6 ms·

Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available - for those that don’t know, the rates are eye watering. $

Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available - for those that don’t know, the rates are eye watering. $4 pr MB - and the onboard Wi-Fi was either completely down, or down in the low tens Kbps speed. The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference. With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.

trustingtrust 3y ago
Not an extreme case. There are times when I can barely get above 100kbps in spotty areas in some buildings. Loading the gmail web page is painful. HTML button appears immediately at the bottom while the website is struggling to load and clicking it will load emails. Very helpful if you ask me.
eviks 3y ago
But the fast and small alternative is skipping the web, e.g. set IMAP to a native app
- kubb 3y ago
  Exactly, a workaround exists and is already installed on your device.
- forgotmypw17 3y ago
  Using an IMAP client is not an option on many devices, especially when it is a public or borrowed device.
  - rini17 3y ago
    It is incredibly inconvenient to log in on such device, especially if your primary one isn't available. I ended up writing down backup authenticator codes in my diary. Of course it kinda defeats the purpose and of course it's hard for users to figure out.
  - seer 3y ago
    One of my employers disabled IMAP on gmail, siting security concerns… ended up pretty much not using email because of that (relying on slack mostly)
    - jowea 3y ago
      What's the security disadvantage of IMAP?
      - johnchristopher 3y ago
        I suspect OP employer didn't secure its IMAP configuration (no TLS) and simply relied on HTTPS in front of the webmail ?
        seer 3y ago
        Apparently gmail’s IMAP implementation was considered “insecure” by the security experts… Forgot the details tbh
- mftrhu 3y ago
  If you can even do that, since they [e-mail hosts] go out of their way to make it difficult - even impossible, in some cases - to push people to use their own app.
- crabbone 3y ago
  Yeah... if only that worked with GMail. You cannot do proper authentication with GMail anymore. You need an elaborate dance, which will depend on how old your GMail account is (they became bolder with time and started to require more personal data from users), you will need to procure a special permit for your IMAP program to connect to GMail, and the way to do that changed over time. Also, newer GMail accounts cannot be registered without MFA, so you'll have to figure out how to deal with that. Having a very old GMail account, I still hold on to it, because I can still use IMAP in Gnus. But, should I lose that, or should Google finally curb my tiny freedoms... I'll have to look for alternatives too.
hkt 3y ago
sdf.org is splendid and their webmail is squirrelmail. $36 for lifetime membership is pretty good, and it is a considerably more ethical and private alternative than gmail.
thfuran 3y ago
Having slow and/or intermittent service isn't nearly so niche as blue water sailing.
entuno 3y ago
It's become pretty clear that a lot of developers never test their websites or apps in low bandwidth environments. Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Nor expensive data environments. The NPR One app used to chew through a few hundred mb of data in "caching" every time you started it. No way to restrict this function to wifi only. And no, you can't select bit rates. Also Zoom has little ability to minimize the audio or video data usage (but I've learned you can reduce how much of others video is sent to you by reducing the window size). Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.
  - 0xFF0123 3y ago
    I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems. The fact that when you intermittently dropped out you catch up on the sped up audio always seemed neat (although I'm unsure if that was an intended feature, or just a side effect).
    - szundi 3y ago
      Pretty sure intended
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      > I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems. Likely true. Zoom doesn't chew up much bandwidth. I always find it funny when people think they need to upgrade their home internet bandwidth because a family "works & studies from home". Unless you're up/downloading huge media files, several instances of Zoom and virtual desktops will consume less than a 4k Netflix stream.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
forgotmypw17 3y ago
Accessibility is all edge cases. And for every edge cases you anticipate and support, others you don't anticipate are allowed access.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Gigachad 3y ago
You're in a cruise ship. A highly destructive and entirely unnecessary luxury and you're complaining about having to pay extra to load gmail? Jesus.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  His point is, there are data limited environments. This point stands, no matter what you think of his cruise? Also, who can decide, what is really necessary? And I don't have hard data at hand, but I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    Cruise ships directly introduce pollutants into the local maritime environment. These include oily bilge water, grey water, and others, not including sulfur emissions from the engines
    - b112 3y ago
      How do you know it wasn't a green cruise vessel? One with filters, or storage tanks. Do you know? Do you? Or is it a presumption? (Googling now to find out if this even exists, doesn't remove the presumptive nature of things.)
      - jzb 3y ago
        If you have to search to see if the Devil’s Advocate alternative you’re trying to gotcha OP on, who is being presumptive? Maybe you could’ve searched first? The vast majority of cruises are pretty shitty for the environment and treatment of people. Also tax avoidant. People just really don’t want to hear that so they can keep doing them and not think about the down sides.
        lostlogin 3y ago
        OP was working on a survey ship, as mentioned in another thread.
userbinator 3y ago
How much "overhead" for the controls should a page contain beyond the content of the email itself? My instinct says several KB up to tens of KB would be reasonable, but apparently the non-basic version of Gmail uses several orders of magnitude more --- tens of MB.
amelius 3y ago
On a cruise ship, you're basically caught in a local monopoly for every product and service.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
johnchristopher 3y ago
> With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative. I don't know. Internet on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ocean is a bit like complaining you don't have good wine on your camels when backpacking through the Sahara. In any case, it absolutely is an edge case for now so there should be a minimum of preparations before the trip (setting IMAP instead of webmail for instance, if you need heavy bandwidth site content then set a proxy that only keeps the actual content and access that instead of the original source, etc.). Same with the beach house or the cottage lost in the woods not zoom-compatible. Well... It's weird to me how when this subject surfaces on HN a lot of people defend they are entitled to the same capabilities when they are in white spots than when they are at home.
onion2k 3y ago
The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference. A well designed Single Page App should be downloading a small-as-possible initial bundle with the page HTML and CSS, and then only downloading the data necessary for any given page. In theory that results in less bandwidth used if you're looking at a reasonably large number of pages compared to downloading a server rendered HTML page for each page because you only download the HTML once in the SPA version compared to every page you load with the SSR version. This is literally the reason why SPAs became popular in the first place. In badly built apps this isn't the case - the data is bloated, the bundle isn't optimized, etc. I imagine in the case of Gmail this is the case though - you probably only need to read a couple of dozen moderately large emails before the JS version starts to win out. This is something you'd need to test rather than making an assumption though. That said, a native app will win over both because it's already on your device so the bandwidth used is only the email data.
- sgt 3y ago
  With continuous deployment, that cached SPA may frequently be replaced though. Depending on the team, but I've seen people deploying to production several times a week. That means a lot more JS and asset downloads as well.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    That's true but it can be mitigated by code-splitting to an extent. Making a vendor bundle out of any dependencies separately to your own code limits any app changes to a single part of the download unless you update a dependency version.
tamimio 3y ago
Not rare, I do sometimes check my email in the airplane and can tell, although it’s usually per X time rather than the MB, but it still slow to load on the web UI. Better just to use an email client.

