3 ms·
> `gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old
by gwern 5y ago
> `gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old iPad has trouble scrolling the page of text even after the font is rendered.
I use the standard `display: swap;` settings on fonts, so you shouldn't be seeing blank pages at all, your Safari browser should be showing the text immediately (and then, possibly, re-rendering once the SSfP font subset downloads). When I check https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls for Safari support, I see that Safari browsers got swap like 5 years ago. (Relatively quick, as Safari things go...) So I think that explains your problem. You are just using such an ancient browser (all Safari versions that old collectively constitute like 0.3% market share now) that it lacks basic performance optimizations that web devs need to take for granted. I held up my half of the bargain and used the relevant optimizations. Perhaps it's time you upgrade?
- watersb 5y agoWow, thanks for responding about this! ---- `font-display:swap` is great Font-display on CSS-Tricks: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-display/ https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-display/ MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Can I Use: https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls Last iOS for my iPad 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#11.1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#11.1 ^^^^ October 31, 2017 ---- I don't expect things to work well in these circumstances. Completely out of scope. I do wonder, though, what the wide world out there -- the non-computer-programmers -- might take away from all this. A web browser is the USB-C of software. It plugs into everything, and most people have no mental model of why things fail the way they do. Thanks very much for gwern.net, an inspiration for non-blogging me.
- gwern 5y agoThey just put up with it. "They'll never tell you it's broken": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... In this case, I think most people replace their iPads before they are old enough to attend middle school, so the problem wouldn't arise.