15 ms·

Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

196 points by robertritz 4y ago

gilbetron 4y ago
Because that represents the patience of the typical user. For the most part, apps/sites/whatever have always hovered around such a limit. It takes that long not because of tech, but because of people.
b0rsuk 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yawnxyz 4y ago
Despite faster computers every year, my computers don't seem to run any faster, either
- kps 4y ago
  “What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.”
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Is the quote attributed to Bill "why should I refactor code when CPUs get faster, drives get larger" an internet legend or a terribly paraphrased line said by Bill?
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Count your pixels.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    You mean that a modern computer has to push more pixels than an old one? I don't think that's enough to explain the apparent lack of progress.
  - alt227 4y ago
    My 1920x1080 LCD monitor has LESS pixels than my CRT monitor in the 90s :)
- CursedUrn 4y ago
  Software wastes any gains we get from hardware. See Jonathan Blow's talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Computer speed is a lot like driving traffic times. The amount of time it takes is pretty fixed as it’s based on what people find acceptable which doesn’t change. With faster computers just comes more features at the same speed.
  - yawnxyz 4y ago
    Atlanta keeps adding new lanes to highways, but the traffic jams never get any better! (There's probably better throughput though)
- timmb 4y ago
  But software is faster to write and so in theory cheaper to buy.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It's just disheartening to see software racing to the bottom, quality-wise.
focusedone 4y ago
1kb.club would like a word.
sxates 4y ago
Ironically this page loaded for me in about 500ms on my 1GB fiber connection.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Its almost the pattern that the articles complaining about bloat contribute about bloat themselves. Projection.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  And bizarrely, even though it's a simple blog post it's almost 15MB.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Your network packets are making a round trip between your computer and the nearest server the site is on, so there's always going to be a hard limit on site speed based on distance. That has to happen a few times for DNS, OPTIONS, a GET for the HTML, maybe more for any blocking resources. Add on parsing and rendering and it's probably getting close to impossible to get much under 100ms for for websites these days. 5 times that isn't great but it does seem a little unreasonable to complain.
- sxates 4y ago
  To be clear, I wasn't complaining about the speed. 1/2 a second is pretty quick when the average is 6 seconds.
jay_kyburz 4y ago
My broadband speed hasn't changed since I moved into my house 9 years ago. Just saying.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  do things feel slower since then?
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    I have ad blocking everywhere so, no. About the same.
alex_young 4y ago
Idk about fast, but a broken back button is kind of a problem.
- eimrine 4y ago
  I wish my browser to save the full state of js app on every action firing which use to alter the state. No matter how much storage is needed for this approach.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Sounds like a fun way to go OOM :')
    - eimrine 4y ago
      This data is not for RAM, it may be done using an HDD or even cloud. This data is not for reading but for storing only. I mean, the concept of browsing history was born when the HDDs used to have memory of a fruit fly and a price of an elephant, I really do not need headers only in my history because most of them become dead in 3-5 years. Wouldn't it great to read my 10-years old interactions with web or to save some big SPA for interacting with it later maybe when no online will be available?
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    You'd be better off saving a copy of the images and code and recording your UI playback! Or just stream is as video on Youtube and let Google pay for the storage :)
- ekianjo 4y ago
  In Japan a bunch of crappy 90s looking websites at least have the courtesy to tell you that the Back button does not work and "do not use it"
  - muh_gradle 4y ago
    That would not make me any happier.
ohCh6zos 4y ago
This website loads an exceptional amount of data for what it is, at least for me. On my browser it makes calls to a site called streamlitapp.com every 100 ms. It appears to be using about 100MB of bandwidth every 10 seconds from what I can see
- robertritz 4y ago
  100MB is a LOT. Do you perhaps mean 100KB? Streamlit is the framework I used to build the app at the bottom of the article with. It does unfortunately load a decent amount of JS. However it should be non-blocking, which means it won't interfere with how quickly you can see or use the page. It pings back to Streamlit to keep your session state alive as it's running a whole Python interpreter on the backend for each session. The speed index for this page hovers between 1-2 seconds when I test it.
  - classified 4y ago
    Using a wasteful app to complain about bad page design. Oh irony.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      It seems to ping with about 800B for a response of about the same size every 2 seconds. So every minute that's about 25KB up and 25KB down. I wouldn't do it like that, but to call that wasteful when many websites need 5MB of ad code before they let you see anything is a bit over the top!
burlesona 4y ago
We can wish that crappy websites didn’t get more bloated every year, but as long as they still load fast enough most people don’t know the difference or care. Everything has an opportunity cost, so once things are good enough the resources that could be spent optimizing will be spent elsewhere instead, and bloat that can be added to solve other business goals will be added. It’s understandable to get frustrated by this, but at some point you realize it’s pointless. This is true in many, many facets of life. Household possessions tend to expand to fill the available square footage. Cities sprawl haphazardly until commute times become unbearable. Irrigation expands until the rivers are depleted. Life expands to the limit, always.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  That would only be true if every one of your customers had fast, loss free, reliable internet 100% of the time they want to access a website. Even in a modern city this is rarely the case. So I'm afraid the real answer is that webdev is just not mature yet.
  - jacobjr23 4y ago
    Businesses don't need to provide a perfect experience to every one of their customers. If they did, they would. Like previously said, businesses are good at satisfying customer needs as dictated by their customers' wallets.
    - dazc 4y ago
      Ironically, the worst website I have to regularly navigate is my ISP's.
  - deburo 4y ago
    I blame the devs before I blame the platform. Relational databases are mature enough and yet devs still find ways to create queries that time out with only a few thousand rows in their tables.
WalterBright 4y ago
My boring html-only pages load pretty fast.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  Browsing with NoScript feels pretty snappy, too
amused2death 4y ago
in my android and linux pc, firefox will refuse to display web pages which was fully downloaded couple hours before. ff always ask for internet connection although all needed files are in the cache. i'm on internet diet (disable wifi for hours long) so bad behaviors are apparent those who always-on-24/7 fiber may not notice
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I've seriously always wondered exactly what the purpose of a cache for web pages in a browser is. Why is it there? It takes up many megabytes (or even GB) of space. Yet it seems to serve no purpose whatsoever: every time you navigate to that page, it always reloads it from the web server, even if you just briefly (mis-)click on a link and then click on "back". A lot of disk space could be saved by simply eliminating these caches.
  - zuhsetaqi 4y ago
    Because for some files developers can set a max time it should be cached. Just open developer tools and go to the Network tab, make sure "Disable Cache" is unchecked and then reload the page. In the column "Transferred" you can see, which things are loaded from cache
sp332 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220923024040/https://www.datafantic.com/how-much-time-do-we-waste-waiting-for-websites-to-load/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220923024040/https://www.dataf... Do you think this is including ad loads? Ad networks run a real-time auction. It takes some time to collect bids so the highest can be chosen.
- fmajid 4y ago
  OpenRTB is capped at 100ms for the auction and in practice much less than that. One of the few areas of web development or assimilated where serious attention is paid to performance.
modeless 4y ago
