4 ms·

Your solution to increasing page size is to hope that people just stop doing the thing that they were doing? I don't particularly care if a new standard is def

Your solution to increasing page size is to hope that people just stop doing the thing that they were doing? I don't particularly care if a new standard is defined or not, but at some point you have to shift incentives and Google has shown itself to be willing to throw its weight around.

wlesieutre 8y ago
IMO Google's previous moves to derank search results of pages with poor load times is a reasonable way to do it. Social sites could apply similar leverage, not promoting content as much if they know it loads slowly. Beyond that, I wonder if in browser "This page is loading slowly" wall of shame messages could work, styled similarly to the "This page tried to open four popup windows" alerts. Users don't have any visibility into page size or javascript load beyond how sluggish it feels, but both of these impact your user experience and battery life, so I'd love to see browsers do more to expose poorly performing sites. Browsers setting a benchmark for "This is unacceptably crappy" would let users know they should expect better. The hard part of that would be differentiating sites that use tons of resources for bullshit reasons from sites that are actually doing something.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  I use uMatrix, which makes JS opt-in rather than opt-out. It’s a hassle, but I get to choose to enable content I want while blocking trackers and bloat. It’d be great if those portions just weren’t transferred to me.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    I think what I'd like to have is a "Use significant resources" permission for sites. Off by default, and unless it's granted a webpage has a hard cap on how many CPU cycles it gets. When a site is trying to go over its limit, you can either continue to browse it in slow mode, allow the permission prompt for better performance, or GTFO and find a less shitty website. It's just assumed right now that webpages get to be as much of a resource drain as they'd like, and site owners are acting as they've been incentivized too. Fifteen ad networks and a Monero miner? Sounds great!

wlesieutre 8y ago

IMO Google's previous moves to derank search results of pages with poor load times is a reasonable way to do it. Social sites could apply similar leverage, not promoting content as much if they know it loads slowly. Beyond that, I wonder if in browser "This page is loading slowly" wall of shame messages could work, styled similarly to the "This page tried to open four popup windows" alerts. Users don't have any visibility into page size or javascript load beyond how sluggish it feels, but both of these impact your user experience and battery life, so I'd love to see browsers do more to expose poorly performing sites. Browsers setting a benchmark for "This is unacceptably crappy" would let users know they should expect better. The hard part of that would be differentiating sites that use tons of resources for bullshit reasons from sites that are actually doing something.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
I use uMatrix, which makes JS opt-in rather than opt-out. It’s a hassle, but I get to choose to enable content I want while blocking trackers and bloat. It’d be great if those portions just weren’t transferred to me.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  I think what I'd like to have is a "Use significant resources" permission for sites. Off by default, and unless it's granted a webpage has a hard cap on how many CPU cycles it gets. When a site is trying to go over its limit, you can either continue to browse it in slow mode, allow the permission prompt for better performance, or GTFO and find a less shitty website. It's just assumed right now that webpages get to be as much of a resource drain as they'd like, and site owners are acting as they've been incentivized too. Fifteen ad networks and a Monero miner? Sounds great!