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>> For years website size was an acceptable proxy for user experience, but that's really not true today. Web browsers are much more complex about what they down

>> For years website size was an acceptable proxy for user experience, but that's really not true today. Web browsers are much more complex about what they download, when, and how that impacts the user experience. Looking at page weight and say "that's bad" is too coarse of a perspective. Has it really changed? Yes, browser perf was an issue then, but perhaps browsers have optimized away other issues. It is unclear to me if anything has improved over time for the large segment of users with limited or expensive bandwidth. This was a very large segment affected by bloated sites when the problem started being highlighted in articles like this one. Have bandwidth and latency issues been resolved for many people who had significant issues in 2015? I'm guessing 4G and the like have been able to penetrate areas fairly quickly, but I've not looked at global data on this topic for a very long time.

giantrobot 5y ago
> I'm guessing 4G and the like have been able to penetrate areas fairly quickly, but I've not looked at global data on this topic for a very long time. Just having 4G available doesn't mean much if the cells are congested, the networks have poor backhaul capacity, or just in a bad radio environment. There can also be a lot of jitter in latency even if there's decent bandwidth. A bunch of scripts can load fine but then grabbing that one necessary resource hangs and the whole page hangs. There's so many stupid interactivity blockers with big JavaScript pages that are made worse by poor network connectivity. Stuff like infinite scroll or blocking page visibility until an ad is visible breaks in jarring ways. High average speed is nice but cellular connectivity has issues in good conditions and a lot of unpredictability. Huge numbers of web users are on cellular data only (or shit public WiFi). I find too many websites ignore these users with fragile designs because of a preponderance of "works on my machine".

giantrobot 5y ago

> I'm guessing 4G and the like have been able to penetrate areas fairly quickly, but I've not looked at global data on this topic for a very long time. Just having 4G available doesn't mean much if the cells are congested, the networks have poor backhaul capacity, or just in a bad radio environment. There can also be a lot of jitter in latency even if there's decent bandwidth. A bunch of scripts can load fine but then grabbing that one necessary resource hangs and the whole page hangs. There's so many stupid interactivity blockers with big JavaScript pages that are made worse by poor network connectivity. Stuff like infinite scroll or blocking page visibility until an ad is visible breaks in jarring ways. High average speed is nice but cellular connectivity has issues in good conditions and a lot of unpredictability. Huge numbers of web users are on cellular data only (or shit public WiFi). I find too many websites ignore these users with fragile designs because of a preponderance of "works on my machine".