I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents. Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the clicking for us, and summarize the results in a much simpler UI designed to actually be fast and useful, vs. designed to optimize the business metrics of some company as interpreted by a gaggle of product managers. This isn't unprecedented. Plaid screen scrapes terrible bank websites and turns them into APIs, though without AI. Google Duplex uses AI to turn restaurant phone numbers into an API for making reservations. DeepMind's Sparrow[1], just announced today, answers factual questions posed in plain English by performing Google searches and summarizing the results. But it's going to be a revolution when it becomes much more general and able to take actions rather than just summarize information. It isn't far off! https://adept.ai https://adept.ai is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about, and I expect there are a lot more people working on similar things that are still in stealth mode. [1] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-agents https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-agents
- bretbernhoft 4y ago
  Your point about more people working on similar projects in stealth mode is likely an underappreciated notion. And thank you for introducing me to Adept; looking forward to keeping my eyes on that company's progress.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  > we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English Language is an imprecise tool, it has inherent ambiguity. Language is also laborious and one dimensional (stream of bits over temporal dimension). A tool such as the one you describe would be extremely frustrating to use.
  - 4y ago
shawnz 4y ago
basically Jevons' paradox
SeanLuke 4y ago
This would seem to be Myhrvold's first law in action. https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-its-a-gas/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-its-a-gas/
wodenokoto 4y ago
Not just load time, but "time to read content" has exploded. Once the webapp has downloaded and it can start doing REST like requests for the actual content, it also needs to start loading pop-ups and the "continue reading"-button, that can hide the content after it is loaded. So once all that is done, the user needs to click away cookie consent banner, newsletter sign-up and the continue reading button. And only now can we stop the clock on "time to read content". This is a big reason why I read comments first. I click and get straight to content. EDIT: I just realized that the "time to ..."-moniker works really bad in my phrasing here. Maybe "time to start reading" would have been better.
- Kiro 4y ago
  What's the point of "continue reading"? Why not just show the full thing immediately?
  - praptak 4y ago
    It's obviously to show more ads.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      Can't be that obvious considering every reply claims a different reason.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Makes those user engagement metrics look good?
  - lrem 4y ago
    A measuring point.
    - emiliobumachar 4y ago
      Don't web developers get full access to the state of the user's scrolling?
Joeri 4y ago
Speaking from experience, at shipping time of a new site performance testing is done, and the developers are asked to improve performance until it is just good enough. So it doesn’t matter how big or small the site is, unless by shipping time it is already faster than desired it will only get optimized to run as fast as every other site, but no faster.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I wonder if it is time to explore alternative syntax parsers with a more generic API to accommodate other markup formats. At least initially this could be 1:1 with HTML but eventually could support new functions not limited by HTML itself so that the features and languages can move at separate paces. Being able to render an enhanced markdown or JSON or YAML page in the browser without any generators would be phenomenal and resolve a lot of long-standing issues with structured data.
elorant 4y ago
Sure they do. Just disable ads, and all 3rd party JS.
alkonaut 4y ago
Good enough is good enough. Just like faster computers don’t make new apps any faster (even at the peak of scaling decades ago), they make sure we can write more complex apps without making them too slow, or equivalently, add more things to apps and sites if there is any performance headroom left.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Good enough is good enough. Oh to be a mere average computer user. I work with files that can still take some non-instant time after hitting save to complete. Conversely, it still takes some non-instant time to open said file. As long as there's such a thing as progress bars, count downs, spinning wheels, beach balls, etc, there is always room to make things faster.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I develop very complicated software for a living and as always, there are some features that will take an unreasonable amount of time. On large documents, you have customers wait 5 seconds for a regular operation (that you may need to complete dozens of times in a row). And yet when you ask customers whether they want more features, or a faster program it's invariably features. Fix a bug or add a feature? Add a feature. Improve perf or add a feature? Add a feature. My own tolerance for delays is tiny, but my "average users" seem to not suffer from it at all. I guess the reason is this: they know how much time something took before. They know that if this takes 10 seconds and it took them an hour to do on paper, that's quick. Meanwhile for me I'm in the IDE having a 200ms keystroke delay and I'm almost having a heart attack.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      >And yet when you ask customers whether they want more features, or a faster program it's invariably features. Fix a bug or add a feature? Add a feature. Improve perf or add a feature? Add a feature. Of course this is what they want. To the user, the damn thing should have been working when you released it. To the user, you shouldn't have to ask to have something that's broken but is meant to be a feature to be fixed. If it's not working, why is it there in the first place. Fix it. Duh. But also add new features before your competitor does and takes your users. This is such a weird excuse on discussions about a progress bar.
manuelmoreale 4y ago
The irony of this post is that the single heaviest resource loaded by this page is a 750kb image used only for the meta tags as a sharing image which most people consuming and downloading the page will never see. What's baffling to me is how people love to spend seemingly infinite time playing with tech stacks and what not but then pay very little attention to basic details like what to load and how many resources do they really need.
- Dma54rhs 4y ago
  These images don't get loaded by a browser, probably it's being used somewhere else. 750kb is way too big for that kind of image anyway.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Ah you're right. It's even dumber. It's used as a header image but it's then hidden with a display: None !important; But I see the image inside the network tab so bandwidth is getting wasted for no reason.
datadata 4y ago
It is possible that website loading is bottlenecked by latency and an irreducible number of round trips needed. Bandwidth is not obviously a bottleneck.
- kmitz 4y ago
  I was wondering the same thing, especially with https
fmajid 4y ago
Throughput of networks is increasing but latency doesn’t improve as much (although 5G wireless is a big improvement over 4G LTE). Also TCP slow-start limits how fast an HTTP connection can go, and most are short-lived so the connection is still ramping up when it is closed. That’s one of the supposed benefits of QUIC a.k.a. HTTP/3. And then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays.
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  On mobile latency has constantly improved. GPRS/EDGE was often +100ms ping --> 3G 400-50ms depending on the day --> 4G/LTE 50-30ms and now I'm often getting sub-20ms ping on 5G connections.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Yes, moving from voice-centric to IP-centric network technology has helped, and 5G paid laudable attention to latency. Their target for 5G is actually 1ms, but of course backhaul will dominate that.
    - gsich 4y ago
      1ms only to the tower.
      - fmajid 4y ago
        Yes, backhaul (the connection from the tower to the Internet via the carrier's central facilities) dominates, as well as queueing latency for packets waiting to be delivered to phones, since traffic is overwhelmingly downloads.
    - gnyman 4y ago
      I had heard the 1 ms number also and did some research some time ago. As far as I understood the 1 ms is for specialised low latency connections and devices not for the every day browsing. Here are two sources which I found useful at that time https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean-bubley https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean...