trustingtrust 3y ago

Not an extreme case. There are times when I can barely get above 100kbps in spotty areas in some buildings. Loading the gmail web page is painful. HTML button appears immediately at the bottom while the website is struggling to load and clicking it will load emails. Very helpful if you ask me.

eviks 3y ago

But the fast and small alternative is skipping the web, e.g. set IMAP to a native app

kubb 3y ago
Exactly, a workaround exists and is already installed on your device.
forgotmypw17 3y ago
Using an IMAP client is not an option on many devices, especially when it is a public or borrowed device.
- rini17 3y ago
  It is incredibly inconvenient to log in on such device, especially if your primary one isn't available. I ended up writing down backup authenticator codes in my diary. Of course it kinda defeats the purpose and of course it's hard for users to figure out.
- seer 3y ago
  One of my employers disabled IMAP on gmail, siting security concerns… ended up pretty much not using email because of that (relying on slack mostly)
  - jowea 3y ago
    What's the security disadvantage of IMAP?
    - johnchristopher 3y ago
      I suspect OP employer didn't secure its IMAP configuration (no TLS) and simply relied on HTTPS in front of the webmail ?
      - seer 3y ago
        Apparently gmail’s IMAP implementation was considered “insecure” by the security experts… Forgot the details tbh
mftrhu 3y ago
If you can even do that, since they [e-mail hosts] go out of their way to make it difficult - even impossible, in some cases - to push people to use their own app.
crabbone 3y ago
Yeah... if only that worked with GMail. You cannot do proper authentication with GMail anymore. You need an elaborate dance, which will depend on how old your GMail account is (they became bolder with time and started to require more personal data from users), you will need to procure a special permit for your IMAP program to connect to GMail, and the way to do that changed over time. Also, newer GMail accounts cannot be registered without MFA, so you'll have to figure out how to deal with that. Having a very old GMail account, I still hold on to it, because I can still use IMAP in Gnus. But, should I lose that, or should Google finally curb my tiny freedoms... I'll have to look for alternatives too.

hkt 3y ago

sdf.org is splendid and their webmail is squirrelmail. $36 for lifetime membership is pretty good, and it is a considerably more ethical and private alternative than gmail.

thfuran 3y ago

Having slow and/or intermittent service isn't nearly so niche as blue water sailing.

entuno 3y ago

It's become pretty clear that a lot of developers never test their websites or apps in low bandwidth environments. Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.

