31 ms·

The web sucks if you have a slow connection

• Swizec 10y 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 10y ago
    What do you mean by latency in this context?
    • richardwhiuk 10y 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 10y 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.
  • coldpie 10y ago
    Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.
    • MrRadar 10y 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_ 10y 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 10y ago
      Same here - I would highly recommend people to at least try this once and get a reminder of how fast sites can be.
  • ploxiln 10y ago
    I notice it in my browser's memory usage.
  • lucb1e 10y 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 10y 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!!!
  • minikites 10y 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.
    • jmcdiesel 10y 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.
      • minikites 10y ago
        If you're running a purely domestic web store, maybe, but people in developing nations are not that different from people in developed nations, they can be just as interested in a a wide variety of topics, that's what makes the internet so appealing and wonderful.
        • 10y ago
• lordCarbonFiber 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
  • ploxiln 10y 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 10y ago
  Bloat: its not just for operating systems.
• Filligree 10y ago
  Not related to the contents of the article, but please add a max-width styling to your paragraphs. 40em or so is good.
  • minikites 10y ago
    I don't disagree, but your web browser doesn't need to fill your entire screen.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • Filligree 10y 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.
    • milesrout 10y ago
      My browser fills however much of my screen dwm tells it to fill.
  • zeveb 10y 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 10y 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.
    • Filligree 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  Well 3G is as low as you can get somewhere deep in the woods, not really a problem...
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • ribasushi 10y ago
    I take it you don't walk in the woods much...
  • bbcbasic 10y ago
    Did you read it?
• schoen 10y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13397282
  • robocat 10y 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 10y ago
      I have seen https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Exponential_backoff https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Exponential_backoff used pretty regularly in many places.
      • robocat 10y ago
        I don't see how that is relevant. 1. There is extra connection information, or information can be sampled. E.g. query to see if anything is responding. 2. Our user just wants to get action ASAP. Not necessary to be a good citizen, our user just wants it to work. 3. Heuristics depend on what works in practice. HTTP/S is a comp layered protocol so it is hard to know what is right. 4. Connection conditions are extremely varied, mobile connection type, overseas location, ISP, IPv6, proxies, VPNs, etc all affect the connection parameters so finding a reasonable heuristic is hard. 5. Sampling connection information is difficult, because when it fails you also fall to log it.
    • scaryclam 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
• warcher 10y ago
  I'm gonna read the article, I promise, but is the title really "If your internet is bad, the internet is bad"?
  • warcher 10y 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.
    • warcher 10y 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.
    • legostormtroopr 10y 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.
      • warcher 10y ago
        Ah, I'm just joking around. Mostly. ;) I agree with and mostly implement the vast majority of google's recommendations vis a vis site weight and speed (when I have time/budget to do so), because I regard making sites fast as a signifier of competent professionalism. Any hack can make a sucky, slow, heavy website. Making a website that really cooks is one of several things I use to justify my rate. ;)
• iLoch 10y 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.
  • minikites 10y 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 10y 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"?
    • 10y ago
• Someone1234 10y 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.
  • freehunter 10y 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?
    • kuschku 10y 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.
      • timdavila 10y ago
        > which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G source? the entire goal of AMP is to load pages quickly
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
• 20years 10y 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-workbench 10y 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.
    • scaryclam 10y 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 10y 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.
• jmcdiesel 10y 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 10y 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.
  • chrismorgan 10y 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 10y 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.
      • chrismorgan 10y ago
        Mostly fairly manual, with a bunch of regular expressions and things like sorting the CSS block by background-color (Vim: `:sort /{/`). It was tempting to slurp it in Python, gargle it about a bit and spit it out neatly refactored, but I didn’t do it that way. A small quantity of Vimscript would also have been fairly straightforward. But no, I did it the hard way out of the wrong type of laziness. (Why did I do it at all? Who knows.)
• atbentley 10y 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 10y 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.
    • atbentley 10y 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.
