9 ms·
Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need
by sidewndr46 3y ago
Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.
- leidenfrost 3y agoThere was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.
- amaccuish 3y agoThe one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?
- yomlica8 3y agoI want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
- michaelt 3y agoWe A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s
- TeMPOraL 3y agoYou jest, but that's exactly how you get plausibly deniable dark patterns. It's a numbers game.
- p_l 3y agoWorse, sometimes the people who do it are completely unaware they are making a dark pattern, because they see the result of A/B test and convince themselves it's superior to what they think.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe ultimate version of this was done by Optimizely some years ago, where - let's assume here unintentional - bad UI design encouraged people to terminate their A/B tests early when the metrics favored the new version, leading to people without good understanding of statistics implementing dark patterns (or just stupid patterns), blissfully unaware that they've biased their own A/B tests so strongly that they could just as well be replaced by a piece of paper with words "NEW THING WORKS BETTER" written on it.
- esafak 3y agoIt maximizes their revenue until I decide to stop using Google. Joke's on them for not measuring long-term effects.
- flangola7 3y agoA/B testing is so gross. In other domains human experimentation of any kind, no matter how low risk, involves getting fully informed consent and ethics board approval before going ahead. Experimental behavior manipulation, without even telling the subject they are part of a manipulation experiment? You would be chased out of the room and your reputation destroyed! Utterly unacceptable. But in webdev universe this is somehow seen as a totally normal practice.
- froggit 3y agoThis is exactly how users felt when Reddit ran A/B testing on their "feature" that forcibly signed out people on mobile browsers and said they needed to use the Reddit app to sign back in. I saw a crazy long thread of straight backlash about how messed up it was and how they aren't cattle to experiment on and how they didn't consent to that (which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to). Seeing as they were posting the backlash on Reddit, I'm guessing a lot of people downloaded the app to log in and Reddit said "Big Success!" when they checked the stats.
- account42 3y ago> which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to The GDPR's notion of informed consent really needs to be applied pervasively to all kinds of consumer contracts. If it's hidden in walls of text that the average user doesn't read it shouldn't count as consent.
- cylemons 3y agoI remember reading somewhere that if you actually read the TOS/EULA of every single thing you use, it would take your entire lifetime.
- ballenf 3y agoI really could see Apple adopting an approach from FPS games, where the phone applies a click to what was under your finger 1/4 second-ish instead of what's there when the click is recognized. Time-travel clicking. But the real solution is better web page design.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoMy guess for this is that the average user doesn't parse text on pages as fast as more tech-savvy users. That delay is perfectly timed for the average user to grab their attention. For me, I use google so often that I can rapidly parse information without really needing to read much of the text, the link just sort of 'looks' right. I've observed my wife reading google results and she is much slower and more methodical, probably because she doesn't google things 20+ times a day every day like I do. That's how I end up misclicking, because i'm not working at the speed of a normal googler. It is really annoying though, there are some css tweaks you can make using browser extensions to make that disappear if you're so inclined.
- polyvisual 3y agoMy goodness, that accordion needs to removed from their code base immediately. A horrific piece of UI/UX/engineering/whatever.
- rkagerer 3y agoThat one ALWAYS foils me and I hate it and whoever created it.
- Fatnino 3y agoTheir new AI shit on the top of the sesrch results does this. It's slow AF and I'll sometimes have scrolled partway down the page before it farts a huge blob of text up top and pushes stuff I've already scrolled past back down past my finger.
- azemetre 3y agoI'm sure the person who wrote that accordion is quite good at solving leetcode tho! (only half joking)
- JohnFen 3y ago> You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Which, in my mind, means it didn't load instantly. The page isn't loaded until all of the data is displayed.
- timthorn 3y ago> Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time I don't disagree with your example, but optimising for page load time is as old as the graphical Web.
- thesuitonym 3y agoYes, but back in the 90s the dominant idea was load the text as quickly as possible, then all the other junk can come later.
- omoikane 3y agoI thought the thing to optimize for is "largest contentful paint", which is one of the weighted factors used by https://pagespeed.web.dev/ https://pagespeed.web.dev/
- microtonal 3y agoThis drives me crazy, especially because it breaks finding within a page. Eg. if you order food and you already know what you want. Old days: Cmd + f, type what you want. New days: first scroll to the end of the page so that all the contents are actually loaded. Cmd + f, type what you want. Is just a list of dishes, some with small thumbnails, some without any images at all. If you can't load a page with 30 dishes fast enough, you have a serious problem (you could always lazily load the thumbnails if you want to cheat).
- mikecoles 3y agoI miss typing / to search on pages. Ctrl-W still messes me up at times when using a terminal in a browser.
- TechieKid 3y agoYou can search with / on Firefox.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago' will search in URLs, skipping plain text.
- GrinningFool 3y agoUnless you're on github.com, because it rather inconsiderately takes over `/`.
- abdusco 3y agoFirefox lets you use / for search.
- dbtc 3y agovimium / vimium-ff
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoFirefox allows you to use / to start a conventional search. As a bonus, in Firefox if you hit the ' key (apostrophe) you get a search that looks only within hyperlinks and ignores all the un-clickable plain text. Give it a try, sometimes it can be very useful
- porphyra 3y agoAnd when you're about to click on something, something new loads and everything jumps unpredictably and you end up accidentally clicking on the wrong thing lol
- YoukaiCountry 3y agoThis is honestly the worst part of it to me. It happens quite a lot!
