7 ms·

Why make it so complicated? Just assume everyone has a 2G connection (you don't see them because of a demographics problem, but 2G users are out there) and make

Why make it so complicated? Just assume everyone has a 2G connection (you don't see them because of a demographics problem, but 2G users are out there) and make sure all static information is accessible without JS. Don't think about web browser compat at all because that's a software problem which costs nothing to fix on the user end, while 2G and slow processors are hardware problems which cost a lot to fix.

bitwize 5y ago
2G and 3G are going away soon, it's LTE/5G or GTFO.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  > 2G and 3G are going away soon Only in the most developed countries, as places like Bolivia are still hanging on to 2G. You just don't hear about those places because of that demographics problem, so people assume 4G/5G are all that's out there.
  - SkyPuncher 5y ago
    How many companies are targeting their primary use case in Bolivia?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Bolivian companies I guess, duh.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      Probably not many, but there are two good counterarguments to that. The first is because that "primary use case" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Some Company isn't intentionally targeting places like Bolivia and instead feeds Big Macs to their website, then people in Bolivia could never discover Some Company's website because of its bloat. Because people can't discover it, Some Company never knows that it could target those people. The second is that not all websites are to promote some product or company, but only provide information. Information usually isn't country-specific, so ignoring the 2G demographic leaves them in the dust.
    - Turing_Machine 5y ago
      Hmm... at this point, someone with an entrepreneurial bent should probably be asking him- or herself "Just how much money is lying on the table in places like Bolivia?" Wikipedia tells me that Bolivia has a GDP (PPP) of $89.018 billion, and there are a bunch of countries like Bolivia.
      - dudeman13 5y ago
        If Bolivia is like sweet home, that money is concentraded as fuck so either their schtick would have to be ubiquitous for it to be worth it, or they would be selling to the ~10% richest in Bolivia (which probably have decent internet access). For all that people sometimes go on about untapped market potential in poor countries, it really isn't that easy when >90% of the population lives on less than 350 USD/month. Sauce: spent the first 1/4 of century of my life living in a third world shithole.
        Turing_Machine 5y ago
        Well, yeah, you're probably not going to sell many Lamborghinis there (other than to the elites you mention). On the other hand, Coca-Cola has a presence in Bolivia, and apparently controls about 60% of the Bolivian market. With 11 million people, that's gotta be a nice piece of change. If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off.
        lelanthran 5y ago
        > If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off. If what you're selling is BOTH: a) closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo and b) closer in demand to a Coke than a Lambo Then, sure, you shouldn't write it off. However, if you're selling stock-trading software, even for the price of a coke, you might not make enough money back to justify supporting Bolivia. Cokes, even in poor countries, are still purchased by tens of millions of people at least once a month. Selling a similarly priced item that may be purchased by a few hundred people at most is not the same thing as Coke.
        5y ago
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      Is that the right question to ask? Shouldn't we rather ask: how many companies care about users in Bolivia at all?
    - it_citizen 5y ago
      So what? With that line of reasoning, very few websites should care about accessibility for people with disabilities.
      - SkyPuncher 5y ago
        Well, this line of reasoning is why accessibility is federally required. It's something that most companies explicitly do not care about.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      There are 660 million people living in Latin America, roughly twice as many as in the United States. You can bet that there are companies targeting them. I know a couple and I live in Western Europe, so locally I'd expect that number to be just about as high as in any other place where people live.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Not in the Berlin U-Bahn, or on German intercity trains. Not in large swathes of rural land. Not for people who ran out of data, but still need to Google stuff.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    In the USA, the major telcos are shutting off their 2G and 3G towers, this year -- after which if you are not reachable with LTE or 5G, you will simply have no service.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      That doesn't account for private stations or congested areas where the service is technically 4G or WiFi, but you get 2G speeds.
krono 5y ago
Don't worry, we're slowly circling back to servers pushing out fully pre-rendered pages that don't require any scripts - or make it more convenient to create those, anyway. React's upcoming server-side components will likely be a very popular solution for achieving this. It's like PHP but this time in JavaScript.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  If I can't use an adblocker on it then count me out.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  The jsx soup already reminds me hacking php and html together with each other, truly back to the roots :)
  - klabb3 5y ago
    Indeed. But it's kinda funny that it quite literally came full circle.
- seumars 5y ago
  It’s disappointing to see that the consensus among frontend devs is to just sit and wait for a new API from react to do all the work. Every framework out there has simple methods for rendering a component to string which can be returned to the client.
