24 ms·

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

• qingcharles 3y ago
  Anyone know how to buy an Itel P32 in the USA? :/
• morcus 3y ago
  Does anyone know how to measure CPU time on the main thread for a page load? I want to benchmark this for my own site.
• patrick451 3y ago
  The entire "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" notion should be considered harmful. That one idea has completely destroyed the end user experience.
• Tainnor 3y ago
  That exchange with Jeff Atwood makes me somewhat angry. It's one thing to be annoyed at a hardware vendor (justified or not), quite another to take it out on the users of said hardware. And while I appreciate that engineers can often afford to be blunter than people in other disciplines, I also think that a founder of two successful companies should have a bit more restraint when posting. Writing "fuck company X" (unless we're talking about a grossly unethical company, maybe) just seems like very immature behaviour to me.
• tracker1 3y ago
  Really need to see some lighter weight CSS tools combined with HTMX for a lot of general use. That or better crafting for web applications. It feels painful to me when I see payloads in excess of 4mb of compressed JS. It makes me really want to embrace wasm frameworks like yew or leptos. Things are crazy and nobody seems to notice or care. I run a relatively dated phone (Pixel 4a) with text set to max size. So many things are broken or unusable.
• iamsaitam 3y ago
  How the lack of design impacts users that want to read your blog post
• nofunsir 3y ago
  It impacts me, and I have a fast device!
• andy99 3y ago
  Nobody cares about people with older devices. We've shifted to a mode where companies tell their customers what they have to do, and if they don't fit the mold they are dropped. It's more profitable that way - you scale only revenue and don't have to worry about accessibility or customer service or any edge cases. That's what big tech has gotten for us.
  • dexwiz 3y ago
    You’re getting downvoted but I think despite the tone you are correct. 10 years ago corporate guidance on web dev was backwards compatibility going back several versions. Now it’s hardly any concern for anything more than 6 months old. More than anything I think it’s because corporate IT has had to modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also cannot demand user use an old version of a browser that still supports some old plugin. And as a vendor it’s not profitable to support people who maintain that mindset. Also “update to the latest version” is the new “turn it off and back on again,” when it comes to basic IT help.
    • gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Part of it was that users were terrible at updating browsers. You needed to support Internet Explorer 6, or cut off a third of your customers. It sucked. Now every browser gets updates, automatically and aggressively. The only real outlier is Safari, but even that updates way quicker than older browsers used to. As a result, who needs backward compatibility?
      • BeFlatXIII 3y ago
        Without all the compatibility shims, it means that you can drop coat bloat sooner when the JS gets replaced with a native browser capability.
    • Gigachad 3y ago
      Because the people with money who are buying your products are all running the latest version of iOS. The ones on a 6 year old Android version are not spending anything therefor it isn't worth investing money in making sure it works for them.
• Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  I'm normally a fan of Dan Luu's posts but I felt this one missed the mark. The LCP/CPU table is a good one, but from there the article turns into a bit on armchair psychology. From some random comments coming from Discourse's founder, readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. Even Knuth gets dragged into the mud based on comments he made about single vs multi-core performance and comments about the Itanium (which is a long standing point of academic contention.) This article just felt too soft, too couched in internet fights, to really stand up.
  • troupo 3y ago
    > readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have. But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now says that 2.4 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is fast now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vitals.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit... (this is from 4 years ago, it's probably worse now). You don't have to go far to see either Youtube loading 2.5 megabytes of CSS on desktop to the founder of Vercel boasting its super fast sites that take 20 seconds to load the moment you throttle it just a tiny bit: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1735338533303259571 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1735338533303259571
    • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      You're making the same mistake the post did. It depends on the reader already having sympathy for the idea that bloat is bad in order to make its case. I can read nerd site comments all day that lament bloat. For an article to stand on its own on this point it has to make the case to people who don't already believe this. Dan's articles have usually been very good at that. The keyboard latency one for example makes few assumptions and mostly relies on data to tell its story. My point is that this article is different. It's an elevated rant. It relies on an audience that already agrees to land its point, hence my criticism that it's too couched in internet fights.
• troupo 3y ago
  Also related: Performance Inequality Gap 2024 https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/ https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
• ryukoposting 3y ago
  I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering. It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's not that old, and it still works like new. I know it's not just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the same struggles. I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's website is among the absolute worst of the worst on mobile devices more than ~4 years old. Amazon was the only site I accessed regularly that bordered on unusable, even with relatively recent high-end mobile hardware.
  • eric__cartman 3y ago
    I have noticed with two 7 year old Snapdragon 835 devices that RAM and running a recent Android version makes a huge difference. I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to replace the battery and disassembling phones is a pain. Meanwhile a Galaxy S8 with the same SoC, 4GB of memory and stock Android 9 with Samsung's modifications chugs like there's no tomorrow. I can understand that having two more gigabytes of memory can make a difference but there is a night and day difference between the phones. Perhaps Android 14 has way better memory management than Android 9? Or Samsung's slow and bloated software is hampering this device? Either way it's irritating to see that many companies don't test on old/low-end devices. Most people in the world aren't running modern flagships, especially if they target a world-wide audience.