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Well we could start here and now by reporting load sizes/site footprint in bytes which wouldn't look out of place on hn, along with badges for cookie consent dialogs, ga usage, non-responsive design, high energy consumption flags for sites that suck the last power out of your mobile, and other non-desiderata. Or just mark a site as requiring JavaScript so we can avoid it. DDG should be doing the same.
mostlystatic 4y ago
Desktop bandwidth is improving over time, but as I understand HTTP Archive is still using a 5 Mbps cable connection. From their FAQ/changelog [1]: > 19 Mar 2013: The default connection speed was increased from DSL (1.5 mbps) to Cable (5.0 mbps). This only affects IE (not iPhone). There was another popular article on HN a while ago [2], claiming mobile websites had gotten slower since 2011. But actually HTTP Archive just started using a slower mobile connection in 2013. I wrote more about that issue with the HTTP Archive data at the time [3]. [1] https://httparchive.org/faq https://httparchive.org/faq [2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/ [3] https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower
- mostlystatic 4y ago
  Regarding "4 seconds wasted" per visit: HTTP Archive also publishes real-user performance data from Google, and only 10% of desktop websites take 4 seconds or more to load. (And I think that's not the average experience but the 75th percentile.) https://httparchive.org/reports/chrome-ux-report#cruxSlowLcp https://httparchive.org/reports/chrome-ux-report#cruxSlowLcp The Google data uses Largest Contentful Paint instead of Speed Index, but the two metrics ultimately try to measure the same thing. Both have pros and cons. Speed Index goes up if there are ongoing animations (e.g sliders). LCP only looks at the single largest content element. When looking at the real-user LCP data over time, keep in mind that changes are often due to changes in the LCP definition (e.g opacity 0 elements used to count but don't any more). https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/speed/metrics_changelog/lcp.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
ReptileMan 4y ago
Since I started using the Adguard dns - it is surprising how much faster everything is. But still there is too much cruft in the most common sites. A startup could probably nuke reddit in a month if they just concentrate on performance and usability.
qwerty456127 4y ago
In the past computers (incl. hard drives and CPUs) were orders of magnitude faster than the communication lines so it made sense to compress everything as hard as possible and cache that. Now I have a 10 Gbps line, a 1 Gbps network card (I don't feel like I need a faster one), a 200 Mbps SSD and the CPU often is near-100%-loaded.
imgabe 4y ago
I got a new M2 Macbook and it's astonishing how much faster the web is. It seems a lot of the lag must just be javascript execution time and not content loading.
- dham 4y ago
  Don't worry web developers will come up with more ways to over-engineer a form with 2 inputs.
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
HackerNews loads pretty fast, and would be one of my favorite sites even if it didn't.
ethn 4y ago
Jevon’s paradox: “…occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating reductions in resource use.” Developers will therefore always maximize resource usage as more becomes available.
rob74 4y ago
> With home broadband reaching 70 Mbps globally The source for that is some stats from speedtest.net, which I assume is calculated from the users who used their speed test? So it's probably heavily skewed towards power users who have a fast connection and want to check if they are really getting what they are paying for. Most "casual" users with shitty DSL connections are happy if "the internet" works at all and are pretty unlikely to ever use this service...
- Springtime 4y ago
  Prior topics on HN about those speed tests (eg[1]) also show ISPs prioritize them which gives a misleading representation of typical speeds. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062799
  - dspillett 4y ago
    This is why Netflix started their own (fast.com), making it more difficult for ISPs to throttle NF video content (or just prioritise speedtest traffic) and blame NF for poor performance (or poor quality because it was using more highly compressed streams to deal with low throughput) because “if you run any speedtest you'll see your connection through us is fine, it must be NF being busy”.
zuhsetaqi 4y ago
No website I use does take 6 seconds to load. And I have 50 Mbps downlink. Can anyone name a website that does take that long to load? Github for example does load in 4.37 seconds with cache disabled in developer tools. CNN does take 3.58 seconds. But I'm using uBlock origin …
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  > But I'm using uBlock origin … You aren't loading all the adtech webshit that makes up the majority of a page load. Given that network wide adblock/tracker blocking saves upwards of 60% of bandwidth (for web traffic) on the average network, its pretty obvious where the problem is.
crb 4y ago
I maintain that "booting a Mac, loading Chrome, loading Google Docs, and getting ready to type", takes as long as "booting DOS, starting Windows 3.1, loading Word for Windows 2.0", takes as long as "loading GEOS from floppy disk on a C64, loading geoWrite", and so on, and so forth.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  If anything, it probably got slightly slower over the years. Reminds me of that time when we switched from writing by hand (and sometimes typing on a typewriter) all kinds of forms and reports to composing them on a computer and then printing it: initial time savings were pretty huge and so, naturally, the powers that be said "well, guess We can make you fill much more paperwork than you currently are filling" and did so. In the end, the amount of paperwork increased slightly out of proportion and we're now spending slightly more time on it than we used to. A sort of a law of conservation of effort, if you will.
- dspillett 4y ago
  Try beat: 1. Power on BBC 2. Type *EDIT[ENTER] Though obviously not as fully featured as a modern word processor, or even some editors of the time.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  The interesting twist to me is that waking up a phone and opening the Google Docs app is the same time length or a tad faster. We haven't progressed in speed, but versatility is theough the roof compared to 10 ~ 20 years ago.
- tekkk 4y ago
  No, c'mon. I still remember how it took ages for my old Windows to boot up and even get to the desktop. Maybe DOS was faster without GUI but it was god damn slow at one point. And all that weird noise your PC would make while reading from the disk non-withstanding the dance with the modem. With my current Mac I'd say it takes about 15s to open Docs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
a_c 4y ago
Making general software faster is saving the planet, both by saving human waiting time and carbon footprint on electricity. We are not measuring on this domain enough and we should start doing so. The added bonus is that faster software/website makes better UX, and we saves time on doing "UX research" as well.
danburbridge 4y ago
See also Induced demand/traffic: building more roads/adding lanes to roads increases congestion rather than decreasing it: https://bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/trunk-roads-traffic-report.pdf https://bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/trunk-roa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
- teeray 4y ago
  I thought about exactly this when I saw this headline. Extra bandwidth just means we can have video header images rather than a still. Here, have a few more tracking scripts.
RobotToaster 4y ago
Javascript and it's consequences have been a disaster for the web.
lm28469 4y ago
Before I upgraded my macbook air 2019 to an m1 I could barely visit most "big" websites. I remember a redesign of a specific store that went from "perfectly usable albeit a bit outdated in term of design" to "10x slower, looks nicer but usability is dog shit"
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Which is exactly why professional users use desktops.
Gud 4y ago
I used to be bothered by this, but in reality it works like a filter. The crappier the website, the crappier the content.
fasteo 4y ago
>>> Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster I would rephrase it: Because faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
preya2k 4y ago
The title of this post is annoying: Typically we say "faster broadband", when we talk about bandwidth, not about "speed" (which would be latency). So obviously, as long as your website is not larger than your bandwidth capacity, nothing is gonna get "faster", when you upgrade your broadband bandwidth. This is the same as saying "Despite larger pipes every year, water still doesn't reach your house any faster".
- xuki 4y ago
