5 ms·

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 go

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]
  - SquareWheel 10y ago
    Well, it would have to be downloaded once. It'd stay cached after that though so it's not really a concern. They use version numbers for cache busting.
    - flukus 10y ago
      On mobile cache sizes are very limited, and with the size of modern web pages it has to get reclaimed regularly. You can't rely on caching to solve poor performance.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Minutes might be slightly overselling it but AMP has a bit over 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript alone before you get the actual content. Here's the current top story when I hit news.google.com in a mobile browser: https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Famphtml%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2Fwp%2F2017%2F02%2F08%2Ftrump-lashes-out-at-nordstrom-in-a-tweet-for-dropping-his-daughters-apparel-line%2F https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.was... Loading that in a simulated 2G connection takes about 80 seconds and at least 30 seconds of that is waiting to display anything you care about. Looking at the content breakdown shows why: ~200KB of webfonts, 1.2MB of JavaScript, 275KB of HTML, etc. https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/... https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details Loading the same page without JavaScript pulls the content render time down into a couple seconds, still over 2G: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/...
    - kuschku 10y ago
      On my throttled 2G connection, it’s ~2½ minutes, and because I rarely visit pages with AMP, it’s never cached.
      - acdha 10y ago
        I live in a major city, have an iPhone 6S with good LTE coverage according to benchmarks, etc. and still routinely have AMP take 15+ seconds to render after the HTML has been received. I don't know if that's Mobile Safari applying strict cache limits or an issue in Google's side but the sales pitch isn't delivering.
        Bahamut 10y ago
        I have all of those as well, and AMP takes < 1s for me to load pages. Sounds like either a configuration issue on your end or maybe your wireless carrier.
rmc 10y 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
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Yes and the average page size has sky-rocketed, despite there being no more actual content (i.e. text). Instead we have animations of images or text fading in as we scroll down a page and lots of Javascript to do things I do not know. Kind of makes me miss the old plain HTML days - much less CPU intensive too.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  But still should make sure low speed works. But try convincing some privileged 20 something developer of that.
  - nindalf 10y ago
    It's really not about a privileged youngster, it's about business priorities. Most of the time the cost benefit ratio doesn't justify the effort to optimise for high latency high packet-loss connections. Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider. At work we did something similar a few years ago with our Android app. We dropped support for Android 2.3 users because we only had a couple hundred of them and it didn't justify the developer cost to maintain it. WhatsApp only dropped support a month ago. I don't think that was because they were somehow less privileged than us. The casual ageism in your comment is unbecoming. You could reconsider it.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      I could, but I've worked with too many examples that only care about writing new code in whatever is the latest hotness and moving on. They[0] don't want to fix their bugs. They don't care about anything but "works on my machine." They certainly don't care about using bandwidth. [0] The ones I've worked with
5ilv3r 10y 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.
- iamdave 10y ago
  No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. This will make a few segments of people cringe because much like the topic of racism, there's a school of thought that it only counts when things are exhibited in severe forms like water cannons, attack dogs or restrictive housing covenants or otherwise people being directly being told 'no' because of superficial topics like race, gender or sexual orientation. But as a tech guy who's slowly pivoting towards law, I've long held the belief that technology will become the next battle ground for civil rights-and has the potential to even change (in the sense of expanding the definition of) how we talk about civil rights. Think along the lines of people being left behind when it comes to accessing information they need to request public resources as more and more cities move towards online only forms, or even utilization of "entitlement programs" to pay for internet access (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-obamaphone-program-to-include-internet http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-o...). Now it may not be active discrimination in the sense that one will be outright told 'no', but disparate impact deserves to be at the table of discussing this sort of thing.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  It seems more plausible to me that they just don't want to take the trouble to support low-bandwidth connections than that they're actively pumping up the space to keep out poor people.

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]
- SquareWheel 10y ago
  Well, it would have to be downloaded once. It'd stay cached after that though so it's not really a concern. They use version numbers for cache busting.
  - flukus 10y ago
    On mobile cache sizes are very limited, and with the size of modern web pages it has to get reclaimed regularly. You can't rely on caching to solve poor performance.
- acdha 10y ago
  Minutes might be slightly overselling it but AMP has a bit over 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript alone before you get the actual content. Here's the current top story when I hit news.google.com in a mobile browser: https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Famphtml%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2Fwp%2F2017%2F02%2F08%2Ftrump-lashes-out-at-nordstrom-in-a-tweet-for-dropping-his-daughters-apparel-line%2F https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.was... Loading that in a simulated 2G connection takes about 80 seconds and at least 30 seconds of that is waiting to display anything you care about. Looking at the content breakdown shows why: ~200KB of webfonts, 1.2MB of JavaScript, 275KB of HTML, etc. https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/... https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details Loading the same page without JavaScript pulls the content render time down into a couple seconds, still over 2G: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/...
  - kuschku 10y ago
    On my throttled 2G connection, it’s ~2½ minutes, and because I rarely visit pages with AMP, it’s never cached.
    - acdha 10y ago
      I live in a major city, have an iPhone 6S with good LTE coverage according to benchmarks, etc. and still routinely have AMP take 15+ seconds to render after the HTML has been received. I don't know if that's Mobile Safari applying strict cache limits or an issue in Google's side but the sales pitch isn't delivering.
      - Bahamut 10y ago
        I have all of those as well, and AMP takes < 1s for me to load pages. Sounds like either a configuration issue on your end or maybe your wireless carrier.

rmc 10y 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

72deluxe 10y ago
Yes and the average page size has sky-rocketed, despite there being no more actual content (i.e. text). Instead we have animations of images or text fading in as we scroll down a page and lots of Javascript to do things I do not know. Kind of makes me miss the old plain HTML days - much less CPU intensive too.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
But still should make sure low speed works. But try convincing some privileged 20 something developer of that.
- nindalf 10y ago
  It's really not about a privileged youngster, it's about business priorities. Most of the time the cost benefit ratio doesn't justify the effort to optimise for high latency high packet-loss connections. Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider. At work we did something similar a few years ago with our Android app. We dropped support for Android 2.3 users because we only had a couple hundred of them and it didn't justify the developer cost to maintain it. WhatsApp only dropped support a month ago. I don't think that was because they were somehow less privileged than us. The casual ageism in your comment is unbecoming. You could reconsider it.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    I could, but I've worked with too many examples that only care about writing new code in whatever is the latest hotness and moving on. They[0] don't want to fix their bugs. They don't care about anything but "works on my machine." They certainly don't care about using bandwidth. [0] The ones I've worked with

5ilv3r 10y 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.

iamdave 10y ago
No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. This will make a few segments of people cringe because much like the topic of racism, there's a school of thought that it only counts when things are exhibited in severe forms like water cannons, attack dogs or restrictive housing covenants or otherwise people being directly being told 'no' because of superficial topics like race, gender or sexual orientation. But as a tech guy who's slowly pivoting towards law, I've long held the belief that technology will become the next battle ground for civil rights-and has the potential to even change (in the sense of expanding the definition of) how we talk about civil rights. Think along the lines of people being left behind when it comes to accessing information they need to request public resources as more and more cities move towards online only forms, or even utilization of "entitlement programs" to pay for internet access (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-obamaphone-program-to-include-internet http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-o...). Now it may not be active discrimination in the sense that one will be outright told 'no', but disparate impact deserves to be at the table of discussing this sort of thing.
emodendroket 10y ago
It seems more plausible to me that they just don't want to take the trouble to support low-bandwidth connections than that they're actively pumping up the space to keep out poor people.