  - tomphoolery 5y ago
    Trust me, no one who's actually working on this in the real world is banking on React's upcoming APIs for this at all. Suspense is still not done, and it's been over 4 years. Server components aren't happening anytime soon IMO. The only reason why I think this year is still tenable is because Vercel ate up all the React devs who can contribute to such a task. Most JS devs I've talked to or work with are writing code based on what we have now.
    - 5y ago
Lamad123 5y ago
You are a 2G user when you most need the Internet. Just drive in parts of New York state or Northeastern Pennsylvania (I mention these two states because they are not remote empty rectangles like Idaho or Utah).
golergka 5y ago
How are going to build something like Figma with these constraints?
- netr0ute 5y ago
  Why does anyone NEED Figma?
  - golergka 5y ago
    Depends on your definition of "need". But most people I know that use it enjoy it a lot, and especially collaboration features that they didn't have in desktop software.
    - swiftcoder 5y ago
      There's no particular reason why native desktop software can't support online collaboration - online video games all somehow manage to support networked interaction while running on the desktop.
      - golergka 5y ago
        I'm working on electron-based desktop software at my job. We support macos, windows and linux. Building the same software natively would take 4x developers, move much slower, and require a lot more coordination. We would also not have access to incredible ecosystem of libraries and tools that we have at our disposal now. And if we wanted to develop a web version, to enable potential customers to try it out without installation, it would be a separate project equal in complexity to what we're already doing right now.
        swiftcoder 5y ago
        Of these points, I think that (almost) free cross-compile to the web is the only one that really holds up to inspection. Cross-platform desktop software has been a thing for decades prior to Electron showing up on the scene, there are frameworks designed explicitly to support that, and there is a truly massive ecosystem of native libraries and tools.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
For the past 1.5 years I've been working on apps for the agriculture industry, mostly in Australia. This means 2G, slow 3G or satellite using customers are extremely common. No G too, if they're using your product out in the field. I myself lived 30 minutes drive from a mobile connection in 2021. A sheep literally ate my internet by chewing through the cable from the satellite to the house. So those users definitely exist in my demographic. And very much in the demographic of my clients, as potential customers. Still, it seems to be a hard sell to make things work with crap connections or offline. First off, frontend devs resist because you're taking away their favourite toys. (Very rational from their perspective - their next gig is probably in banking or retail or somewhere else with ubiquitous fast internet). Second off, those allocating budgets are very hesitant to spend money on any software dev out of the mainstream. From their perspective software is risky enough given its expense, let alone doing something that might require specialists. (This may be more of an Australian thing, they're not risk takers like Americans). So yes, you're very right on a technical level. I'm with you, and would love to talk to others who see this. On a more practical level - it's hard to make the stars align, even if it will land you customers.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Do you ever write articles / blog entries about this ? I love frugal programming (and it seems there's some people interested in that too). You're experience is pretty telling.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Appreciate the comment. I do keep meaning to blog. Anything in that post that caught your interest in particular? I'll make it happen.
    - stonenoodles 5y ago
      Would subscribe/read as well. Not original poster, but would be interested in these edge case challenges and solutions.
    - fomine3 5y ago
ravenstine 5y ago
What I find funny was the whole idea of a "web app" used to be that having JavaScript on the frontend perform lean API requests to the backend would result in a snappier experience for the user. It's turned out to be quite the opposite, though I primarily blame the developers rather than the technology itself; pretty much everyone is using the technology wrong, otherwise so many blogs wouldn't completely fail to show content with NoScript enabled.
fomine3 5y ago
OP is written by LINE employee, that's widely used messenger in some Asia. So it seems that it covers wide user range. Maybe Asia is good at 4G deployment, some developing country just skip 3G and deploy 4G. Or OP maybe only see Japan, where 4G coverage is enough high to stop supporting 3G on 5G phone.
onion2k 5y ago
If a user on 2G you'd probably be better off moving away from typical web dev entirely, and delivering a desktop or mobile app with as much clientside logic built in as possible (offline database, CRDT for syncing, no external dependencies, binary protocol for any critical networking, etc).
duckmysick 5y ago
> Don't think about web browser compat at all because that's a software problem which costs nothing to fix on the user end Disagree. It costs them time and attention. If they don't have to do something, they won't do it. Updating software is low on people's priority lists. And not everyone has automatic updates enabled.
jefftk 5y ago
From the article: 1. Other mobile browsers update independently from the OS, whereas Safari is only updated when there is an update to iOS. iOS devices that are no longer supported with newer versions of iOS cannot update to the latest version of Safari. 2. All browsers in iOS are based on Webkit: There are Chrome and Firefox versions for iOS but those use the same engine as Safari in iOS. This is because of an Apple guideline which mentions that all iOS browsers must use Webkit. These users can't fix this problem without getting a new device.

