8 ms·
Interestingly enough, both the best and the worst experiences I've had on the web lately both belonged to tools-and-hardware suppliers: McMaster.com and HomeDep
by myself248 6y ago
Interestingly enough, both the best and the worst experiences I've had on the web lately both belonged to tools-and-hardware suppliers: McMaster.com and HomeDepot.com, respectively.
Everything about McMaster-Carr's site is built for speed and ease. I can literally have an idea, find the category, identify the specific part, and complete an order in about twenty seconds. (I've done this during a phone call. In the time it took my coworker to articulate the part he was looking for and finish his sentence, I was able to reply "It'll be here tomorrow.")
HomeDepot on the other hand sometimes takes 20 or 30 seconds to render the page to the point that I can see prices. I just checked with a page whose URL was already in my history, an unusually brisk 7 seconds. (Gag!) How do they screw it up so bad? I honestly don't understand how a web page can take so long to do anything.
- exmadscientist 6y agoThere is something _wrong_ with HomeDepot.com. It managed to send my poor laptop into swap hell/thrashing, which wasn't too surprising as that machine is always short on RAM. That it could do the same to a beefy workstation (16 cores, 64GB RAM), though... that was impressive. Whatever is wrong there, it hits memory especially hard.
- unnouinceput 6y agoI got a beefy one so I got curious to see this. And here is the response I got: Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.homedepot.com/ http://www.homedepot.com/" on this server. Reference #18.669a1702.1607500613.3482d63b I lol'ed.
- dncornholio 6y agoSame here, EU, think they block based on geo data?
- dismantlethesun 6y agoThey probably do. Since, I left the US on vacation, I've noticed a lot of US-only retail sites are blocked outside of the states. For example Safeway, a popular grocery chain, is blocked. Sometimes the block comes with a scary warning saying that the site has detected a hacking attempt, and stopped your IP at the firewall.
- culturestate 6y agoInterestingly, loading homedepot.com from Singapore gives me the full site and automatically sets my ordering location to their store in Guam...
- rozab 6y agoLocal news sites are the worst for it. It's understandable, but it sometimes makes reading HN a pain
- nfriedly 6y agoI made a web proxy about 10 years ago - you can stick it on a raspberry pi or some cloud server and then use it to browse from that machine's IP. It doesn't work for everything (e.g. OAuth) but it's fast and convenient for a lot of things. Core library: https://github.com/nfriedly/node-unblocker https://github.com/nfriedly/node-unblocker Example web app: https://github.com/nfriedly/nodeunblocker.com https://github.com/nfriedly/nodeunblocker.com I don't keep a copy of it online anymore because the ones I put up got a little too popular, but if you don't tell anyone else, you should be able to use it indefinitely.
- seszett 6y agoIt works for me from Belgium, but not from France.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoGDPR
- tecleandor 6y agoI think that's the "easy" way to manage GDPR that lots of non-EU (particularly from the USA) site are using: - EU IP? Blocked. It's beyond silly.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoIt's not: they don't operate in the EU, they don't want to give up their tracking, and they don't want to conform to EU privacy measures. That's perfectly fine, and simply denying EU visitors is the easiest and cheapest solution.
- lou1306 6y agoBut then, it should respond with a 451 error rather than a generic 403 :)
- Rexxar 6y agoSo "big brother" that want to track everything use a reference to 1984 to criticize a law that protect against it ? Perfect double speak in action (sadly).
- lou1306 6y agoThe 451 code (which, by the way, is a reference to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, not Orwell's 1984) just says that a resource is "unavailable for legal reasons". These "legal reasons" may be user-hostile (e.g., censorship) or user-friendly (e.g., GDPR). Having said that, it's just good form to specify why exactly a request was denied rather than spitting out an "access denied" response and call it a day. Be liberal in what you receive, conservative in what you send, yada yada.
- Rexxar 6y agoIndeed, for some reasons the two books are very near in my memory and each time I think to one of them memories of the other comes.
- michaelmrose 6y agoAre you connected to a VPN I get the same issue with Fred Meyer from a vpn.
- fogihujy 6y agoThe page loaded fairly fast in my case, but my laptop sounds like it's about to take off. An excellent example on how a web site should _not_ be built. :D
- lukeramsden 6y agoI loaded it and was surprised to find it loaded instantly, and worked and looked fine. Then I realised uMatrix was blocking JS. Explains a lot.
- confidantlake 6y agoI have 8GB RAM and it loaded fast for me. Shrug.
- arnaudsm 6y agoI am impressed by McMaster's search engine : every product is standardised and the search options really works. Amazon should really take note, their search engine is stuck at Stone age.
- vishnugupta 6y agoTalking about the worst: LinkedIn’s mobile web site. Horrible to the point of being unusable. One could argue it’s a good thing.