- dghughes 3y agoYes, in Windows 50% of my day is fighting with something obscuring my view or taking focus. Something pops up just as I was clicking or pressing Enter. I have to sign into multiple systems in the morning and sometimes it takes four attempts to enter creds for one login because I keep getting interrupted. It's infuriating.
- smegger001 3y agoyou would think they could figured out that programs not directly opened by the user shouldn't be able to steal focus from the program the user is currently interacting with. seems like basic UX/UI failure
- causality0 3y agoYou're talking about people who haven't figured out you should be able to edit the options on the right click menu from a single settings menu and that the task bar should expand and contract dynamically with the number of open windows. Microsoft stopped improving the Windows UI around 2006.
- Aerbil313 3y agoYou’re talking about people who use Macs.
- smegger001 3y agodesktop user interfaces on all 3 main operating systems peaked by 2010, at that point everything became aimed at clueless cellphone users.
- asah 3y agojfyi this is not new - we confronted this in 1996 when the web was very young.
- tracker1 3y agoEven more annoying is when ads pop in a second or so later under the cursor position just before you click, taking you to the ad not what you wanted to click.
- jrumbut 3y agoI could kind of understand things moving around back in the 2000s when we were all getting used to AJAX but all these years later can we (at least) have the main navigation links stay still?
- wingworks 3y agoThis is so frustrating. Though I recently come across a rare bread, that I thought stood out on load speed. The BBC of all places. While following the sub disaster I was pleasantly surprised at how quick it always loaded. Nearly always it would load near instant after clicking my bookmark. (Definitely not something that is that common when you live in NZ) Not at all what I expected from a news site. They're usually full of crap and dog slow. This is the specific URL I experienced this with. Though the whole site seems mostly very quick. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 And this is on a 2017 MBP, which some sites are really slow. Nothing crazy like the new silicon CPUs here either.
- simooooo 3y agoIt’s fast but it still resets the scroll to the top about 700ms after it loads on an iPhone
- anthk 3y agoIf you can install Lagrange on Mac, install it and try gemini://gemi.dev Then head to the Newswaffle link and input https://bbc.com https://bbc.com or just scroll down the page to head to the converted site.
- anthk 3y agoSorry I forgot the URL: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- THENATHE 3y agoAdjacent but similar, I am so over all of the animations and corporate bullshit on pages. I run a business making decent and super optimized web pages and people love them. They’re the only website in their town and field that doesn’t take 10 seconds to load and render.
- pdimitar 3y agoCan you link to your website?
- THENATHE 3y agoUnfortunately I don’t have a website for myself and I don’t feel comfortable sharing my client’s websites. I operate purely through word of mouth in my local town, and I don’t have any aspirations to “go big”
- pdimitar 3y agoI realize I didn't formulate my comment well -- the XYZ problem happened. I am interested in your fast loading techniques in general. I also am considering making a bunch of personal / pro websites where I'll use a static generator. Just looking for some inspiration and ideas to steal I suppose. Since it's kinda fresh pursuit for me, I am still looking to gather some links and do proper research. I wasn't looking to deanonymize you, my apologies.
- THENATHE 3y agoOh sure, no worries! As far as my inspiration, I use Craigslist and google as my inspiration. I try to get a sleek and simple look like google pages, but maintain the “old school” functionality and layout ideas of Craigslist . As far as actual development is concerned, I use oracle ARM servers that are grossly overpowered for a webhost, cloudflare nameservers OR CDN, and I keep as much of the development as possible server side with as little JavaScript as I can. An example was a simple blogging system I made. The entire system is set up with a MariaDB table that has “title, date, image url, and content” as the data bits for it, and then each function works on one of two pages: a backend using php session that has all of the functions with get request, and a front end that has all of its content on a page with post requests. There is no JavaScript involved on either page, which means the stuff transmitted over the internet is lesser, the stuff done on the client computer is lesser, and the number of outside calls is lesser. This does make it “less responsive”, but does the blog really need image zoom in on hover and shit like that? I have found the best way to develop for speed and simplicity is to curb the enthusiasm of the client from “looks as good as possible” to “simple, cheap, fast, and robust, while still looking better than average” The final suggestion I have is to develop with security AND accessibility in mind first. If you want to put aria links of all of your stuff, it is much harder to go back later and 1) determine what the link does, and 2) write an aria for it than it is to just include it in the first place. Always follow proper form for mitigating risks like SQL injection and XSS, and do as much as possible on the server before you resort to JS. If you are looking for a couple of sites that I didn’t build, but get the point of what I am trying to do across, check out Smashingmagazine.com Hacker news doesn’t look the best, but it follows the logic set forth, Openai.com (this one surprised me because if you remove a lot of the slightly more interactive elements it is fast as hell) If you have any specific questions, ask away and I’ll do my best
- rasz 3y agoGoogle specifically reengineered YT last year to do exactly that! From loading ready to display html with subsequent clicks ajaxing more html to loading 1MB .js library and 400KB of json on first load with every subsequent click requesting anotehr ~400KB of json to be interpreted.
- chrisldgk 3y agoThis is called cumulative layout shift (CLS for short) and there’s a push in web dev to work against and around this - it’s recently become part of the performance measurement of googles lighthouse scoring and server side rendering and static site generation metaframeworks like nextjs and Astro allow you to send out the entire static page HTML without having to lazy load any new data.
- ksec 3y agoWe also have tech companies that claims sub 300ms request response time is good enough. I wish people look at StackOverflow and understand how they do everything at under 20ms.
- immibis 3y agoAs a person from New Zealand I am accustomed to every single request taking a minimum of 300ms RTT and sometimes it's shocking when it doesn't.