    • hinkley 3y ago
      This is what I miss from the removal of serviceable components on MacBooks. Was a time I would buy the fastest processor and just okay memory and disk, then the first time I got a twinge of jealousy about the new machines, buy the most Corsair memory that they would guarantee would work, and a bigger faster drive. Boom, another 18 months of useful lifetime.
      • lotsofpulp 3y ago
• ericra 3y ago
  As someone with recent experience using a relatively slow Android phone, it can be absolutely brutal to load some web pages, even ones that only appear to be serving text and images (and a load of trackers/ads presumably). The network is never the bottleneck here. This problem is compounded by several factors. One is that older/slower phones cannot always use fully-featured browsers such as Firefox for mobile. The app is takes too many resources on its own before even opening up a website. That means turning to a pared-down browser like Firefox Focus, which is ok except for not being able to have extensions. That means no ublock origin, which of course makes the web an even worse experience. Another issue is that some sites will complain if you are not using a "standard" browser and the site will become unusable for that reason alone. In these situations, companies frequently try to force an app down your throat instead. And who knows how much space that will take up on a space-limited device or how poorly it will run. Many companies/sites used to have simplified versions to account for slower devices/connections, but in my experience these are becoming phased out and harder to find. I imagine it's much harder to serve ads and operate a full tracking network to/from every social media company without all the javascript bloat.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    "Another issue is that some sites will complain if you are not using a "standard" browser and the site will become unusable for that reason alone." This is where the blog post falls short. It assumes the software someone uses to access these websites is a constant, chosen from a small selection of browsers controlled by companies that seek to profit from proliferation of online advertising. The software used is not a variable in this "study". Most of the sites on the list presented, namely the ones where we are just reading, listening or watching (cf. performing some commercial transaction), can be accessed using software not controlled by so-called "tech" companies on older hardware even with today's bloat and the experience will be faster than if trying to use the bloated software from so-called "tech" companies. (That software comprises both the browser and the gratuitous Javascript software that these browsers will run automatically without any input or choice from the user.)
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• MichaelMug 3y ago
  Since 2000, I've observed the internet shift from free sharing of information to aggressive monetization of every piece of knowledge. So I suspect that is the culprit. If you use the mobile web on the latest iPhone you'll find its unusable without an ad-blocker.
  • smokel 3y ago
    Hm, not entirely true, depending on what you mean with "the internet shifting". The internet has grown, and the free sharing is still going strong. Have a look at Wikipedia, Hacker News, Arxiv.org. To be honest, the stuff that was shared freely in 2000 was not all that great, and most of that which was, is still available. Remember that you had to buy a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica back then, and to all the academic journals. Granted, there are some non-free information silos, but generally I'm pretty happy with the procrastination advice on Reddit being surrounded by annoying ads that drive me away.
    • Solvency 3y ago
      Google "Roche Ff7 rebirth". I was curious who this character is. In 2000-2012 all the top links would be amazing fan sites and forums describing, discussing, and detailing the character with rich info. Now it's all AI seo spam LADEN with data mining and ad boat on monolithic sites like Fandom they barely work on the newest iphone.
    • geraldwhen 3y ago
      And Britannica wasn’t filled with highly moderated propaganda. Wikipedia is a failed experiment.
      • permo-w 3y ago
        Wikipedia is great, it's just not as good as it could be
    • ibz 3y ago
      Encyclopedia Britannica was on CDs, not on the internet. I'm old enough to remember.
• amelius 3y ago
  Perhaps these people are better off by running a web browser on a remote machine and interfacing with it over VNC.
  • wmf 3y ago
    Who's going to pay for that server? We're talking about $50-100 phones here.
  • ericra 3y ago
    This is trolling, right? Lemme just give my grandma a list of instructions for doing this so she can get to Facebook. I'll let you know how it works out.
    • wmf 3y ago
      Obviously you'd want to productize it (see WebTV, Mighty browser).
  • hexo 3y ago
    webdevs and their managers should use these web "apps" on bad machine over VNC on a slow connection for a few months. these javascript hellpages are basically crime against humanity and do contribute a lot to e-waste, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions
• olliej 3y ago
  It’s not just slow devices, it’s also any time you have any kind of weak connectivity. I think every OS now has tools to let you simulate shitty network performance these days so it’s inexcusable that so many sites and even native apps fail so badly anytime you have anything less than a mbit connection or greater than 50ms latency :-/
  • layer8 3y ago
    It’s not just weak connectivity. I know people in rural areas who still have less than 1 Mbps internet speed over their DSL landline. Using the internet there isn’t a lot of fun.
    • olliej 3y ago
      Which is absurd when you think that the internet used to be usable on 14.4k modems. I remember having to plan to take up hours of time on our phone line to download giant files that were smaller than many basic webpages these days (ignoring things like photos where there's obviously a basic size/quality tradeoff + more pixels)
      • layer8 3y ago
        Yes, 1 Mbps was actually high-speed internet 25 years ago.
      • genewitch 3y ago
        When i first moved to where i live now DSL had a waitlist, so i tried both a verizon hotspot (myfi!) and dialup. Dialup with HTML gmail (for slow connections!) took minutes to load. IRC was completely usable, but hangouts was not. danluu's website would have loaded just fine, as an example. I just remembered that after getting DSL if more than one person decided to watch a youtube video the pings went up in the 1000ms range.
• efields 3y ago
  How web bloat impacts users: negatively. Better do your best to fix it. This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.