      • deftnerd 10y ago
        It's not that there are multiple IP's in the A record, it's that there are multiple A records, each with an IP address. For geographic routing, there is a clever trick that can be utilized using a technology called Anycast. Anycast is basically a way of assigning the same IP address to multiple machines so requests to that IP address results in connecting with the one that's the closest to you, route wise. Providers sometimes use Anycast DNS Name Servers and configure them to provide the different IP addresses depending on which name server people connect to. So, if someone wants to determine the IP address of ebay, their DNS client connects to ns1.ebay.com and asks "hey, what's the IP addresses for the A records for ebay.com" and ns1.ebay.com replies with the list. But ns1.ebay.com might be an Anycast DNS Name Server that's close to them and it provides the list of IP addresses closest to that name server. Someone on another continent might reach a name server with the same name and ip address, but it's a different machine in a different data center. It would provide a list of IP addresses on that continent. I do something similar with one of my sites. I rent three VPS's from buyvm.net (who has Anycast setup) that have the same IP address and are located in Las Vegas, New Jersey, and Luxembourg. I pay less than $10 a month in total and run my DNS name servers there. Clients that connect to the name server in Las Vegas get an IP pointing to a Digital Ocean load balancer in San Francisco proxying data from a few front-end VPS's. Clients that connect to the name server in New Jersey get an IP pointing to an OVH Canada load balancer near Montreal. Clients that connect to the name server in Luxembourg get an IP pointing to an OVH load balancer in the North of France. The result is a responsive service that has amazingly low latency for the US and the EU. Gonna try to set up some infrastructure in Singapore soon to make things faster for Australia and Asia.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• andrewstuart2 10y 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."
  • dragonwriter 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
• diggan 10y 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?
  • andyana 10y ago
    He mentions packet loss of 10%. That's a different problem than a slow connection.
    • falcolas 10y 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.
      • phil21 10y ago
        10% packet loss though typically is the threshold of "completely unusable" TCP connections. Depends of course, but 5% I generally think of "severely degraded" (e.g. ssh being almost unusable but still able to get some basic stuff done during a sev0) and 10% being "drive on-location because you aren't getting anything done" territory.
      • andyana 10y ago
        Exactly, but it's not a modern website problem.
        • falcolas 10y ago
          How is it not a modern website problem, if that modern website is being viewed over wireless connections, and follows Google's lead in disabling slow start TCP?
• SwellJoe 10y 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 10y ago
    Incidentally, you may find GMail's "basic HTML view" works better when your connection's throttled: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 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 https://i.reddit.com
    • ashark 10y 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.
• jaclaz 10y ago
  A unit of measure I find appropriate is the "Doom", 2015 prediction: https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688 https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688
• dsfyu404ed 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
  • kalleboo 10y 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.
  • emondi 10y 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.
• crispyambulance 10y 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 10y 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.
  • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Just been to Atwood's homepage, https://blog.codinghorror.com/ 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 https://gtmetrix.com/reports/blog.codinghorror.com/d1x7zZBk
  • accountface 10y ago
    Appears to be mostly lack of image optimization (and he loves gifs). A common issue with blogs.
    • codinghorror 10y ago
      Images are meticulously optimized, problem is, retina is expensive in file size.
      • minikomi 10y ago
        Seems that images such as the superman image [0] or pinball image [1] currently on the front page are much much larger than they should be -- body max-width is 700 (70% of 1000px). Even for retina that's overkill. If you want to get really fancy you could restrict all (served) image widths to under 700px and make a 1400px @2x version to use in a srcset. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2017/01/help-keep-your-school-all-american.jpg https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2017/01/help-ke... [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2016/11/pro-pinball-timeshock-ultra-4k-1.jpg https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2016/11/pro-pin...
• zeveb 10y 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.
• ddebernardy 10y 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.
• dsfyu404ed 10y 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.
• franciscop 10y 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/ http://picnicss.com/ - Umbrella JS (right now website in maintenance): http://github.com/franciscop/umbrella http://github.com/franciscop/umbrella Also I wrote an article on the topic: - https://medium.com/@fpresencia/understanding-gzip-size-836c74b66c0b https://medium.com/@fpresencia/understanding-gzip-size-836c7... Finally, I also have the domain http://100kb.org/ 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.
  • tluyben2 10y 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.
    • franciscop 10y 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.
• ikeboy 10y 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 10y 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.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • castratikron 10y 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 10y ago
    I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
    • antisthenes 10y 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.
• joeyh 10y 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 10y ago
  Website I'm currently working on has no JS and weighs an average of 15 KiB per page. Loads in <20ms.
