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

While I agree with others here that dial-up-friendly sites don't "collide" with complex web-apps (thus rendering this argument somewhat void), I sadly think the underlying problem is much more mundane: Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Same reason. No one wants to pay the additional costs of achieving that. Practically speaking, this means that either Random Local Newspaper Inc. knows their potential online reader base exactly and deemed the additional effort not to pay off, or they have no idea of their potential customers that would flock to their site if they did put in the effort, and thus don't miss them. Add on top of that the fact that much of the internet is based on (perhaps only assumed) prestige (or loss of it if your page doesn't have the most modern features A through Z or looks like its from the 90ies) or extremely short-lived (a newspaper doesn't care about yesterday's news) and this theory pretty much explains it all. Cynical, I know, but hey... :-/ Edit: Also: We can have nice things. No one with a 56k connection will honestly try to watch Netflix. A much more interesting question would be: How could we create incentives for big corporations to optimize their pages for connections with a small bandwith? After all, much of the web is also built on ad deals - which also almost certainly don't target those people.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Because even in the 1990s, word processors weren't orders of magnitude slower than the person sitting at the keyboard, which is the ultimate limiting factor on word processing speed.
- btschaegg 10y ago
  Which is, essentially, the same explanation. I would very much like a fast, Vim-style modern word processor (the new cursor behavior in Word drives me insane btw). But I'm not the main target. I alone wouldn't pay the bills. The same goes for almost any website: People with 56k don't consume much digital goods and returns from ads are most likely almost non-existent (especially if the ads are huge themselves). That easily explains a huge part of the web. Thus, either the connectivity around the globe has to be improved (thats the route Facebook seems to choose, albeit with debatable conditions for their new "customers") or create other incentives for anyone hosting something on the web to attract people with low bandwith connections.
- milesrout 10y ago
  I very frequently had to sit and wait for my word processor to catch up when typing quickly, well into the mid-2000s.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Because even in the 1990s, word processors weren't orders of magnitude slower than the person sitting at the keyboard, which is the ultimate limiting factor on word processing speed.

btschaegg 10y ago
Which is, essentially, the same explanation. I would very much like a fast, Vim-style modern word processor (the new cursor behavior in Word drives me insane btw). But I'm not the main target. I alone wouldn't pay the bills. The same goes for almost any website: People with 56k don't consume much digital goods and returns from ads are most likely almost non-existent (especially if the ads are huge themselves). That easily explains a huge part of the web. Thus, either the connectivity around the globe has to be improved (thats the route Facebook seems to choose, albeit with debatable conditions for their new "customers") or create other incentives for anyone hosting something on the web to attract people with low bandwith connections.
milesrout 10y ago
I very frequently had to sit and wait for my word processor to catch up when typing quickly, well into the mid-2000s.