  • withinboredom 3y ago
    > This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks. Meanwhile watches a team build a cathedral when all they needed was a shack.
    • ponector 3y ago
      Why not to build a cathedral if someone else is paying? I've never seen companies where developers are rewarded for performance improvement or any kind of improvement. Did an improvement? Nice! Good job! And that's it.
      • withinboredom 3y ago
        The point is, you build a shack so you can build a cathedral where it’s warranted. If you are stuck maintaining a cathedral you can’t move on to bigger better things.
        • nottorp 3y ago
          Yep, you build a shack and charge the users the price of a starbucks latte per month because "it's just a starbucks latte". Then you wonder why the solo founder saas has no customers.
          • withinboredom 3y ago
            I'm not sure what you're talking about; but what I was trying to say is I tend to see teams get charged with building X (which should be a cathedral), but then build a cathedral of configuration parsing, and a cathedral of CRUD; instead of focusing on X.
    • 3y ago
• ugjka 3y ago
  Here is how you do web: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ Observe the speed
  • c2xlZXB5Cg1 3y ago
    What a refreshing experience.
  • throw_m239339 3y ago
    Or HN. All that talk about "brutalist web design" yet most websites are more bloated than ever...
    • MaxBarraclough 3y ago
      'Brutalist web design' is a pretty small niche though, no? It's the kind of thing Hacker News readers will have heard of, but I don't think it was ever close to mainstream.
  • Solvency 3y ago
    Ironically the modern web, built by programmers, is scorned by programmers. You all collectively, persistently, shamelessly decided AngularReactNodeWebpackViteBloat 200mb asynchronous hellspawn websites needed to be made this way. When all this time, lightweight CSS and anchor links and some PHP was all we needed.
    • RGamma 3y ago
      *built by techbros
  • ildjarn 3y ago
    This loads faster than native apps serving local content on my device.
    • yen223 3y ago
      For me, it took an estimated 3-5s to load on first visit. Fast, but not "faster than native apps" The second time round it loaded almost instantly. I'm guessing there's some caching going on.
• jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  These sites can and should be much better. Yes. Definitely. At the same time, while a 10s load time is a long time & unpleasant, it doesn't seem catastrophic yet. The more vital question to me is what the experience is like after the page is loaded. I'm sure a number of these sites have similarly terrible architecture & ads bogging down the experience. But I also expect that some of those which took a while to load are pretty snappy & fast after loading. Native apps probably have plenty of truly user-insulting payloads they too chug through as they load, and no shortage of poor architectural decisions. On the web it's much much easier to see all the bad; a view source away. And there is seemingly less discipline on the web, more terrible and terribly inefficient cases of companies with too many people throwing whatever the heck into Google Tag Manager or other similar offenses. The latest server-side react stuff seems like it has a lot of help to offer, but there's still a lot of questions about rehydration of the page. I'm also lament see us shift away from the thick-client world; so much power has been embued to the users from the web 9.9 times out of 10 just being some restful services we can hack with. In all, I think there's a deficiency in broad architectural patterns for how the thick client should manage it's data, and a really issue with ahead-of-time bundles versus just-in-time & load behind code loading that we have failed to make much headway on in the past decade, and this lack is where the real wins are.
  • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    Yeah this is exactly the kind of nuance I'd love to see explored but as you say, auditing native apps is difficult, and it's really hard to compare apples to apples unless you can really compare equivalent web and mobile apps.
• nhggfu 3y ago
  re: Wordpress - with which theme? benchmarked on default theme they give away free like "2024" or whatever ? obvs a good coder optimizes their own theme to get 100% score on lighthouse.
• throw_m239339 3y ago
  Every company stopped caring, especially the companies who were at the forefront of standards and good web design practices, like Google and Apple. Google recently retired their HTML Gmail version, mind you, it still worked on a 2008 256MO RAM Android phone with an old Firefox version and it was simply fast... of course the new JS bloated version doesn't, it just kills the browser. That's an extreme example, yet low budget Phones have 2GB of RAM, you simply cannot browser the web with these and expect reasonable performances anymore. Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to use "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to data collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and Google.
  • lukan 3y ago
    "Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to use "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to data collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and Google." Partly for sure, but Amazon for example? Or Decathlon? (a big sports/outdoor chain in europe) Their sites are just horrible on a mobile (or in Decathlons case also on a Desktop, that is not high end), but they also don't offer me their app in plain view, so I have to assume it is just incompetence. The devs only testing everything on their high end devices connected to a backbone.
    • Nextgrid 3y ago
      > but Amazon for example? Or Decathlon? (a big sports/outdoor chain in europe) Pretty much every company out there employs oxygen wasters who need "engagement" to justify their promotions/salaries. They don't care whether said "engagement" translates to actual profit. If bloating the page or adding some annoying cookie banner allows them to come up with some random number that goes up (no matter whether the measurement is even correct) they'll happily take that opportunity even if would cause actual profits to go down.
  • spintin 3y ago
    Yes, on Thursday Google ended their only viable "product". RIP Google. The new Reddit is unusable, and the old is well too old. Twitch is borderline usable, with chat and video stream problems... The list is long... All changes are bad when you have the final formula because they are job security. Eventually the monkeys on this ball of dirt will realize that jobs and money don't exist, but then it will be to late... oh that is now! RIP Humans.
