4 ms·

Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic

Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to. Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.

tedunangst 10y ago
"total data transferred: X MB ($y.zz)" should be part of a browsers standard status bar.
- vinnymac 10y ago
  I know we can easily get some info from chrome dev tools and chrome://net-internals/#bandwith. It would be convenient for users if someone put together an extension that would display this information by default, or alternatively browsers just had a setting we could turn on.
  - phaed 10y ago
    On it
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
  Perhaps not – I don't think it's the browser makers job to figure out what terms the current connection has (and for the vast majority of workstation desktops there are no such terms, I think; you're getting a pretty rough deal if you pay by the byte on a fixed connection, no matter the price).
morsch 10y ago
It's not easy to discover how much data usage a specific site triggers. Android reports data usage per app, if you dig into the right preference panel, but that's not going to tell you anything about specific websites. I'd like a notification to pop up when the current usage (within, say, a 3 minute window) exceeds my typical usage. That'd make it easier to notice a website started autoplaying a (muted) video, for instance. It's also something that could be done at the operating system level. The operating system could also conceivably show traffic by domain, but that's not ideal; you want traffic by referrer domain, ie. if the LA Times embeds megabytes of images from some random third party server, those should be aggregated under latimes.com and not under some meaningless CDN domain. But the OS probably doesn't have that information. Of course browser vendors could add more detailed reporting. Say a brief in-browser notification ("Page finished downloading 5 MB.") after initial load is complete and repeating if excessive downloading continues. I guess that could annoying really fast, though. A less annoying alternative would be a special page (e.g. "about:data-usage") that has an overview per page in a user-selectable time range. Maybe link to it from the browser start page.
Bahamut 10y ago
Or make use of things like service workers to cache pages locally.
makecheck 10y ago
It has been years since data caps though, and years of obnoxious ads, nothing has changed. The only way in my opinion to fix this is to (a) give phones HARD preferences on maximum data that cannot be exceeded and (b) give web browsers even stricter per-site settings with sane defaults. Then, let the ad companies fight within themselves to figure out how to deal with the fact that none of their content gets through anymore. Force them to innovate into smaller form factors.
- cobookman 10y ago
  It's cause the data caps are fairly high. For example whats 10MiB when you have a 300GiB data cap. But if we change to a utility like model people will start caring about penny pinching their bills
  - craigds 10y ago
    In the US, and on wired connection maybe. In NZ the largest mobile plan I can even find has 5GB. Another one with flat rate for data is $50 for 3GB (so $250 for this 14GB day). If I load a webpage on my mobile data that uses 10MB of data, I want to know about it so I can shut that down (and never come back.)

tedunangst 10y ago

"total data transferred: X MB ($y.zz)" should be part of a browsers standard status bar.

vinnymac 10y ago
I know we can easily get some info from chrome dev tools and chrome://net-internals/#bandwith. It would be convenient for users if someone put together an extension that would display this information by default, or alternatively browsers just had a setting we could turn on.
- phaed 10y ago
  On it
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
Perhaps not – I don't think it's the browser makers job to figure out what terms the current connection has (and for the vast majority of workstation desktops there are no such terms, I think; you're getting a pretty rough deal if you pay by the byte on a fixed connection, no matter the price).

morsch 10y ago

It's not easy to discover how much data usage a specific site triggers. Android reports data usage per app, if you dig into the right preference panel, but that's not going to tell you anything about specific websites. I'd like a notification to pop up when the current usage (within, say, a 3 minute window) exceeds my typical usage. That'd make it easier to notice a website started autoplaying a (muted) video, for instance. It's also something that could be done at the operating system level. The operating system could also conceivably show traffic by domain, but that's not ideal; you want traffic by referrer domain, ie. if the LA Times embeds megabytes of images from some random third party server, those should be aggregated under latimes.com and not under some meaningless CDN domain. But the OS probably doesn't have that information. Of course browser vendors could add more detailed reporting. Say a brief in-browser notification ("Page finished downloading 5 MB.") after initial load is complete and repeating if excessive downloading continues. I guess that could annoying really fast, though. A less annoying alternative would be a special page (e.g. "about:data-usage") that has an overview per page in a user-selectable time range. Maybe link to it from the browser start page.

Bahamut 10y ago

Or make use of things like service workers to cache pages locally.

makecheck 10y ago

It has been years since data caps though, and years of obnoxious ads, nothing has changed. The only way in my opinion to fix this is to (a) give phones HARD preferences on maximum data that cannot be exceeded and (b) give web browsers even stricter per-site settings with sane defaults. Then, let the ad companies fight within themselves to figure out how to deal with the fact that none of their content gets through anymore. Force them to innovate into smaller form factors.

cobookman 10y ago
It's cause the data caps are fairly high. For example whats 10MiB when you have a 300GiB data cap. But if we change to a utility like model people will start caring about penny pinching their bills
- craigds 10y ago
  In the US, and on wired connection maybe. In NZ the largest mobile plan I can even find has 5GB. Another one with flat rate for data is $50 for 3GB (so $250 for this 14GB day). If I load a webpage on my mobile data that uses 10MB of data, I want to know about it so I can shut that down (and never come back.)