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I just got a text this morning from my phone company: "Your exceeded your monthly 500MB limit". It's probably not a crisis, but it has some quite real economic

by WA 10y ago

I just got a text this morning from my phone company: "Your exceeded your monthly 500MB limit". It's probably not a crisis, but it has some quite real economic consequences if I have to download 2MB worth of nothing whenever I click a link. Yes, Adblockers to the rescue. But you know, Apple doesn't support Adblockers on an iPhone 5 for whatever stupid reason.

oolongCat 10y ago
See the main problem then, is not a problem with if websites are obese or paper thin, the question is are websites and our browsers doing a good job of using already existing features for helping users. I think we should be complaining about developers and admins who doesn't enable gzipping, we should be angry with the fact some websites don't even bother setting headers to cache static resources. We should not be throwing out hands up in air screaming crisis because our web is becoming more useful.
- exodust 10y ago
  "Useful" doesn't need to mean bloated. You seem to miss the point that many websites these days are bloated even basic articles. We don't need a V8 engine and oversize tyres to go buy milk and bread. You're forgetting that mobile devices quickly run out of cache memory. This includes iPads. You might visit a news site once every few days, but quite often the same resources need downloading again and again because your iPad has not kept them in cache memory because it ran out already. Desktop browsers have a lot more capacity to keep web resources cached. Not only that, but RAM memory is also limited on mobile devices. Forget about expecting multiple websites to remain in memory across numerous tabs. My iPad3 can pretty much handle only one tab open. If I switch tabs to another website, then switch back, the whole page loads again. A less bloated web would help this issue. And then there's accessibility for low-speed areas. Did you even read the article?
- tracker1 10y ago
  Most static servers enable If-Modified-Since header, as well as other detections... Cache sizes, specifically on mobile are very small, and ineffective... it's more often than not, a very small http request to recheck if a cached file is still valid. Optimizing images is a pretty huge thing, as is enabling gz compression on the streams... these two alone add up to far more saving than setting cache headers, not that they can't or shouldn't be set.
gremy0 10y ago
That's a problem with your phone company not websites, 500MB really isn't enough for using the modern web. Also since when exactly did websites have a mandate to economise to the scale of mobile data? It's always been edge case unless you are specifically targeting that.
- WA 10y ago
  500 MB could be enough. As I said, if I need a bigger plan, unoptimized websites have economic consequences. I heard mobile-first is a thing. It doesn't seem too far stretched to assume that users and thus potential customers might be interested in fast-loading websites. See, what this boils down to is this: People use Adblockers, because they're tired of all that shit that's consuming their bandwidth (at least on mobile). Content publishers complain about people using Adblockers. But they're not willing to get the technical side of their content consumption platform right in order to accommodate their very visitors. They cry foul but are part of the problem obviously. Unfortunately, I don't get to see what links to avoid (size-wise) before I download all the bloat and waste my bandwidth.
  - gremy0 10y ago
    Yeah 500 MB could be enough if technology regressed (which it isn't going to). You're going to need a bigger plan regardless as 500 MB is nothing and mobile internet features are become more rich and ubiquitous. The growth of website size has been fairly steady, if anything the growth has flattened over the last year or so. It is up to the infrastructure to keep up with that. In the last year or two we've had the introduction 4G with 2-4 times the speed of 3G and you expect to have the same usage allowance?
    - anteht 10y ago
      For people in the developed world with good technology infrastructure, yes. But it's also quite inconsiderate to tell people to upgrade their dataplan (which for some people might be a financial limit) instead of trying to think of better ways to reduce cruft and unnecessary data transfers.

by WA 10y ago

oolongCat 10y ago

See the main problem then, is not a problem with if websites are obese or paper thin, the question is are websites and our browsers doing a good job of using already existing features for helping users. I think we should be complaining about developers and admins who doesn't enable gzipping, we should be angry with the fact some websites don't even bother setting headers to cache static resources. We should not be throwing out hands up in air screaming crisis because our web is becoming more useful.

exodust 10y ago
"Useful" doesn't need to mean bloated. You seem to miss the point that many websites these days are bloated even basic articles. We don't need a V8 engine and oversize tyres to go buy milk and bread. You're forgetting that mobile devices quickly run out of cache memory. This includes iPads. You might visit a news site once every few days, but quite often the same resources need downloading again and again because your iPad has not kept them in cache memory because it ran out already. Desktop browsers have a lot more capacity to keep web resources cached. Not only that, but RAM memory is also limited on mobile devices. Forget about expecting multiple websites to remain in memory across numerous tabs. My iPad3 can pretty much handle only one tab open. If I switch tabs to another website, then switch back, the whole page loads again. A less bloated web would help this issue. And then there's accessibility for low-speed areas. Did you even read the article?
tracker1 10y ago
Most static servers enable If-Modified-Since header, as well as other detections... Cache sizes, specifically on mobile are very small, and ineffective... it's more often than not, a very small http request to recheck if a cached file is still valid. Optimizing images is a pretty huge thing, as is enabling gz compression on the streams... these two alone add up to far more saving than setting cache headers, not that they can't or shouldn't be set.

gremy0 10y ago

That's a problem with your phone company not websites, 500MB really isn't enough for using the modern web. Also since when exactly did websites have a mandate to economise to the scale of mobile data? It's always been edge case unless you are specifically targeting that.

WA 10y ago
500 MB could be enough. As I said, if I need a bigger plan, unoptimized websites have economic consequences. I heard mobile-first is a thing. It doesn't seem too far stretched to assume that users and thus potential customers might be interested in fast-loading websites. See, what this boils down to is this: People use Adblockers, because they're tired of all that shit that's consuming their bandwidth (at least on mobile). Content publishers complain about people using Adblockers. But they're not willing to get the technical side of their content consumption platform right in order to accommodate their very visitors. They cry foul but are part of the problem obviously. Unfortunately, I don't get to see what links to avoid (size-wise) before I download all the bloat and waste my bandwidth.
- gremy0 10y ago
  Yeah 500 MB could be enough if technology regressed (which it isn't going to). You're going to need a bigger plan regardless as 500 MB is nothing and mobile internet features are become more rich and ubiquitous. The growth of website size has been fairly steady, if anything the growth has flattened over the last year or so. It is up to the infrastructure to keep up with that. In the last year or two we've had the introduction 4G with 2-4 times the speed of 3G and you expect to have the same usage allowance?
  - anteht 10y ago
    For people in the developed world with good technology infrastructure, yes. But it's also quite inconsiderate to tell people to upgrade their dataplan (which for some people might be a financial limit) instead of trying to think of better ways to reduce cruft and unnecessary data transfers.