  Bandwidth = data per unit of time. So for the same amount of data, faster bandwidth absolutely decreases load time.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Expanding on this point: If a website is transferring more data to render content, or worse, before starting to display content, then bandwidth matters as it will move that data more quickly. If a website requires multiple round trips to complete a given request, then latency will also matter, and sets an absolute minimum floor to time-to-display (TTD) regardless of bandwidth. The higher your latency, the slower that process. In theory it's possible for an SPA (single-page application) to be more responsive despite an overall larger page weight as it can incrementally request and present additional content. In practice such pages often perform worse on time to display due to both increased total data transfer and round-trip request requirements. A lightweight HTTP/2 HTML+CSS only site can be far more performant if it's based on static pages and request/load dynamics.
mrtri 4y ago
yodsanklai 4y ago
Classic rebound effect. Same thing for cars. > Contrary to popular belief, the average car is not in fact that much more fuel-efficient than older cars. Still, to this day, the average vehicle has a range of between 20 and 30 miles per gallon; a stat which was very similar in the 1920s. But, why is this? Well, cars are a whole lot bigger.
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  It's not cars just being bigger, they need to produce less toxic emissions too because of regulations.
can16358p 4y ago
More bandwidth, more processing power, more browser APIs and support for shiny CSS effects: More sites taking advantage of them at the same pace of technical development, cancelling them out. Otherwise if we had a website from 10 years ago it is faster to load with today's connections.
kmitz 4y ago
It'd be interesting to know why load time hasn't improved. In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency ? Is it a problem of latency or bandwidth ? What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Just wondering
- doix 4y ago
  > In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? I'm not sure what sort of analysis you're looking for, but different sites have different problems. I'm not convinced that averaging them makes sense, and it's very difficult to create a reasonable metric. As soon as you start measuring some specific metric, people will optimize for it whilst still making the site unusable. Unfortunately "usable state" is too hard to quantify without it being game-able. > How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency Very little, you can check here [0] and see for yourself. Obviously it depends on your distance to the server you are reaching, but the added latency of HTTPS isn't really a factor when you're looking at 10s for a page to load. > What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Lets look at CNN (only because I happen to remember that a lite version exists thanks to someone on HN). The lite[1] version loads entirely in 350ms for me. The normal version[2] with adblock on finishes loading everything after 1.43s. The normal version with adblock off, finishes loading after 20s and reflows a bunch of times as ads get loaded. So I agree with the rest of the comments, it's "because of js and adtech". Disclaimer: I'm in South Africa at the moment on 4g, my internet isn't the best :) [0] https://www.httpvshttps.com/ https://www.httpvshttps.com/ [1] https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en [2] https://edition.cnn.com/ https://edition.cnn.com/
- Kye 4y ago
  I put Patreon's official button on a site once and was confused at the seconds it added to the load. It's a little button! Turns out it was hauling in 10MB of analytics scripts.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? I don't know about a real analysis, but it's pretty easy to see the effect in your own browser. Disable JS and see how much faster the page loads.
mindless_solips 4y ago
"Grove giveth, Gates taketh away"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zxienin 4y ago
On similar note: Despite faster hardware every year, laptops don't perform any better, running applications. Usage experience with typical specs of 2022 (500G SSD and 16G RAM) is as good or bad as ones from 20 years back (say, 20G HDD and 128M RAM).
- AStrangeMorrow 4y ago
  Actually curious, what do you mean exactly by "doesn't perform better" in this context? My experience doesn't go as far (10-15 years), but while I agree a whole subset of softwares don't feel much different (text editors, web browsers), in some other domains I can feel the difference (video games, programing IDEs and the tools they offer). Where I imagine I agree is if a computer hardware becomes 10x more performant, there is not a related 10x improvement performance on softwares
  - dham 4y ago
    I started software professionally in 2008 and I honestly can't tell a difference between literally anything in this time period. I was using Netbeans and doing Java EE / JSF and the feedback loop feels about the same as it does today. I do remember going from Java EE to Play Framework and it being a little faster feedback loop. Sublime Text still works about the same as it did on Leopard. The only noticeable speed bump I've felt in this time period was going to an M1 from 2019 Intel MacbookPro. I think the reason is the 2019 Intel Macbook pro is one of the slowest computers to ever be released and while throttled (99% of the time) it was slower than my 2015 Macbook Pro and maybe even my 2013. I'm sure the M1 will be eaten up with React and Electron apps soon enough.
gwbas1c 4y ago
The slowdowns come from: Latency: Part of the page loads, and then the page asks for more data. In some cases, (such as loading a page hosted on another continent,) this is bound by the speed of light. Poor data access (database) code: Sometimes this is due to lazy or incompetent programmers, other times its due to the fact that "not instant" is "good enough." Writing a web page to load everything very quickly in a single request is surprisingly hard, and will often break modern and easily understood design patterns.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Latency: Part of the page loads, and then the page asks for more data. In some cases, (such as loading a page hosted on another continent,) this is bound by the speed of light. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that web pages are just built as giant JavaScript applications for no reason. With a page pretending to be an app, the browser has to download, parse, and execute the JavaScript core before the browser can do anything. All of the resources are hidden somewhere inside the application and the browser is stuck with its thumb up its ass unable to load or do anything. Sites using a bunch of JavaScript to "render" everything client side are causing their own stupid problems. I just built a toy React app that only displays Hello World. It's the most trivial app that isn't just a blank project. A production build of it weighs in at 143kB for just the JavaScript portion. It's also multiple resource requests just to load that crap. Even bundled into an HTML skeleton it's still 145kB of JavaScript to run before the browser can do anything else. Served locally it takes about 20ms to load that React app and draw something on my screen. An HTML copy of Frankenstein (463kB) loaded from the same server loaded in 5ms. A plain HTML document three times the size of the toy React "app" loaded in a quarter of the time! > Writing a web page to load everything very quickly in a single request is surprisingly hard, and will often break modern and easily understood design patterns. I find this to be an odd take. This nearly 4,000 word CNN article[0] including graphics weighs in at 70kB. The HTML alone including a bunch of inline styling (tables, font tags, etc) weighs only 55kB. With no graphics loaded it is still a perfectly readable article. Loading the HTML of that page in my above test it still loads in 5ms and is 100% readable. Not just that but I can navigate with the sidebars and headers. In less space than just a toy React app I've got a completely usable page that can display as close to instantly as my eyes can determine. There's nothing about "modern and easily understood design patterns" that requires hundreds of kB of JavaScript or even extra CSS. It would be trivial to replace the table and font tags with CSS in the header and likely get the whole document even smaller while keeping 100% of the functionality and navigation. The CNN article example coincidentally shows how stupid the JavaScript bloat problem is because several of the images are not found and the 404 pages CNN is returning in their place are a megabyte. [0] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9806/24/win98.idg/index.html http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9806/24/win98.idg/index.ht...
jrm4 4y ago
Sure. Again, the basic issue is that this is not optimized for the user. It's optimized for whoever stands to make money from the pages.
orobinson 4y ago
Recently I've been wondering why my internet seems to be getting so slow. It then dawned on me that webpage bloat has progressed to the point that my 2015 MacBook (the small one with the rubbish processor) really struggles to load a typical webpage in a reasonable amount of time.
bombcar 4y ago
You can make pages insanely fast: https://danluu.com/car-safety/ https://danluu.com/car-safety/ for example, but you will notice it is very simple and lacks video/ads. This is not optimized for "engagement" or whatever proxy for "money in my pocket", however, so it's pretty rare.
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196 points by robertritz 4y ago