• timnetworks 3y ago
  68k.news loads fine, it's probably that the people writing your applications are not great at their jobs?
• legulere 3y ago
  Missing text styling impacts all users. The text is hardly legible. You really don't need much styling (bloat) to get a good result, as demonstrated on http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • anthk 3y ago
    Contrast is good. https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/
  • bensecure 3y ago
    addressed in the article
• sylware 3y ago
  google web engines (blink/geeko) and apple web engines with their SDK are sickening. They are an insult to sanity. They well deserve their hate.
  • tredre3 3y ago
    The engines are perfectly fine. It's the websites/web developers that are the problem.
    • sylware 3y ago
      I don't agree, the web devs are making it worse.
• zac23or 3y ago
  Nobody, nobody, nobody cares about old hardware, performance, users, etc. if anyone cared, React wouldn't be a success. The last time I tried to use the react website on an old phone, it was slow as hell. LetsEncrypt is stopping serving Android 7 this year. Android 7 will be blocked from 19% of the web: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration The option is to install Firefox. Users with old hardware are poor people. Nobody wants poor people around, not even using their website. “Fuck the user”, that's what we heard from a PO when we tried to defend users, imagine if we tried to defend poor users.
  • supertrope 3y ago
    I think Let's Encrypt made a heroic effort. They deployed a hack to support Androids long abandoned by the operating system maintainer and manufacturer. If you want to blame LE for the breakage then also blame: GOOG for using the IBM PC clone business model without a device tree standard, QCOM for selling chips but very quickly cutting support, the manufacturer, and cellular carriers who prefer to lock you into another 24 month installment plan than approve an update for your existing handset.
    • zac23or 3y ago
      > If you want to blame LE for the breakage then also blame ... Of course they are also guilty. LE isn't the most to blame in reality, it's just an example that old hardware isn't important to decision makers.
  • robocat 3y ago
    > PO What's the acronym? Unfortunately acronyms are context sensitive and many users here are not in your context... Maybe try to avoid using acronyms!
    • gkbrk 3y ago
      Product owner?
    • 3y ago
• mik1998 3y ago
  I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged) and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my preference of using native software (non-electron), which generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more modern" computer.
  • jwells89 3y ago
    Whenever I pull out old machines I’m a little shocked at how responsive they are running a modern OS (Win10 or Linux), so long as the modern web is avoided. Anything with a Core 2 Duo or better is adequate for a wide range of tasks if you can find non-bloated software to do them with. Even going back so far that modern OS support is absent, snappiness can be found. My circa 2000 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9.1 doesn’t feel appreciably slower than its modern day counterpart for more than one might expect, and some things like typing latency are actually better.
    • skydhash 3y ago
      I have a mac mini 2011 and it works great with Linux Mint. But load youtube and you’re in a world of pain.
    • anthk 3y ago
      A Core Duo it's perfectly fine with an ad blocker: git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters
    • ogurechny 3y ago
      “True UNIX way” solution to this would be getting the data from the Web non-interactively and redirecting it into some regular expressions to produce the only thing you want. Random example: https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli
    • nicbou 3y ago
      My 12" Macbook was my main computer for 2022 and part of 2023. It ran smoothly for my workflow, even with a 4k monitor. However YouTube and Gmail brought it to a crawl. I had to sell it because Youtube Music slowed down my work.
• Thorrez 3y ago
  Okta has a speed test?
  • wmf 3y ago
    Presumably Ookla.
• tdudhhu 3y ago
  Not only the user is affected by this. The difference between a 2MB and a 150KB CSS file can be a lot of bandwidth. The difference between a bad and good framework can be a lot of CPU power and RAM. Companies pay for this. But I guess most have no clue that these costs can be reduced. And some companies just don't care as long as money is coming in.
  • supertrope 3y ago
    A lot of companies don't care about end user performance experience. Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus, endpoint monitoring, TLS interception, Microsoft Teams, etc. If there's no explicit responsiveness goal, then performance dies by a thousand cuts.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      >Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus, Ugh, bane of my day job. I work with two companies in particular that have high security requirements in their environments and very similar total workloads with our software. One spends around $250k (ish) a year in self hosting costs, the other over a million to get the same throughput. The less costly one worked with us as a vendor to get anti-virus/endpoint exclusions on the file io intensive part of our application and put anti-virus scanning before that point, then harden those machines in other ways. The other customer is "policy demands we scan everything everywhere and the policy is iron law".
      • Nemo_bis 3y ago
        Worst is, nowadays such bloated "security" software is being forced onto Linux servers too... every time I check why something feels slow, Microsoft Defender is hogging resources.
  • afavour 3y ago
    Eh. Cloudfront pricing starts at 8.5c per GB and goes down to 2c. I think you’d struggle to use that pricing as a justification when compared to the software engineer hours required to shrink down a CSS bundle. (don’t get me wrong, 2MB is insane and ought to be a professional embarrassment. But I think you’re going to struggle using bandwidth bills as the reason) I agree with you about frameworks, though. So much waste in creating everything as (e.g.) a React app when there’s no need. Sadly the industry heavily prioritises developer experience over user experience.