bitwize 5y ago

2G and 3G are going away soon, it's LTE/5G or GTFO.

netr0ute 5y ago
> 2G and 3G are going away soon Only in the most developed countries, as places like Bolivia are still hanging on to 2G. You just don't hear about those places because of that demographics problem, so people assume 4G/5G are all that's out there.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  How many companies are targeting their primary use case in Bolivia?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Bolivian companies I guess, duh.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    Probably not many, but there are two good counterarguments to that. The first is because that "primary use case" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Some Company isn't intentionally targeting places like Bolivia and instead feeds Big Macs to their website, then people in Bolivia could never discover Some Company's website because of its bloat. Because people can't discover it, Some Company never knows that it could target those people. The second is that not all websites are to promote some product or company, but only provide information. Information usually isn't country-specific, so ignoring the 2G demographic leaves them in the dust.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    Hmm... at this point, someone with an entrepreneurial bent should probably be asking him- or herself "Just how much money is lying on the table in places like Bolivia?" Wikipedia tells me that Bolivia has a GDP (PPP) of $89.018 billion, and there are a bunch of countries like Bolivia.
    - dudeman13 5y ago
      If Bolivia is like sweet home, that money is concentraded as fuck so either their schtick would have to be ubiquitous for it to be worth it, or they would be selling to the ~10% richest in Bolivia (which probably have decent internet access). For all that people sometimes go on about untapped market potential in poor countries, it really isn't that easy when >90% of the population lives on less than 350 USD/month. Sauce: spent the first 1/4 of century of my life living in a third world shithole.
      - Turing_Machine 5y ago
        Well, yeah, you're probably not going to sell many Lamborghinis there (other than to the elites you mention). On the other hand, Coca-Cola has a presence in Bolivia, and apparently controls about 60% of the Bolivian market. With 11 million people, that's gotta be a nice piece of change. If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off.
        lelanthran 5y ago
        > If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off. If what you're selling is BOTH: a) closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo and b) closer in demand to a Coke than a Lambo Then, sure, you shouldn't write it off. However, if you're selling stock-trading software, even for the price of a coke, you might not make enough money back to justify supporting Bolivia. Cokes, even in poor countries, are still purchased by tens of millions of people at least once a month. Selling a similarly priced item that may be purchased by a few hundred people at most is not the same thing as Coke.
        5y ago
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    Is that the right question to ask? Shouldn't we rather ask: how many companies care about users in Bolivia at all?
  - it_citizen 5y ago
    So what? With that line of reasoning, very few websites should care about accessibility for people with disabilities.
    - SkyPuncher 5y ago
      Well, this line of reasoning is why accessibility is federally required. It's something that most companies explicitly do not care about.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    There are 660 million people living in Latin America, roughly twice as many as in the United States. You can bet that there are companies targeting them. I know a couple and I live in Western Europe, so locally I'd expect that number to be just about as high as in any other place where people live.
nicbou 5y ago
Not in the Berlin U-Bahn, or on German intercity trains. Not in large swathes of rural land. Not for people who ran out of data, but still need to Google stuff.
- bitwize 5y ago
  In the USA, the major telcos are shutting off their 2G and 3G towers, this year -- after which if you are not reachable with LTE or 5G, you will simply have no service.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    That doesn't account for private stations or congested areas where the service is technically 4G or WiFi, but you get 2G speeds.

krono 5y ago

Don't worry, we're slowly circling back to servers pushing out fully pre-rendered pages that don't require any scripts - or make it more convenient to create those, anyway. React's upcoming server-side components will likely be a very popular solution for achieving this. It's like PHP but this time in JavaScript.

netr0ute 5y ago
If I can't use an adblocker on it then count me out.
Dma54rhs 5y ago
The jsx soup already reminds me hacking php and html together with each other, truly back to the roots :)
- klabb3 5y ago
  Indeed. But it's kinda funny that it quite literally came full circle.
seumars 5y ago
It’s disappointing to see that the consensus among frontend devs is to just sit and wait for a new API from react to do all the work. Every framework out there has simple methods for rendering a component to string which can be returned to the client.
- tomphoolery 5y ago
  Trust me, no one who's actually working on this in the real world is banking on React's upcoming APIs for this at all. Suspense is still not done, and it's been over 4 years. Server components aren't happening anytime soon IMO. The only reason why I think this year is still tenable is because Vercel ate up all the React devs who can contribute to such a task. Most JS devs I've talked to or work with are writing code based on what we have now.
  - 5y ago