Because that represents the patience of the typical user. For the most part, apps/sites/whatever have always hovered around such a limit. It takes that long not because of tech, but because of people.

b0rsuk 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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yawnxyz 4y ago

Despite faster computers every year, my computers don't seem to run any faster, either

kps 4y ago
“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.”
- dylan604 4y ago
  Is the quote attributed to Bill "why should I refactor code when CPUs get faster, drives get larger" an internet legend or a terribly paraphrased line said by Bill?
lostmsu 4y ago
Count your pixels.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  You mean that a modern computer has to push more pixels than an old one? I don't think that's enough to explain the apparent lack of progress.
- alt227 4y ago
  My 1920x1080 LCD monitor has LESS pixels than my CRT monitor in the 90s :)
CursedUrn 4y ago
Software wastes any gains we get from hardware. See Jonathan Blow's talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM
Gigachad 4y ago
Computer speed is a lot like driving traffic times. The amount of time it takes is pretty fixed as it’s based on what people find acceptable which doesn’t change. With faster computers just comes more features at the same speed.
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  Atlanta keeps adding new lanes to highways, but the traffic jams never get any better! (There's probably better throughput though)
timmb 4y ago
But software is faster to write and so in theory cheaper to buy.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It's just disheartening to see software racing to the bottom, quality-wise.

focusedone 4y ago

1kb.club would like a word.

sxates 4y ago

Ironically this page loaded for me in about 500ms on my 1GB fiber connection.

ekianjo 4y ago
Its almost the pattern that the articles complaining about bloat contribute about bloat themselves. Projection.
manuelmoreale 4y ago
And bizarrely, even though it's a simple blog post it's almost 15MB.
onion2k 4y ago
Your network packets are making a round trip between your computer and the nearest server the site is on, so there's always going to be a hard limit on site speed based on distance. That has to happen a few times for DNS, OPTIONS, a GET for the HTML, maybe more for any blocking resources. Add on parsing and rendering and it's probably getting close to impossible to get much under 100ms for for websites these days. 5 times that isn't great but it does seem a little unreasonable to complain.
sxates 4y ago
To be clear, I wasn't complaining about the speed. 1/2 a second is pretty quick when the average is 6 seconds.

jay_kyburz 4y ago

My broadband speed hasn't changed since I moved into my house 9 years ago. Just saying.

ekianjo 4y ago
do things feel slower since then?
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  I have ad blocking everywhere so, no. About the same.

alex_young 4y ago

Idk about fast, but a broken back button is kind of a problem.

eimrine 4y ago
I wish my browser to save the full state of js app on every action firing which use to alter the state. No matter how much storage is needed for this approach.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Sounds like a fun way to go OOM :')
  - eimrine 4y ago
    This data is not for RAM, it may be done using an HDD or even cloud. This data is not for reading but for storing only. I mean, the concept of browsing history was born when the HDDs used to have memory of a fruit fly and a price of an elephant, I really do not need headers only in my history because most of them become dead in 3-5 years. Wouldn't it great to read my 10-years old interactions with web or to save some big SPA for interacting with it later maybe when no online will be available?
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  You'd be better off saving a copy of the images and code and recording your UI playback! Or just stream is as video on Youtube and let Google pay for the storage :)
ekianjo 4y ago
In Japan a bunch of crappy 90s looking websites at least have the courtesy to tell you that the Back button does not work and "do not use it"
- muh_gradle 4y ago
  That would not make me any happier.

ohCh6zos 4y ago

This website loads an exceptional amount of data for what it is, at least for me. On my browser it makes calls to a site called streamlitapp.com every 100 ms. It appears to be using about 100MB of bandwidth every 10 seconds from what I can see

robertritz 4y ago
100MB is a LOT. Do you perhaps mean 100KB? Streamlit is the framework I used to build the app at the bottom of the article with. It does unfortunately load a decent amount of JS. However it should be non-blocking, which means it won't interfere with how quickly you can see or use the page. It pings back to Streamlit to keep your session state alive as it's running a whole Python interpreter on the backend for each session. The speed index for this page hovers between 1-2 seconds when I test it.
- classified 4y ago
  Using a wasteful app to complain about bad page design. Oh irony.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    It seems to ping with about 800B for a response of about the same size every 2 seconds. So every minute that's about 25KB up and 25KB down. I wouldn't do it like that, but to call that wasteful when many websites need 5MB of ad code before they let you see anything is a bit over the top!

burlesona 4y ago

We can wish that crappy websites didn’t get more bloated every year, but as long as they still load fast enough most people don’t know the difference or care. Everything has an opportunity cost, so once things are good enough the resources that could be spent optimizing will be spent elsewhere instead, and bloat that can be added to solve other business goals will be added. It’s understandable to get frustrated by this, but at some point you realize it’s pointless. This is true in many, many facets of life. Household possessions tend to expand to fill the available square footage. Cities sprawl haphazardly until commute times become unbearable. Irrigation expands until the rivers are depleted. Life expands to the limit, always.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
That would only be true if every one of your customers had fast, loss free, reliable internet 100% of the time they want to access a website. Even in a modern city this is rarely the case. So I'm afraid the real answer is that webdev is just not mature yet.
- jacobjr23 4y ago
  Businesses don't need to provide a perfect experience to every one of their customers. If they did, they would. Like previously said, businesses are good at satisfying customer needs as dictated by their customers' wallets.
  - dazc 4y ago
    Ironically, the worst website I have to regularly navigate is my ISP's.
- deburo 4y ago
  I blame the devs before I blame the platform. Relational databases are mature enough and yet devs still find ways to create queries that time out with only a few thousand rows in their tables.

WalterBright 4y ago

My boring html-only pages load pretty fast.

beebeepka 4y ago
Browsing with NoScript feels pretty snappy, too

amused2death 4y ago

in my android and linux pc, firefox will refuse to display web pages which was fully downloaded couple hours before. ff always ask for internet connection although all needed files are in the cache. i'm on internet diet (disable wifi for hours long) so bad behaviors are apparent those who always-on-24/7 fiber may not notice

midoridensha 4y ago
I've seriously always wondered exactly what the purpose of a cache for web pages in a browser is. Why is it there? It takes up many megabytes (or even GB) of space. Yet it seems to serve no purpose whatsoever: every time you navigate to that page, it always reloads it from the web server, even if you just briefly (mis-)click on a link and then click on "back". A lot of disk space could be saved by simply eliminating these caches.
- zuhsetaqi 4y ago
  Because for some files developers can set a max time it should be cached. Just open developer tools and go to the Network tab, make sure "Disable Cache" is unchecked and then reload the page. In the column "Transferred" you can see, which things are loaded from cache

sp332 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220923024040/https://www.datafantic.com/how-much-time-do-we-waste-waiting-for-websites-to-load/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220923024040/https://www.dataf... Do you think this is including ad loads? Ad networks run a real-time auction. It takes some time to collect bids so the highest can be chosen.

fmajid 4y ago
OpenRTB is capped at 100ms for the auction and in practice much less than that. One of the few areas of web development or assimilated where serious attention is paid to performance.