• Devasta 3y ago
  If you don't have a good phone and a high speed connection, you don't have any money to spend on either the sites products or the products of their advertisers. When looked at from that angle, bloat is a feature. It's not reasonable to have an expectation of quality when it comes to the web.
  • LAC-Tech 3y ago
    Huh? I have a 5 year old, mid range android, and I still buy things online. Not everyone cares about phones.
    • blauditore 3y ago
      Also, there are some websites targeting users with little money as well.
  • Uehreka 3y ago
    Well that take sure goes from 0 to 60 real fast. Can you really be sure that only people with good phones and connections have money to spend? Just to poke some obvious holes: what about old rich people who have a distaste for modern phones but spend lavishly on vacations every year? Or outdoorsy rich people who are frequently in areas with poor cell coverage but are constantly purchasing expensive camping/climbing equipment? How about people who aren’t rich, but work for companies where their input is part of a purchasing process with millions of dollars of budget? Those people are all super-lucrative advertising targets, I don’t think advertisers are intentionally weeding them out.
  • jhanoncomm 3y ago
    I think you are close to the truth there. But I doubt companies purposely increase their hosting costs as some kind of firewall to only include the rich. More like they just don’t care. Same reason for technical debt, everyone wants to grow and move needles. If a company could magically make their site more available and efficient for free I am sure they would jump at the chance. But spending a million on that vs. a million on ads wont seem worth it.
• bluquark 3y ago
  Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. I believe it's primarily this category of user that accounts for Dan's observation that incremental improvements in CPU/RAM/disk measurably improve engagement. As for users with the lowest-end devices like the Itel P32, Dan's chart seems to prove that no amount of incremental optimization would benefit them. The only thing that might is a wholesale different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved successful: the empathy problem returns in a different guise, as US-based developers often make the wrong decisions on which features/polish are essential to keep versus discarded for performance reasons.
  • qingcharles 3y ago
    These phones aren't just in the Developing World, though. This is a USA problem too. I work with parolees and they get the free "Lifeline" phones the federal govt pays for. You can get one for free on any street corner in the poor 'hoods of the USA. They are the cheapest lowest spec Android phones with 15GB data/month. That data is burned up by day 3 due to huge Web payloads and then the user can't fill out forms he needs for jobs/welfare and can't navigate anywhere as he can't load Maps.
    • BehindBlueEyes 3y ago
      I’m curious how quickly the data would be used up if only using it for the intended forms/jobs/welfare. I wouldn’t be surprised if the data lasted barely any longuer due to bloat.
      • qingcharles 3y ago
        When I had one of these the data only lasted me 4 days. I didn't even purposely watch any videos, but I did read a lot of news articles and many "magazine" style sites have huge video payloads that load (and sometimes play) in the background if you're not running something like uBlock. I found some sites with 250MB home pages :(
• zdw 3y ago
  Is this new or old reddit being benched? That would be an interesting direct comparison.
  • re 3y ago
    New Reddit, per the appendix. I think that Old Reddit is likely to be fairly competitive (I would guess placing near Wordpress), and yeah I agree it would be interesting to have in the table to see how far it's fallen.
• nolist_policy 3y ago
  Next try out the search engines. Anecdotally, Google Search loads ~500ms faster than DuckDuckGo on the OG Pinephone.
  • jhanoncomm 3y ago
    That is one performance metric. What about energy use and loading search results not just the home page. I find DDG faster from a perception point of view. I imagine on sone metrics it is faster.
    • nolist_policy 3y ago
      Sorry, should have been more precise. I was measuring loading search results. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=test9999 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=test9999 vs. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=test9999&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=test9999&ia=web
      • ponector 3y ago
        Did you measure time user needs to scroll and click reject google cookies?
• AlienRobot 3y ago
  I'm glad people remember what WW in WWW means. :) It makes me very sad to see that reddit's new design is so heavy it can't even be accessed by part of the world. It's like parts of the internet are closing theirs doors just so they can have more sliding effects that nobody wants. Or maybe I'm just a weird one who prefers my browser to do a full load when I click a link. Btw there was a time everyone kept talking about "responsive" web design and, having used only low-end smartphones and tablets, I kept finding it weird that there was such focus on the design being responsive for mobile devices when those mobile devices were so extremely slow to respond to touch to begin with. Of course I know that's not what they meant, but it still felt weird.
  • Izkata 3y ago
    > I'm glad people remember what WW in WWW means. :) Welcome to the Wide Web, where bloat is the norm.
• anthk 3y ago
  A simple text site such as Reddit and some Digg clones are nearly unusable under an Item ATOM with a JS based client.
• maxloh 3y ago
  YouTube is one of the slowest websites I have ever used. It takes several seconds to load, even with moderate hardware and fast internet connections.
  • jhanoncomm 3y ago
    Reddit for me is the slowest site. And while old.reddit fixes this they try to steer you back to main reddit at any opportunity!
    • genewitch 3y ago
      RES fixes this, i think. It's a browser extension that forces everything to stay the way it was when reddit worked fine - before publishers bought it. I don't have any issue with reddit usability, although i do use it a lot less since they nuked my cellphone app from orbit as a cash grab.
    • Vilian 3y ago
      Same, but i'm using lemmy more
  • lazypenguin 3y ago
    YouTube doesn’t feel zippy as a website but the reliable and speed of videos have been very good for me. I remember the days when buffering videos was hell.