- raleighm 6y agoI'd assumed that was at least somewhat intentional, to encourage use of the app.
- danjac 6y agoSee also: Reddit.
- bregma 6y agoWhy single out their mobile web site? The non-mobile site is just as wretched. I just tried it and it took 24 seconds to finish loading (17 seconds before it was useful). Over 300 round-trip queries, and I have all ads and trackers disabled. They obviously know how bad their experience is because they throw up an animated splash screen while waiting for their page to load.
- tecleandor 6y agoWow, the McMaster-Carr's site is downright awesome. I wish I could use it in Europe. I'd like to hug this site developers.
- raleighm 6y agoSame here. I have no tool/hardware needs at the moment but I'm having a blast navigating the site.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoIt's kinda small for my liking, but I've got a big screen and didn't bother zooming in. Only niggly thing is that page clicks create a spinner; one thing they could do to improve is to pre-render everything, given that what I clicked on was just category pages. I've had great experiences with Gatsby on Netlify in that regard, we've built a number of websites using it. With Gatsby you get the benefits of a React webapp but without the downsides, things like preloading on hover, instant rendering, service workers acting as content caches, etc.
- madeofpalk 6y ago> With Gatsby you get the benefits of a React webapp but without the downsides Instead Gatsby just brings its own set of downsides. Gatsby does not scale very well and has horrific dev and build times when it needs to ingest a medium quantity of entries.
- Bayart 6y agoYeah, it's way better than Conrad or Manomano, who both use the same shitty layout you get from every etailer : gigantic full-page promotional material and some top categories in the middle to start navigating things. And in the end you have to tinker with filters for 5 minutes before narrowing it down to probably maybe the right part.
- tecleandor 6y agoHaven't tried Conrad, but Manomano it's a mess if you wanna look for something concrete. Once you enter in a category, it's like searching in eBay. It's so difficult to search by brand, model or specs...
- leokennis 6y agoWow. I know absolutely jack shit about home improvement etc., but that McMaster.com site is just a joy to browse. A temporary relief from the "modern web". It's like I'm querying a well set up database, but without having to type SQL.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoWhile not horrible on mobile, it could do with some work. It would be easy to make it perfect on mobile while retaining basically the same UI and with zero performance penalty
- arcturus17 6y agoJust checked McMaster, I would wager that a lot of what makes it great is the information architecture, from how it's probably modeled in the DB and how it's queried, to how it's presented in terms of UX.
- icelancer 6y agoMcMaster's website has been like that for years. Probably a decade now. It's always been great.
- amelius 6y agoSome websites are both fast and slow. For example, searching parts is quite fast on Digikey. However, Digikey's BOM manager is awfully slow.
- swiley 6y agoI think the difference is the marketing approach. HomeDepot takes a very modern approach of controlling and measuring everything the user does. This needs a ton of code and some absolutely ridiculous stuff no one here would ever build if they were told to redo the site. The McMaster-Carr mug is an example of marketing done right. It says "we're here to do precisely what you want in exchange for money."
- pojntfx 6y agoThat McMaster-Carr page is something else; they also use `fetch` very efficiently IMHO. Auto-focus on quantities as well ... that's how it's done.
- levitate 6y agoMcMaster is pretty much web designer developer porn
- gonzo41 6y agoOh nice, McMaster is a treat. It has something I talk about a lot at work. Information Density. That front page is like a phone book.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoIt's like their physical catalog
- afranchuk 6y agoThat's funny, I was just thinking this exact same thing the other day. HomeDepot.com has been getting seemingly worse and worse (especially this year if I'm not mistaken), but had to get some stuff from McMaster a few months back and it was refreshing to be reminded of how useable their website is.
- loughnane 6y agoI’ve been a mechanical engineer for some time. McMaster is an institution. Their catalog is still an iconic presence in engineering departments and you’re right, their site is incredible. Even for professionals you often don’t know what to call a part, but punch in a few words and it “gets” what you’re going for. Add tot hat pretty reliable next day shipping even when ordering at 4pm and it’s not so surprising that Amazon hasn’t eaten them, even though they launched Amazon Industrial like ~7-10y ago
- city41 6y agoI've always been curious about HD's website. Surely being so slow costs them a lot of missed sales? I would think a large successful retailer understands that. Is it just bureaucracy or do they genuinely think their website isn't important?
- patagurbon 6y agoYou should see the internal crap...
- ddevault 6y agoSimilar to McMaster.com is RockAuto.com: https://www.rockauto.com https://www.rockauto.com I would also shoutout to Mouser for a powerful interface for narrowing down what you want to buy, but its performance does leave something to be desired.
- robotnikman 6y agoWow, just checked out the McMaster site and its blazing fast! Its a breeze to browse through and use, I wish more websites were like that.