Lamad123 5y ago

You are a 2G user when you most need the Internet. Just drive in parts of New York state or Northeastern Pennsylvania (I mention these two states because they are not remote empty rectangles like Idaho or Utah).

golergka 5y ago

How are going to build something like Figma with these constraints?

netr0ute 5y ago
Why does anyone NEED Figma?
- golergka 5y ago
  Depends on your definition of "need". But most people I know that use it enjoy it a lot, and especially collaboration features that they didn't have in desktop software.
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    There's no particular reason why native desktop software can't support online collaboration - online video games all somehow manage to support networked interaction while running on the desktop.
    - golergka 5y ago
      I'm working on electron-based desktop software at my job. We support macos, windows and linux. Building the same software natively would take 4x developers, move much slower, and require a lot more coordination. We would also not have access to incredible ecosystem of libraries and tools that we have at our disposal now. And if we wanted to develop a web version, to enable potential customers to try it out without installation, it would be a separate project equal in complexity to what we're already doing right now.
      - swiftcoder 5y ago
        Of these points, I think that (almost) free cross-compile to the web is the only one that really holds up to inspection. Cross-platform desktop software has been a thing for decades prior to Electron showing up on the scene, there are frameworks designed explicitly to support that, and there is a truly massive ecosystem of native libraries and tools.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

For the past 1.5 years I've been working on apps for the agriculture industry, mostly in Australia. This means 2G, slow 3G or satellite using customers are extremely common. No G too, if they're using your product out in the field. I myself lived 30 minutes drive from a mobile connection in 2021. A sheep literally ate my internet by chewing through the cable from the satellite to the house. So those users definitely exist in my demographic. And very much in the demographic of my clients, as potential customers. Still, it seems to be a hard sell to make things work with crap connections or offline. First off, frontend devs resist because you're taking away their favourite toys. (Very rational from their perspective - their next gig is probably in banking or retail or somewhere else with ubiquitous fast internet). Second off, those allocating budgets are very hesitant to spend money on any software dev out of the mainstream. From their perspective software is risky enough given its expense, let alone doing something that might require specialists. (This may be more of an Australian thing, they're not risk takers like Americans). So yes, you're very right on a technical level. I'm with you, and would love to talk to others who see this. On a more practical level - it's hard to make the stars align, even if it will land you customers.

agumonkey 5y ago
Do you ever write articles / blog entries about this ? I love frugal programming (and it seems there's some people interested in that too). You're experience is pretty telling.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  Appreciate the comment. I do keep meaning to blog. Anything in that post that caught your interest in particular? I'll make it happen.
  - stonenoodles 5y ago
    Would subscribe/read as well. Not original poster, but would be interested in these edge case challenges and solutions.
  - fomine3 5y ago

ravenstine 5y ago

What I find funny was the whole idea of a "web app" used to be that having JavaScript on the frontend perform lean API requests to the backend would result in a snappier experience for the user. It's turned out to be quite the opposite, though I primarily blame the developers rather than the technology itself; pretty much everyone is using the technology wrong, otherwise so many blogs wouldn't completely fail to show content with NoScript enabled.

fomine3 5y ago

OP is written by LINE employee, that's widely used messenger in some Asia. So it seems that it covers wide user range. Maybe Asia is good at 4G deployment, some developing country just skip 3G and deploy 4G. Or OP maybe only see Japan, where 4G coverage is enough high to stop supporting 3G on 5G phone.

onion2k 5y ago

If a user on 2G you'd probably be better off moving away from typical web dev entirely, and delivering a desktop or mobile app with as much clientside logic built in as possible (offline database, CRDT for syncing, no external dependencies, binary protocol for any critical networking, etc).

duckmysick 5y ago

> Don't think about web browser compat at all because that's a software problem which costs nothing to fix on the user end Disagree. It costs them time and attention. If they don't have to do something, they won't do it. Updating software is low on people's priority lists. And not everyone has automatic updates enabled.

jefftk 5y ago

From the article: 1. Other mobile browsers update independently from the OS, whereas Safari is only updated when there is an update to iOS. iOS devices that are no longer supported with newer versions of iOS cannot update to the latest version of Safari. 2. All browsers in iOS are based on Webkit: There are Chrome and Firefox versions for iOS but those use the same engine as Safari in iOS. This is because of an Apple guideline which mentions that all iOS browsers must use Webkit. These users can't fix this problem without getting a new device.