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use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web All the actually useful bits of the web, text, images, etc would still work. I bet you could still shop on Amazon

by gaius 9y ago

use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web All the actually useful bits of the web, text, images, etc would still work. I bet you could still shop on Amazon with one of those old browsers. The power is being sucked to run the 10Mb+ of JS, Flash and other crap that ads add to every page.

LeoPanthera 9y ago
Lack of TLS would prevent Amazon shopping.
ehnto 9y ago
Working in e-commerce, there is a truly monstrous amount of javascript tracking snippets that enterprise level sites use. 30+ individual snippets and tracking pixels being pulled into the page. Polluting the console with JS errors and console logs. Thanks to Google Tag Manager, we don't even get a say anymore. It's out of our hands. We can put hours into optimising animations and UX but it is in vain once the marketing companies get their hands on the GTM account. With enterprise level clients near quarterly change of marketing provider, I'm sure many of the snippets aren't even being used anymore, they sit there because the new account manager is too afraid to remove them and no one truly understands what gets delivered to the customer's browser. We will spend immense time architecting performant backend solutions and infrastructure, then we decide that tens of thousands of completely disjointed lines of javascript, that we've never seen unminified and have no idea who wrote it, is probably fine to deliver straight to the browser. Don't worry, caching will solve the network problem, and everyone has quad-core smartphones now so it's probably okay. Weird, the screen keeps flickering and scrolling isn't smooth. Oh well, probably a browser bug.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  ...and then you deliver those tens of thousands of lines of JS to a browser running uBlock Origin and 80% of it gets ignored, restoring speed and lowering memory requirements at the tiny cost of not seeing your ads or being tracked by ad networks.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I'm always a bit surprised at how many sites blocking doesn't break. Sure, it occasionally murders some S3 load I actually needed, but for the most part it doesn't perceptibly change my experience. It's a bit alarming that you can kill 80% of a page load without your experience degrading in any way. At that point I'm prepared to call what's happening hostile design - the user's well-being has clearly taken a serious backseat.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    Unfortunately we have to test as if we were the average user of our websites, so we are not afforded that luxury!

by gaius 9y ago

LeoPanthera 9y ago

Lack of TLS would prevent Amazon shopping.

ehnto 9y ago

Working in e-commerce, there is a truly monstrous amount of javascript tracking snippets that enterprise level sites use. 30+ individual snippets and tracking pixels being pulled into the page. Polluting the console with JS errors and console logs. Thanks to Google Tag Manager, we don't even get a say anymore. It's out of our hands. We can put hours into optimising animations and UX but it is in vain once the marketing companies get their hands on the GTM account. With enterprise level clients near quarterly change of marketing provider, I'm sure many of the snippets aren't even being used anymore, they sit there because the new account manager is too afraid to remove them and no one truly understands what gets delivered to the customer's browser. We will spend immense time architecting performant backend solutions and infrastructure, then we decide that tens of thousands of completely disjointed lines of javascript, that we've never seen unminified and have no idea who wrote it, is probably fine to deliver straight to the browser. Don't worry, caching will solve the network problem, and everyone has quad-core smartphones now so it's probably okay. Weird, the screen keeps flickering and scrolling isn't smooth. Oh well, probably a browser bug.

dsr_ 9y ago
...and then you deliver those tens of thousands of lines of JS to a browser running uBlock Origin and 80% of it gets ignored, restoring speed and lowering memory requirements at the tiny cost of not seeing your ads or being tracked by ad networks.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I'm always a bit surprised at how many sites blocking doesn't break. Sure, it occasionally murders some S3 load I actually needed, but for the most part it doesn't perceptibly change my experience. It's a bit alarming that you can kill 80% of a page load without your experience degrading in any way. At that point I'm prepared to call what's happening hostile design - the user's well-being has clearly taken a serious backseat.
- ehnto 9y ago
  Unfortunately we have to test as if we were the average user of our websites, so we are not afforded that luxury!