be usable and look good both when JS is turned off, and when it's turned on but still being loaded. This can be achieved with careful use of inline styles, short inline scripts, noscript tags, and so on.

3. Make the CSS dependency somewhat optional too. As a basic rule, the site should work in w3m, as pointed out above. Sections of HTML that make sense only when positioned by CSS should be placed at the end of the body.

I consider all of this common sense, but unfortunately not all devs seem to have the knowledge, skill, and/or time allowance to care for these things, because admittedly they only matter for < 1% of most website's viewers.

HorizonShadow• 9 years ago

I would say a lot of people disregard internet speeds when creating websites. Just check the source of any random website, and you're going to see jquery loaded, where it's either not being used at all, or using a single function in the entire library.

NoGravitas2• 9 years ago

I think your 2, 2b, and 3 are absolutely spot on, and it is amazing the extent to which web developers go out of their way not to do these things.

I'm going to slightly disagree with 1, though. It's somewhat important now, but should become less so as http2 gets more widely used.

zelias• 9 years ago

I don't completely agree. If you're working on an SPA that targets higher-income (e.g. better internet) consumers, a developer could be forgiven for doing as much as possible using JS. I choose to sacrifice the <1% of my target users who have JS turned off or have poor connections to benefit the UX of the other 99% of users. I think the time and resource investment in strictly adhering to these guidelines is cost-prohibitive for many lean engineering teams, particularly those at early-stage startups.

I get that the web was designed to be optimized for HTML/CSS first, JS last. However, the web was also not originally designed to support web applications as complex as the marketplace currently supports. As the web matures as the only universal application platform (to compete with various native platforms), I think a paradigm shift is required -- towards replacing as much markup with programmatic code as possible. Such a paradigm shift is required for complex web applications to compete with native environments going forward.

Of course, none of this applies if your organization just requires static websites. Choose the right tool for the job, and all that.

gkya5• 9 years ago

It sucks if you have a fast connexion too, because then your CPU and RAM suffer instead. And as you add addons to rectify the many offending web pages, then the performance penalty of those quickly equal to that of crappy JS. I was so happy with Xombrero as my browser, but it's stagnant and insecure now. I do like my Firefox but with all the blocking addons it's slow, and without them it's slower (not that it's its fault).

AngeloAnolin• 9 years ago

"Google’s AMP currently has > 100kB of blocking JavaScript that has to load before the page loads"

Wasn't it that Google was claiming that by using AMP, you can actually make web pages load faster as it is a stripped-down form of HTML[1].

From what I am hearing from the author (Dan), bare html with minimal JS and CSS should (in theory/reality?) load pages faster.

https://moz.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-whiteboard-fri...

dguillot• 9 years ago

The worst of all I think it's NHL.com It appears to me that they have been asked to be "responsive" in terms of viewability instead of functionality. Good luck using this site.

gwu78• 9 years ago

"Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text..."

Yes.

My kernel, userland, third party software and configuration choices, the entire way in which I use the computer, are optimized for consuming plain text.@1

As a consequence, the web is very fast for me compared to a user with a graphical browser. This is why every time some ad-supported company claims they are offering a means to "make the web faster" it makes them appear to me as even more dishonest. They are, at least indirectly, the ones who are responsible for slowing it down. They are promising to fix a problem they created, but will never really deliver on that promise. Conflict of interest.

@1 I find there is no better way to optimize for fast, plain text web consumption than to work with a slow connection. It is like when a batsman warms up with weights on the bat. When he takes the weights off, the bat feels weightness, and the velocity increases. When I spend a year or so on a slow connection and adjust everything I do to be as bandwidth efficient as possible, then when I get on a "fast" connection, the speed is incredible.

I also use the same technique with hardware, working with a small, resource constrained computer. When I switch to a larger, more powerful one, such as a laptop, the experience is that I instantly have an enormous quantity of extra memory and screen space, for free. I do not need a HDD/SSD to work. My entire system and storage fits easily in memory.

Now if I do the opposite, if everyday I only worked on a large, powerful computer with GB's of RAM with a fast connection, then switching to anything less is going to be an adjustment that will require some time. I would spend significant time making necessary adjustments before I could get anything else done.

johnnydoe9• 9 years ago

Can confirm, am using horrible internet right now. Googleweblight is a lifesaver for reading article, not sure why it hasn't been mentioned by I recommend everyone facing speed issues to try it.

Entangled• 9 years ago

Can't browsers provide a service like

txt://example.com

that shows web content in plain text, no images, no javascript, nothing, something like readability but directly without loading the whole page first?

It would also be good for mobile connections.

* Wikipedia should be the first site to offer that txt: protocol, Google second.

* Btw, hacker news is the perfect example of a text only site.

kemps4• 9 years ago

I live in a rural area. There are three options for internet - satellite (limited data allowance - but decent speed), dial-up or a local ISP with a Motorola canopy system. I chose the last option. I get 100 KB/sec max download speed (on a good day). Divide by the 4-5 people in the house regularly using the Internet and it gets really slow, really quick. Many times I just give up and shut the computer off or I browse using Lynx.

And nope - no cell phone signal here either..

ge96• 9 years ago

Yeah I take my 100Mbps connection lightly, developing an image-oriented web app for the Philippines and holy crap the one guy was lucky to get 0.3Mbps.

So... had to severely redo the code to pull 50px wide images, blur them in, and only load the visible (depending on screen dimension) then a 2-second max refresh thingyyyy (yeah I'm just making this loader-interrupter thing) it's been a mess I feel pretty stupid sometimes. Why can't I get this... JavaScript. Yeap I am lucky to have Google Fiber (and I have the cheaper plan too)

tlow• 9 years ago

Quora is unusable on a slow connection. It literally shows a popup that obscures content if you lose high speed connectivity or drop packets.

However, the web is even worse if you have no connection at all. This is important because if we provide internet access at a municipal level, we can reach 100% adoption among our pluralistic educational system and progress to primary learning materials that are web based (CA 60119 for example prohibits any primary educational materials not available to all students both in the classroom AND AT HOME).

jlardinois• 9 years ago

In the U.S., AOL alone had over 2 million dialup users in 2015.

I've seen this figure a few times before, and I wonder every time who these users are. Specifically I'm curious what the breakdown is between people who

- Really don't have a better option available (infrastructure in this country is unbelievably bad in some places, so I wouldn't be surprised at a large size for this group)

- Are perfectly happy with the dialup experience so they don't switch to something better

- Don't know there are better options so they stay with dialup

- Don't even realize they never cancelled AOL and are still having it auto-debited every month

- Some other option I didn't think of

beautifulfreak• 9 years ago

Why not make a site that proxies other sites, but retransmits them as fast-loading? Isn't traffic=dollars?

dotchev• 9 years ago

This exactly one of the problems IPFS will solve by serving content from local peers.

The web sucks if you have a slow connection

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