  • Nextgrid 3y ago
    I remember watching YouTube in 720p HD back in 2009 on a mid-range laptop of the era and it felt faster than the current experience on an M1 where the page often stutters and takes seconds to load. As far as I know, nothing changed on the video detail page to justify such a huge performance degradation. There's still a player, there are still comments, there are ads and suggested videos. Everyone working on that pile of shit should be ashamed. They would've been better off literally doing nothing and just enjoy the incremental performance gains as the hardware got faster.
• INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
  web bloat also impacts my sanity
• genewitch 3y ago
  as a data point youtube is unusable on raspberry pi 3. This happened within the last year, because prior to that you could "watch" videos at about 10-15FPS which is enough, for instance, to get repair videos in a shop setting (ask me how i know). When the raspberry pi model B - the first one released - came out, you could play 1080p video from storage, watch youtube, play games. I'm not sure what youtube is doing (or everyone else for that matter.) If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans. eating CPU cycles for profit (ad-tech would be my off the cuff guess for why youtube sucks on these low power devices) should be loudly derided in the media and people should use more efficient services, even if the overall UX is worse.
  • LM358 3y ago
    Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other codecs a while ago.
    • Retr0id 3y ago
      I have no idea if it still works, but the "h264ify" browser extension used to be great for working around this issue (by forcing youtube to serve h264) https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify
      • genewitch 3y ago
        i did a full apt dist-upgrade to try and get the h264ify plugin to install and if i remember correctly i never was able to get it to install. I upgraded from "chromium" to "chromium-browser" and set all the compositing and other settings recommended for the RPI. and to reply to another sibling, "yt-dlp" isn't workable, this is for a senior citizen that does small motor repairs. I got an HP elitedesk that's a few years old coming in monday to replace the RPI; hopefully that will last another 3 years before google et al decide to "optimize" again.
        • 3y ago
• zbrozek 3y ago
  There's also a huge tendency to design for fast, high quality connectivity. Try using any Google product on airplane wifi. Even just chat loads in minutes-to-never and frequently keels over dead, forcing an outrageously expensive reload. Docs? Good luck. I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet loss are real.
  • timeon 3y ago
    What I find interesting is that design of websites is often 'mobile first' but rarely 'mobile connection first'.
  • genewitch 3y ago
    The last decade of my life has been a speedrun in "less than ideal conditions" for computing. CGNAT, 5mbit dsl, spotty "fixed wireless" and my latest debacle: starlink, although that seems to be getting better slowly; used to drop 15/60 seconds, now it drops more like 4/200 seconds. Constant power issues and lightning strikes - i only have 1 computer that has a working NIC, because evidently tiny power fluctuations are enough to send most chipsets into the graveyard. I had to switch to full fiber between all compute sites on my property, and a wifi backup, because copper is too risky.
    • zer00eyz 3y ago
      Do you have earth return on your power?
      • genewitch 3y ago
        Yes, and it works, too. But i have outbuildings with servers and networking gear in them and metal conduit between buildings on/underground. Voltage potentials don't care, if there's a wet extension cord or something that's a less resistive path to start flowing and some gear is on that circuit or adjacent, it'll go. Overall switching to fiber is cheaper than aggressive lightning protection, and i moved all the network gear to a commercial UPS, and the interconnect between the "modems" and the switches is media converted to fiber for 3 feet. any time i have to run networking further than 6' or so i run fiber and put a media converter or a single gbic switch there. I'm hoping i futureproofed enough to upgrade to 10gbit in a year or so. My backup NAS has 10gbit but nothing else is connected at that speed yet. edit: One time lightning hit a pine tree in the back of the house, and it used my dipole antenna to reach a tree 80' away, and apparently there was an extension cable near there, which went back into the house, and it went all the way around the house, to reach the telco CPE box where DSL lived. the telco box and my mains earth are roughly 1 meter apart. That surge took out my main desktop computer, a washing machine (singed the dryer where it arced between it and the washer), the toaster oven, a microwave, my NAS, and my router connected to telco. It went two different paths inside the house, along both outside walls, one via mains copper and the other via cat5e copper. That was quite an expensive misadventure.
• myself248 3y ago
  Where "users with slow devices" equals "anyone trying to keep hardware running more than a few years", it seems. It's enforced obsolescence. I've said for a long time, devs should be forced to take a survey of their users' hardware, and then themselves use the slowest common system, say, the 5th-percentile, one day a week. If they don't care about efficiency now, maybe they will when it's sufficiently painful.
  • StressedDev 3y ago
    I have an iPhone 11 Pro. It is about 4.5 years old and still runs great. My guess is I can get another 1.5 to 2.5 years out of it. My point here is not every phone which is more than a few years old stops working or cannot browse web sites.
  • logtempo 3y ago
    thing is, boss is not a dev. He is a business man.
• dan-robertson 3y ago
  If one cares about accessibility of a website to people with much slower devices, particularly living in less developed parts of the world, I guess there are more considerations: - using more clear English with simple sentence structures should make the content more accessible to people who don’t read English with the fluency of an educated American - reducing the number of requests required to load a page as latency may be high (and latency to the nearest e.g. cloudflare edge node may still be high)
  • zozbot234 3y ago
    > reducing the number of requests required to load a page In practice this pretty much requires pure SSR and "multiple page" design, given the amount of network roundtrips on typical SPA sites. (Some lightweight SPA updates may nonetheless be feasible, by using an efficient HTML-swapping approach as seen in HTMX as opposed to the conventional chatty-API requests and heavy DOM manipulation.)