modeless 4y ago

I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents. Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the clicking for us, and summarize the results in a much simpler UI designed to actually be fast and useful, vs. designed to optimize the business metrics of some company as interpreted by a gaggle of product managers. This isn't unprecedented. Plaid screen scrapes terrible bank websites and turns them into APIs, though without AI. Google Duplex uses AI to turn restaurant phone numbers into an API for making reservations. DeepMind's Sparrow[1], just announced today, answers factual questions posed in plain English by performing Google searches and summarizing the results. But it's going to be a revolution when it becomes much more general and able to take actions rather than just summarize information. It isn't far off! https://adept.ai https://adept.ai is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about, and I expect there are a lot more people working on similar things that are still in stealth mode. [1] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-agents https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-agents

bretbernhoft 4y ago
Your point about more people working on similar projects in stealth mode is likely an underappreciated notion. And thank you for introducing me to Adept; looking forward to keeping my eyes on that company's progress.
deleted 4y ago
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systemvoltage 4y ago
> we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English Language is an imprecise tool, it has inherent ambiguity. Language is also laborious and one dimensional (stream of bits over temporal dimension). A tool such as the one you describe would be extremely frustrating to use.
- 4y ago

shawnz 4y ago

basically Jevons' paradox

SeanLuke 4y ago

This would seem to be Myhrvold's first law in action. https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-its-a-gas/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-its-a-gas/

wodenokoto 4y ago

Not just load time, but "time to read content" has exploded. Once the webapp has downloaded and it can start doing REST like requests for the actual content, it also needs to start loading pop-ups and the "continue reading"-button, that can hide the content after it is loaded. So once all that is done, the user needs to click away cookie consent banner, newsletter sign-up and the continue reading button. And only now can we stop the clock on "time to read content". This is a big reason why I read comments first. I click and get straight to content. EDIT: I just realized that the "time to ..."-moniker works really bad in my phrasing here. Maybe "time to start reading" would have been better.

Kiro 4y ago
What's the point of "continue reading"? Why not just show the full thing immediately?
- praptak 4y ago
  It's obviously to show more ads.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Can't be that obvious considering every reply claims a different reason.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Makes those user engagement metrics look good?
- lrem 4y ago
  A measuring point.
  - emiliobumachar 4y ago
    Don't web developers get full access to the state of the user's scrolling?

Joeri 4y ago

Speaking from experience, at shipping time of a new site performance testing is done, and the developers are asked to improve performance until it is just good enough. So it doesn’t matter how big or small the site is, unless by shipping time it is already faster than desired it will only get optimized to run as fast as every other site, but no faster.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I wonder if it is time to explore alternative syntax parsers with a more generic API to accommodate other markup formats. At least initially this could be 1:1 with HTML but eventually could support new functions not limited by HTML itself so that the features and languages can move at separate paces. Being able to render an enhanced markdown or JSON or YAML page in the browser without any generators would be phenomenal and resolve a lot of long-standing issues with structured data.

elorant 4y ago

Sure they do. Just disable ads, and all 3rd party JS.

alkonaut 4y ago

Good enough is good enough. Just like faster computers don’t make new apps any faster (even at the peak of scaling decades ago), they make sure we can write more complex apps without making them too slow, or equivalently, add more things to apps and sites if there is any performance headroom left.

dylan604 4y ago
>Good enough is good enough. Oh to be a mere average computer user. I work with files that can still take some non-instant time after hitting save to complete. Conversely, it still takes some non-instant time to open said file. As long as there's such a thing as progress bars, count downs, spinning wheels, beach balls, etc, there is always room to make things faster.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  I develop very complicated software for a living and as always, there are some features that will take an unreasonable amount of time. On large documents, you have customers wait 5 seconds for a regular operation (that you may need to complete dozens of times in a row). And yet when you ask customers whether they want more features, or a faster program it's invariably features. Fix a bug or add a feature? Add a feature. Improve perf or add a feature? Add a feature. My own tolerance for delays is tiny, but my "average users" seem to not suffer from it at all. I guess the reason is this: they know how much time something took before. They know that if this takes 10 seconds and it took them an hour to do on paper, that's quick. Meanwhile for me I'm in the IDE having a 200ms keystroke delay and I'm almost having a heart attack.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >And yet when you ask customers whether they want more features, or a faster program it's invariably features. Fix a bug or add a feature? Add a feature. Improve perf or add a feature? Add a feature. Of course this is what they want. To the user, the damn thing should have been working when you released it. To the user, you shouldn't have to ask to have something that's broken but is meant to be a feature to be fixed. If it's not working, why is it there in the first place. Fix it. Duh. But also add new features before your competitor does and takes your users. This is such a weird excuse on discussions about a progress bar.

manuelmoreale 4y ago

The irony of this post is that the single heaviest resource loaded by this page is a 750kb image used only for the meta tags as a sharing image which most people consuming and downloading the page will never see. What's baffling to me is how people love to spend seemingly infinite time playing with tech stacks and what not but then pay very little attention to basic details like what to load and how many resources do they really need.

Dma54rhs 4y ago
These images don't get loaded by a browser, probably it's being used somewhere else. 750kb is way too big for that kind of image anyway.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  Ah you're right. It's even dumber. It's used as a header image but it's then hidden with a display: None !important; But I see the image inside the network tab so bandwidth is getting wasted for no reason.

datadata 4y ago

It is possible that website loading is bottlenecked by latency and an irreducible number of round trips needed. Bandwidth is not obviously a bottleneck.

kmitz 4y ago
I was wondering the same thing, especially with https

fmajid 4y ago

Throughput of networks is increasing but latency doesn’t improve as much (although 5G wireless is a big improvement over 4G LTE). Also TCP slow-start limits how fast an HTTP connection can go, and most are short-lived so the connection is still ramping up when it is closed. That’s one of the supposed benefits of QUIC a.k.a. HTTP/3. And then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays.

RF_Savage 4y ago
On mobile latency has constantly improved. GPRS/EDGE was often +100ms ping --> 3G 400-50ms depending on the day --> 4G/LTE 50-30ms and now I'm often getting sub-20ms ping on 5G connections.
- fmajid 4y ago
  Yes, moving from voice-centric to IP-centric network technology has helped, and 5G paid laudable attention to latency. Their target for 5G is actually 1ms, but of course backhaul will dominate that.
  - gsich 4y ago
    1ms only to the tower.
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Yes, backhaul (the connection from the tower to the Internet via the carrier's central facilities) dominates, as well as queueing latency for packets waiting to be delivered to phones, since traffic is overwhelmingly downloads.
  - gnyman 4y ago
    I had heard the 1 ms number also and did some research some time ago. As far as I understood the 1 ms is for specialised low latency connections and devices not for the every day browsing. Here are two sources which I found useful at that time https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean-bubley https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean...