Scoundreller 3y ago
Nor expensive data environments. The NPR One app used to chew through a few hundred mb of data in "caching" every time you started it. No way to restrict this function to wifi only. And no, you can't select bit rates. Also Zoom has little ability to minimize the audio or video data usage (but I've learned you can reduce how much of others video is sent to you by reducing the window size). Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.
- 0xFF0123 3y ago
  I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems. The fact that when you intermittently dropped out you catch up on the sped up audio always seemed neat (although I'm unsure if that was an intended feature, or just a side effect).
  - szundi 3y ago
    Pretty sure intended
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    > I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems. Likely true. Zoom doesn't chew up much bandwidth. I always find it funny when people think they need to upgrade their home internet bandwidth because a family "works & studies from home". Unless you're up/downloading huge media files, several instances of Zoom and virtual desktops will consume less than a 4k Netflix stream.
- lostlogin 3y ago

forgotmypw17 3y ago

Accessibility is all edge cases. And for every edge cases you anticipate and support, others you don't anticipate are allowed access.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Gigachad 3y ago

You're in a cruise ship. A highly destructive and entirely unnecessary luxury and you're complaining about having to pay extra to load gmail? Jesus.

hutzlibu 3y ago
His point is, there are data limited environments. This point stands, no matter what you think of his cruise? Also, who can decide, what is really necessary? And I don't have hard data at hand, but I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  Cruise ships directly introduce pollutants into the local maritime environment. These include oily bilge water, grey water, and others, not including sulfur emissions from the engines
  - b112 3y ago
    How do you know it wasn't a green cruise vessel? One with filters, or storage tanks. Do you know? Do you? Or is it a presumption? (Googling now to find out if this even exists, doesn't remove the presumptive nature of things.)
    - jzb 3y ago
      If you have to search to see if the Devil’s Advocate alternative you’re trying to gotcha OP on, who is being presumptive? Maybe you could’ve searched first? The vast majority of cruises are pretty shitty for the environment and treatment of people. Also tax avoidant. People just really don’t want to hear that so they can keep doing them and not think about the down sides.
      - lostlogin 3y ago
        OP was working on a survey ship, as mentioned in another thread.

userbinator 3y ago

How much "overhead" for the controls should a page contain beyond the content of the email itself? My instinct says several KB up to tens of KB would be reasonable, but apparently the non-basic version of Gmail uses several orders of magnitude more --- tens of MB.

amelius 3y ago

On a cruise ship, you're basically caught in a local monopoly for every product and service.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

johnchristopher 3y ago

> With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative. I don't know. Internet on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ocean is a bit like complaining you don't have good wine on your camels when backpacking through the Sahara. In any case, it absolutely is an edge case for now so there should be a minimum of preparations before the trip (setting IMAP instead of webmail for instance, if you need heavy bandwidth site content then set a proxy that only keeps the actual content and access that instead of the original source, etc.). Same with the beach house or the cottage lost in the woods not zoom-compatible. Well... It's weird to me how when this subject surfaces on HN a lot of people defend they are entitled to the same capabilities when they are in white spots than when they are at home.

onion2k 3y ago

The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference. A well designed Single Page App should be downloading a small-as-possible initial bundle with the page HTML and CSS, and then only downloading the data necessary for any given page. In theory that results in less bandwidth used if you're looking at a reasonably large number of pages compared to downloading a server rendered HTML page for each page because you only download the HTML once in the SPA version compared to every page you load with the SSR version. This is literally the reason why SPAs became popular in the first place. In badly built apps this isn't the case - the data is bloated, the bundle isn't optimized, etc. I imagine in the case of Gmail this is the case though - you probably only need to read a couple of dozen moderately large emails before the JS version starts to win out. This is something you'd need to test rather than making an assumption though. That said, a native app will win over both because it's already on your device so the bandwidth used is only the email data.

sgt 3y ago
With continuous deployment, that cached SPA may frequently be replaced though. Depending on the team, but I've seen people deploying to production several times a week. That means a lot more JS and asset downloads as well.
- onion2k 3y ago
  That's true but it can be mitigated by code-splitting to an extent. Making a vendor bundle out of any dependencies separately to your own code limits any app changes to a single part of the download unless you update a dependency version.

tamimio 3y ago

Not rare, I do sometimes check my email in the airplane and can tell, although it’s usually per X time rather than the MB, but it still slow to load on the web UI. Better just to use an email client.