• lelanthran 3y ago
  This article is basically unreadable for me 48 y/o on desktop). In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it readable: font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.5em; max-width: 38rem; Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is. I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to make it readable. Seriously, techies, it's an extra 64 Bytes to make your page more readable.
  • hmottestad 3y ago
    It’s pretty terrible on my phone too. Almost no margins and small font. Thankfully Reader Mode works in Safari, which fixes everything.
    • db48x 3y ago
      This page doesn’t specify _any_ font size. It relies on your browser to choose an appropriate size instead. If the text is too small for you to read, then your browser settings for default font size are wrong.
  • extra88 3y ago
    I agree that they should add some minimal CSS. But using your browser's Reader View also works, a click rather than multiple steps in DevTools.
  • db48x 3y ago
    Why don’t you just change your browser’s default font size?
  • jagged-chisel 3y ago
    Do you have any idea of the layers of tooling you must use these days to produce those 64 bytes, and how each of those layers change and remove was was fed from all the other layers? To get exactly those bytes out the other end of the tools would be a herculean effort. Because we can’t just go around trying to understand basic web-based development without the frameworks … can we?
  • blehn 3y ago
• sams99 3y ago
  Highly Gamed === It is better if users with slow devices see a white screen for 30 seconds vs an indication that something is happening, because ... reasons?
  • yawaramin 3y ago
    You missed the point, which is that it's better if users with slow devices see actually useful content rather than a splash screen.
• ashayh 3y ago
  This is bad from a global warming perspective.
• dan-robertson 3y ago
  Relating to the aside about opportunities in different countries: the comparison between potential programming career prospects between a poor American and middle class Pole feels reasonable for someone born around the same time as the OP (early ’80s I guess) but I suspect it’s since shifted in Poland’s failure. I think the relative disadvantages of a poor American compared to their wealthier peers have increased as there’s more competition (as the degree is seen as more desirable by motivated wealthy parents) and the poor student likely won’t even have a non-phone computer at home where all their wealthier peers probably will. Possibly they could work around the competitiveness of computer science by going via some less well-trodden path (eg mathematics or physics) except that university admission isn’t by major. They may also be disadvantaged by later classism in hiring. Meanwhile a middle class Pole will have access to a computer and, provided they live sufficiently near one of the big cities, access to technical schools which can give them a head start on programming skills (and on competitive programming which is a useful skill for passing the current kind of programming interview questions). To get the kind of good outcome described in the OP, they then need to get hired somewhere like Google in Zurich (somewhat similar difficulty to in the US except the earlier stages were easier (in the sense of being more probable) for the hypothetical Pole) and progress from there (maybe impeded by initially not being at the headquarters / fewer other employment opportunities to get career advancement by changing jobs). Class will be less of a problem as the hypothetical middle class pole isn’t so different in wealth from other middle class Europeans and you get much less strong class-selection than when (e.g.) Americans are hiring Americans.
• hexage1814 3y ago
  >Many pages actually remove the parts of the page you scrolled past as you scroll There is a special place in hell for every web developer who does that.
  • teg4n_ 3y ago
    It’s a performance optimization for rendering a large amount of html. If the DOM had all the items in memory it would perform much worse. Thankfully browsers are working on a feature where you can keep the markup in the DOM for things like CTRL-F without hurting performance. Granted the main reason such a technique is needed is designs that avoid pagination.
    • acdha 3y ago
      Pagination is part of it but most of it is simply using inefficient JavaScript frameworks and not learning how the DOM or CSS really work. The maximum number of elements you could have on a phone a decade ago was measured in hundreds of thousands (median) or millions (iPhone), and the hardware & browsers have gotten faster. The problem is that you have had a lot of very turnaround focused developers shoveling out code which uses deeply nested elements, poorly-scoped event handlers, etc. which mean that too many DOM elements are created, unnecessarily touched during updates, and the overall complexity means that on the off chance someone opens their browser’s profiler they won’t see a single obvious problem and will likely proclaim it unfixable and say something like “the DOM is slow”.
    • anonymoushn 3y ago
      We had web pages with big lists and tables in the DOM 20+ years ago, they were fine. The difference is that now we use web frameworks that do work proportional to DOM size many times per second.
      • hexage1814 3y ago
        Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it's all a plane to make it harder for people to save stuff. If the content just stays there after you loaded, you could just save the page as HTML and, if there wasn't a lot of javascript shenanigans, it should save it okay. When you add this element, this doesn't work anymore. I'm pretty sure instagram, for example, does that with the intention of making it harder for people to save profiles.
• GIFtheory 3y ago
  Using https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/ makes me wish I were a hardware engineer. Makes every other e-commerce site feel like garbage. If amazon were this fast, I’d be broke within days. Why haven’t other sites figured this out?