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Well we could start here and now by reporting load sizes/site footprint in bytes which wouldn't look out of place on hn, along with badges for cookie consent dialogs, ga usage, non-responsive design, high energy consumption flags for sites that suck the last power out of your mobile, and other non-desiderata. Or just mark a site as requiring JavaScript so we can avoid it. DDG should be doing the same.

mostlystatic 4y ago

Desktop bandwidth is improving over time, but as I understand HTTP Archive is still using a 5 Mbps cable connection. From their FAQ/changelog [1]: > 19 Mar 2013: The default connection speed was increased from DSL (1.5 mbps) to Cable (5.0 mbps). This only affects IE (not iPhone). There was another popular article on HN a while ago [2], claiming mobile websites had gotten slower since 2011. But actually HTTP Archive just started using a slower mobile connection in 2013. I wrote more about that issue with the HTTP Archive data at the time [3]. [1] https://httparchive.org/faq https://httparchive.org/faq [2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/ [3] https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower

mostlystatic 4y ago
Regarding "4 seconds wasted" per visit: HTTP Archive also publishes real-user performance data from Google, and only 10% of desktop websites take 4 seconds or more to load. (And I think that's not the average experience but the 75th percentile.) https://httparchive.org/reports/chrome-ux-report#cruxSlowLcp https://httparchive.org/reports/chrome-ux-report#cruxSlowLcp The Google data uses Largest Contentful Paint instead of Speed Index, but the two metrics ultimately try to measure the same thing. Both have pros and cons. Speed Index goes up if there are ongoing animations (e.g sliders). LCP only looks at the single largest content element. When looking at the real-user LCP data over time, keep in mind that changes are often due to changes in the LCP definition (e.g opacity 0 elements used to count but don't any more). https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/speed/metrics_changelog/lcp.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

ReptileMan 4y ago

Since I started using the Adguard dns - it is surprising how much faster everything is. But still there is too much cruft in the most common sites. A startup could probably nuke reddit in a month if they just concentrate on performance and usability.

qwerty456127 4y ago

In the past computers (incl. hard drives and CPUs) were orders of magnitude faster than the communication lines so it made sense to compress everything as hard as possible and cache that. Now I have a 10 Gbps line, a 1 Gbps network card (I don't feel like I need a faster one), a 200 Mbps SSD and the CPU often is near-100%-loaded.

imgabe 4y ago

I got a new M2 Macbook and it's astonishing how much faster the web is. It seems a lot of the lag must just be javascript execution time and not content loading.

dham 4y ago
Don't worry web developers will come up with more ways to over-engineer a form with 2 inputs.

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

HackerNews loads pretty fast, and would be one of my favorite sites even if it didn't.

ethn 4y ago

Jevon’s paradox: “…occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating reductions in resource use.” Developers will therefore always maximize resource usage as more becomes available.

rob74 4y ago

> With home broadband reaching 70 Mbps globally The source for that is some stats from speedtest.net, which I assume is calculated from the users who used their speed test? So it's probably heavily skewed towards power users who have a fast connection and want to check if they are really getting what they are paying for. Most "casual" users with shitty DSL connections are happy if "the internet" works at all and are pretty unlikely to ever use this service...

Springtime 4y ago
Prior topics on HN about those speed tests (eg[1]) also show ISPs prioritize them which gives a misleading representation of typical speeds. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062799
- dspillett 4y ago
  This is why Netflix started their own (fast.com), making it more difficult for ISPs to throttle NF video content (or just prioritise speedtest traffic) and blame NF for poor performance (or poor quality because it was using more highly compressed streams to deal with low throughput) because “if you run any speedtest you'll see your connection through us is fine, it must be NF being busy”.

zuhsetaqi 4y ago

No website I use does take 6 seconds to load. And I have 50 Mbps downlink. Can anyone name a website that does take that long to load? Github for example does load in 4.37 seconds with cache disabled in developer tools. CNN does take 3.58 seconds. But I'm using uBlock origin …

nibbleshifter 4y ago
> But I'm using uBlock origin … You aren't loading all the adtech webshit that makes up the majority of a page load. Given that network wide adblock/tracker blocking saves upwards of 60% of bandwidth (for web traffic) on the average network, its pretty obvious where the problem is.

crb 4y ago

I maintain that "booting a Mac, loading Chrome, loading Google Docs, and getting ready to type", takes as long as "booting DOS, starting Windows 3.1, loading Word for Windows 2.0", takes as long as "loading GEOS from floppy disk on a C64, loading geoWrite", and so on, and so forth.

Joker_vD 4y ago
If anything, it probably got slightly slower over the years. Reminds me of that time when we switched from writing by hand (and sometimes typing on a typewriter) all kinds of forms and reports to composing them on a computer and then printing it: initial time savings were pretty huge and so, naturally, the powers that be said "well, guess We can make you fill much more paperwork than you currently are filling" and did so. In the end, the amount of paperwork increased slightly out of proportion and we're now spending slightly more time on it than we used to. A sort of a law of conservation of effort, if you will.
dspillett 4y ago
Try beat: 1. Power on BBC 2. Type *EDIT[ENTER] Though obviously not as fully featured as a modern word processor, or even some editors of the time.
makeitdouble 4y ago
The interesting twist to me is that waking up a phone and opening the Google Docs app is the same time length or a tad faster. We haven't progressed in speed, but versatility is theough the roof compared to 10 ~ 20 years ago.
tekkk 4y ago
No, c'mon. I still remember how it took ages for my old Windows to boot up and even get to the desktop. Maybe DOS was faster without GUI but it was god damn slow at one point. And all that weird noise your PC would make while reading from the disk non-withstanding the dance with the modem. With my current Mac I'd say it takes about 15s to open Docs.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

a_c 4y ago

Making general software faster is saving the planet, both by saving human waiting time and carbon footprint on electricity. We are not measuring on this domain enough and we should start doing so. The added bonus is that faster software/website makes better UX, and we saves time on doing "UX research" as well.

danburbridge 4y ago

See also Induced demand/traffic: building more roads/adding lanes to roads increases congestion rather than decreasing it: https://bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/trunk-roads-traffic-report.pdf https://bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/trunk-roa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

teeray 4y ago
I thought about exactly this when I saw this headline. Extra bandwidth just means we can have video header images rather than a still. Here, have a few more tracking scripts.

RobotToaster 4y ago

Javascript and it's consequences have been a disaster for the web.

lm28469 4y ago

Before I upgraded my macbook air 2019 to an m1 I could barely visit most "big" websites. I remember a redesign of a specific store that went from "perfectly usable albeit a bit outdated in term of design" to "10x slower, looks nicer but usability is dog shit"

lostmsu 4y ago
Which is exactly why professional users use desktops.