• uvince 10y ago
  Regardless of connection speed it also sucks if you try using LinkedIN's new website. Nothin' but progress bars.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• tmaly 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 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.)
• fenwick67 10y 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/ http://www.telegraphherald.com/
  • ovulator 10y 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 10y ago
    When I opened that page and emptied my cache, I got a lot more than 8MB... http://imgur.com/a/qt0Zd 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.
  • hvidgaard 10y 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.
    • fenwick67 10y ago
      Most of my news I do get from elsewhere, but it's really the only local news source.
• julianj 10y 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 10y 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.
  • yellowapple 10y 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 10y 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.
• 0xc001 10y 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?
• 0xc001 10y 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 10y ago
  See also: The Website Obesity Crisis[0] by Maciej Ceglowski [0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
• gabemart 10y 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?
  • gnud 10y 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.
    • curun1r 10y 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.
      • ggreer 10y ago
        Satellite ISPs have low data caps and/or charge a lot per GB of transfer. Avoiding unnecessary downloads seems like the correct behavior in this case. I think the best solution would be an optional http header. That way, the server could choose to send a different initial response to low-bandwidth users. If connection speed is solely available via JavaScript API or media query, then only subsequent assets can be adapted for users on slow connections.
• jakeogh 10y ago
  Caching DNS lookups locally and host blocking via dnsmasq[1] helps quite a bit. [1] https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate
• andrewclunn 10y ago
  reddit.com takes 7.5 seconds to load on FIOS? I must be reading this table wrong.
• kordless 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  This guys posts are insufferable for constantly namedropping where he works. Ugh.
• amelius 10y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13584980
• realPubkey 10y ago
  And thats why we need to adapt offline-first.
• amazon_not 10y 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 10y 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-nommm 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
      To be fair, the Chase website was awful before. It was just awful and slightly faster.
• Pica_soO 10y 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-workbench 10y ago
    I've been very tempted to start publishing content on the gopher protocol, its immune to the cancers of the modern web.
• 0mp 10y ago
  There is a project called txti which provides a free hosting for a simple websites edited in Markdown: http://txti.es 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 10y 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 10y 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.
• pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  anything sucks if you have a sucky anything.
• georgehaake 10y 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 10y 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 https://imgur.com/gallery/wfjoT
• Lxr 10y ago
  We need more sites like this! Absolutely no bloat, so nice to use.
• noway421 10y ago
  This post can be seen as exceptional even because of the fact that that page loads instantaneously. Nothing extra. Bravo.
• kyleblarson 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
    Have you tried the HTML version of Gmail? https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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]
• tlanc 10y 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 10y 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-by-the-top-100-sites/ http://dangoldin.com/2014/03/09/examining-the-requests-made-...
• songco 10y ago
  And the GFW(great fire wall)...
• songco 10y ago
  And the GFW(great fire wall)...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• bambax 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
• samuell 10y 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).
  • AstralStorm 10y 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 10y ago
  AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
• ainiriand 10y ago
  The web sucks, but it sucks less if you have a fast connection.
• thedonkeycometh 10y ago
  Page should have datestamp on it, for future eye-rolling hijinx
• mathgenius 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 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 10y ago
  But like, if you don't fill your website with megabytes of useless bloat, you'll get called out, because "it's 2017".
• tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
  NoScript still reports back to Google. JavaScript is just a means to offload the server workload onto your desktop. If people didn't use javascript, you'd see the need for more data centres, which isn't good for some businesses and helps explains why the internet is slow in some parts of the world. Still considering how much the US spends on military toys, you'd have thought those warmongers could get more peace by keeping everyone entertained & busy with a good internet connection.
• k__ 10y 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 10y ago
  how much weight would a little css to make the text not full-width add to that page?
• etatoby 10y 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 10y 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.
  • NoGravitas 10y 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.
  • 10y ago
• gkya 10y 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 10y 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-friday https://moz.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-whiteboard-fri...
• dguillot 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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..
• jlardinois 10y 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
• ge96 10y 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 10y 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).
• beautifulfreak 10y ago
  Why not make a site that proxies other sites, but retransmits them as fast-loading? Isn't traffic=dollars?
• dotchev 10y ago
  This exactly one of the problems IPFS will solve by serving content from local peers.