4 ms·
> It’s difficult to convince to most web developers to accept these limits, especially if you don’t anticipate selling a lot of products to “emerging markets” n
by microcolonel 9y ago
> It’s difficult to convince to most web developers to accept these limits, especially if you don’t anticipate selling a lot of products to “emerging markets” nations. Hitting Google’s recommended target often requires a ground-up rewrite, discarding well-loved JS frameworks.
That's why their target for "emerging markets" devices is five whole seconds of JavaScript compilation, which would hardly be considered acceptable on a device five times as expensive, but that device is not five times as fast on a given core, it's probably something more like one and a half or two, maybe two and a half if you include faster main memory and caches.
Added: I once worked on an ecommerce site where I told my team early on that we would probably do worse than we planned if we built and tested on the latest iPhones and Galaxy devices, and was vindicated basically every week after a certain point. It was so bad that, on 802.11ac WiFi connected to a gigabit downlink with about 15ms round trip latency to the servers, the homepage would take about 10 seconds to display anything at all on an iPhone 6s, and another 8 seconds to finish loading the visible content. Unbelievably, more than three quarters of that time was spent parsing and compiling JavaScript. You don't even want to know what happens when you try to open that site on anything slower than a late 2015 flagship device.
- kinlan 9y agoDid they fix it? Did they care about fixing it?
- microcolonel 9y agoNah, it's still trash, and they expanded it to more markets! The good-but-not-great software consulting firm they replaced us with (lower per-head rate, and they don't question the tech lead) sometimes still emails me to try to get ideas about how to fix it, but they never bite the bullet. They're thinking of doing things which will actually make it even slower and fatter. This is what happens when you hire people who are foolisher, lazier, or more short-sighted than you, they rot your company from the inside out. ;- )
- shitRabbits 9y agoThis comment depresses me. It just sounds like everyone had no experience and just threw their hands up and said fuck it.
- microcolonel 9y agoI've thought at times about contacting the CEO or the board of the company to let them know that their executive might be screwing them out of tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars by being lazy and selfish, but I'm beginning to think that this is just the way it's supposed to be. Maybe it's for the best that they don't make a smooth end-to-end ecommerce user flow, more money in common folks' pockets in Taiwan and Western Europe, and more money in the pockets of developers.
- pryelluw 9y agoAfter hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, I had to drive 15 minutes to get mobile signal. Every website except HN and Gmail (html version) was too slow to load. This experience has lead me to reconsider my opinions regarding performance.
- eru 9y agoWhat about the Google front page? (And Wikipedia?)
- pryelluw 9y agoI did not test Wikipedia and dont use Google. Duck Duck Go was unusable.
- ascom 9y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/html https://duckduckgo.com/html Or if it's really bad: https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
- toomuchtodo 9y agoI am somewhat surprised Duck Duck Go doesn’t detect load speed and offer the degraded lite version on slow connections (Gmail does this).
- pryelluw 9y agoDid not know of those. Whish theyd redirect there after noticing a slow load.
- sytelus 9y agoIn my recent travel to India, I realized that "normal" broadband speed is usually 1Mbps. Almost everything on Internet comes to crawl. Vimeo and GitHub is surprisingly bad. I can't even download the releases of project > 1 GB due to timeouts and errors in Chrome. So I'd to VPN to my US computer, download it to dropbox and then wait for sync in my India machine :).
- Cacti 9y agoMan, thats like the past decade in a nutshell.
- hesarenu 9y agoConnection needs to be stable as well. It usually isn't in developing countries. Yesterday Hacker news was talking about 3+ seconds to load. Today it loads instantly. When the speed varies you just wait for the page to load. Nobody thinks it's JavaScript they assume net is slow.