Gud 4y ago

I used to be bothered by this, but in reality it works like a filter. The crappier the website, the crappier the content.

fasteo 4y ago

>>> Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster I would rephrase it: Because faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster

preya2k 4y ago

The title of this post is annoying: Typically we say "faster broadband", when we talk about bandwidth, not about "speed" (which would be latency). So obviously, as long as your website is not larger than your bandwidth capacity, nothing is gonna get "faster", when you upgrade your broadband bandwidth. This is the same as saying "Despite larger pipes every year, water still doesn't reach your house any faster".

xuki 4y ago
Bandwidth = data per unit of time. So for the same amount of data, faster bandwidth absolutely decreases load time.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Expanding on this point: If a website is transferring more data to render content, or worse, before starting to display content, then bandwidth matters as it will move that data more quickly. If a website requires multiple round trips to complete a given request, then latency will also matter, and sets an absolute minimum floor to time-to-display (TTD) regardless of bandwidth. The higher your latency, the slower that process. In theory it's possible for an SPA (single-page application) to be more responsive despite an overall larger page weight as it can incrementally request and present additional content. In practice such pages often perform worse on time to display due to both increased total data transfer and round-trip request requirements. A lightweight HTTP/2 HTML+CSS only site can be far more performant if it's based on static pages and request/load dynamics.

mrtri 4y ago

yodsanklai 4y ago

Classic rebound effect. Same thing for cars. > Contrary to popular belief, the average car is not in fact that much more fuel-efficient than older cars. Still, to this day, the average vehicle has a range of between 20 and 30 miles per gallon; a stat which was very similar in the 1920s. But, why is this? Well, cars are a whole lot bigger.

maximus-decimus 4y ago
It's not cars just being bigger, they need to produce less toxic emissions too because of regulations.

can16358p 4y ago

More bandwidth, more processing power, more browser APIs and support for shiny CSS effects: More sites taking advantage of them at the same pace of technical development, cancelling them out. Otherwise if we had a website from 10 years ago it is faster to load with today's connections.

kmitz 4y ago

It'd be interesting to know why load time hasn't improved. In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency ? Is it a problem of latency or bandwidth ? What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Just wondering

doix 4y ago
> In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? I'm not sure what sort of analysis you're looking for, but different sites have different problems. I'm not convinced that averaging them makes sense, and it's very difficult to create a reasonable metric. As soon as you start measuring some specific metric, people will optimize for it whilst still making the site unusable. Unfortunately "usable state" is too hard to quantify without it being game-able. > How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency Very little, you can check here [0] and see for yourself. Obviously it depends on your distance to the server you are reaching, but the added latency of HTTPS isn't really a factor when you're looking at 10s for a page to load. > What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Lets look at CNN (only because I happen to remember that a lite version exists thanks to someone on HN). The lite[1] version loads entirely in 350ms for me. The normal version[2] with adblock on finishes loading everything after 1.43s. The normal version with adblock off, finishes loading after 20s and reflows a bunch of times as ads get loaded. So I agree with the rest of the comments, it's "because of js and adtech". Disclaimer: I'm in South Africa at the moment on 4g, my internet isn't the best :) [0] https://www.httpvshttps.com/ https://www.httpvshttps.com/ [1] https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en [2] https://edition.cnn.com/ https://edition.cnn.com/
Kye 4y ago
I put Patreon's official button on a site once and was confused at the seconds it added to the load. It's a little button! Turns out it was hauling in 10MB of analytics scripts.
JohnFen 4y ago
> In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? I don't know about a real analysis, but it's pretty easy to see the effect in your own browser. Disable JS and see how much faster the page loads.

mindless_solips 4y ago

"Grove giveth, Gates taketh away"

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zxienin 4y ago

On similar note: Despite faster hardware every year, laptops don't perform any better, running applications. Usage experience with typical specs of 2022 (500G SSD and 16G RAM) is as good or bad as ones from 20 years back (say, 20G HDD and 128M RAM).

AStrangeMorrow 4y ago
Actually curious, what do you mean exactly by "doesn't perform better" in this context? My experience doesn't go as far (10-15 years), but while I agree a whole subset of softwares don't feel much different (text editors, web browsers), in some other domains I can feel the difference (video games, programing IDEs and the tools they offer). Where I imagine I agree is if a computer hardware becomes 10x more performant, there is not a related 10x improvement performance on softwares
- dham 4y ago
  I started software professionally in 2008 and I honestly can't tell a difference between literally anything in this time period. I was using Netbeans and doing Java EE / JSF and the feedback loop feels about the same as it does today. I do remember going from Java EE to Play Framework and it being a little faster feedback loop. Sublime Text still works about the same as it did on Leopard. The only noticeable speed bump I've felt in this time period was going to an M1 from 2019 Intel MacbookPro. I think the reason is the 2019 Intel Macbook pro is one of the slowest computers to ever be released and while throttled (99% of the time) it was slower than my 2015 Macbook Pro and maybe even my 2013. I'm sure the M1 will be eaten up with React and Electron apps soon enough.

gwbas1c 4y ago

The slowdowns come from: Latency: Part of the page loads, and then the page asks for more data. In some cases, (such as loading a page hosted on another continent,) this is bound by the speed of light. Poor data access (database) code: Sometimes this is due to lazy or incompetent programmers, other times its due to the fact that "not instant" is "good enough." Writing a web page to load everything very quickly in a single request is surprisingly hard, and will often break modern and easily understood design patterns.

giantrobot 4y ago
> Latency: Part of the page loads, and then the page asks for more data. In some cases, (such as loading a page hosted on another continent,) this is bound by the speed of light. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that web pages are just built as giant JavaScript applications for no reason. With a page pretending to be an app, the browser has to download, parse, and execute the JavaScript core before the browser can do anything. All of the resources are hidden somewhere inside the application and the browser is stuck with its thumb up its ass unable to load or do anything. Sites using a bunch of JavaScript to "render" everything client side are causing their own stupid problems. I just built a toy React app that only displays Hello World. It's the most trivial app that isn't just a blank project. A production build of it weighs in at 143kB for just the JavaScript portion. It's also multiple resource requests just to load that crap. Even bundled into an HTML skeleton it's still 145kB of JavaScript to run before the browser can do anything else. Served locally it takes about 20ms to load that React app and draw something on my screen. An HTML copy of Frankenstein (463kB) loaded from the same server loaded in 5ms. A plain HTML document three times the size of the toy React "app" loaded in a quarter of the time! > Writing a web page to load everything very quickly in a single request is surprisingly hard, and will often break modern and easily understood design patterns. I find this to be an odd take. This nearly 4,000 word CNN article[0] including graphics weighs in at 70kB. The HTML alone including a bunch of inline styling (tables, font tags, etc) weighs only 55kB. With no graphics loaded it is still a perfectly readable article. Loading the HTML of that page in my above test it still loads in 5ms and is 100% readable. Not just that but I can navigate with the sidebars and headers. In less space than just a toy React app I've got a completely usable page that can display as close to instantly as my eyes can determine. There's nothing about "modern and easily understood design patterns" that requires hundreds of kB of JavaScript or even extra CSS. It would be trivial to replace the table and font tags with CSS in the header and likely get the whole document even smaller while keeping 100% of the functionality and navigation. The CNN article example coincidentally shows how stupid the JavaScript bloat problem is because several of the images are not found and the 404 pages CNN is returning in their place are a megabyte. [0] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9806/24/win98.idg/index.html http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9806/24/win98.idg/index.ht...

jrm4 4y ago

Sure. Again, the basic issue is that this is not optimized for the user. It's optimized for whoever stands to make money from the pages.

orobinson 4y ago

Recently I've been wondering why my internet seems to be getting so slow. It then dawned on me that webpage bloat has progressed to the point that my 2015 MacBook (the small one with the rubbish processor) really struggles to load a typical webpage in a reasonable amount of time.

bombcar 4y ago

You can make pages insanely fast: https://danluu.com/car-safety/ https://danluu.com/car-safety/ for example, but you will notice it is very simple and lacks video/ads. This is not optimized for "engagement" or whatever proxy for "money in my pocket", however, so it's pretty rare.

deleted 4y ago

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