  • geraldhh 3y ago
    wow! that was a refreshing experience > Why haven’t other sites figured this out? i suspect that most ppl cannot appreciate efficiency
  • samstave 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • samstave 3y ago
      If you are upset that I posted obv GPT output, then here is a reason why you're failing at your disgruntlement: I am able to post my prompt in whatever crazy alarmist fashion I would like and massage it into producing an output that I agree with, represents my arguments and doesnt inflame or trigger... aside from the 12 monkeys anti GPT reponse, because they couldnt imagine that it not a generic GPT-barf, as opposed to the machinations of the OP to get a more salient point without crossing lines.... oops..
      • samstave 3y ago
        WHO THE FUCK IS DOWNVOTING THIS? @Dang - are you beholden to trolls now? Jeauses.. asking who consumes bandwidth is not "dont criticise the bandwidth providers"?)) SERIOUS Show me every sing account that downvoted this. I gave you content, I uploaded an opinon for which you monetize - yet you take censorship on my provided content as well as revenue. Show me.
  • bombela 3y ago
    As a hobbyist, I cannot justify the cost of McMaster. I will confess that I often use it to find the precise name of a part for purchasing on Amazon/AliExpress. Maybe a quality service really does cost that much? But the gap in performances and usability is so great, it seems that something else must be at play sometimes.
• demondemidi 3y ago
  I was expecting this to go one level deeper and point out that bloated sites that are critical, like: banking, medical, government -- can lead to problems paying bills or getting timely information (especially in the case of medical situations that aren't quite emergencies but close to it).
• hexage1814 3y ago
  What I noticed more and more is me using alternative front-end or deliberately changing my user-agent to some old browser in some sites that still have some legacy version
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mastazi 3y ago
  > While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites. Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to implement that new tracking script and everyone assumes that users won't even be able to tell the difference.
  • spintin 3y ago
    PUBG is now a very special beast: It's CPU bound = we are unlikely to ever see a "AAA" game with anything beyond it's complexity for eternity. You can run it on a 1030 GPU at 60 FPS.
    • duck2 3y ago
      It's not like websites are GPU bound
      • spintin 3y ago
        No but most games are. Thus PUBG is an outlier.
    • willcipriano 3y ago
      Somebody has to be working on a Simcity or Civilization MMO.
      • spintin 3y ago
        I wish! The truth is server and client programmers rarely get along so persistent MMOs with alot of moving parts are only going to happen once one developer is schizo enough to do both well. AAA will never be able to do it.
  • paledot 3y ago
    (But don't under any circumstances break the four other trackers already running on the site.)
• baseline-shift 3y ago
  People can only comfortably read a maximum of 17 words per line. Best is 12. That text should be in two columns.
• kabes 3y ago
  As someone who makes bloated sites I can only say that management doesn't give a fuck about bloat as long as features are checked of in due time. So please don't blame me
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    What about pride in your vocation?
• grishka 3y ago
  That Discourse guy is a classic example of someone designing their product for the world they wished existed instead of the world we actually live in. Devices with Qualcomm SoCs exist in billions, and will keep existing and keep being manufactured and sold for the foreseeable future. No amount of whining will change that. Get over it and optimize for them. People who use these devices won't care about your whining, they'll just consider you an incompetent software developer because your software crashes.
  • BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    Or they take the route to say “not for you”
    • grishka 3y ago
      It only works when you have a coherent vision of your product. "We can't be assed to optimize our code because we value DX above all else" certainly isn't that.
• Hackbraten 3y ago
  Mind that not only low-end or old phones have slow CPUs. Both the $999 Librem 5 and the $1999 Liberty Phone (latest models) have an i.MX8M, which means they have similar processing power as the $50 phones the article is talking about. I tried to log into Pastebin today. The Cloudflare check took several minutes.
• daft_pink 3y ago
  I really wish he compared an m3 Mac to a 6 year old intel chip and not some random processor I’ve never seen or experienced that I’m not sure is even available in the usa
  • illusive4080 3y ago
    I can vouch that my 2017 MacBook Pro struggles with all kinds of tasks, especially web ones.
• chefandy 3y ago
  The web is a communication medium: having bad delivery is going to impact the efficacy of the message. I've worked as both a developer and a designer, and as a developer I've certainly had to push back against content-focused people requesting things they didn't realize were, frankly, bananas. Tech isn't their job, so it was my job to surface those problems before they arose. However, as a designer, I've also had to push back against developers that refused to acknowledge that technical purity is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Something looking the same in lynx and firefox isn't a useful goal in any situation I've encountered, and the only people that think a gopher resource has better UX than a modern webpage stare at code editors all day long. No matter who it is, when people visualize how to solve a problem, they see how their area of concern contributes more clearly than others'. It's easy to visualize how our contributions will help solve a problem, and also hard to look past how doing something else will negatively impact your tasks. In reality, this medium requires a nuanced balance of considerations that depend on what you need to communicate, why, and to whom. Being useful on a team requires knowing when to interject with your professional expertise, but also know when it's more important to trust other professionals to do their jobs.
• keernan 3y ago
  A problem that recently started in Feb 2024 for me is probably unrelated to the topic, but close enough that I'm posting in the hopes someone has an idea of what is happening. I am running on a relatively new Lenovo Legion (~ 18 months old) with 64kb of ram running windows 11. About 6 weeks ago I began getting the BSOD every time I streamed a live hockey game (I watch maybe 3 games a week from Oct to Jun via Comcast streaming or 'alternative' streams). The crashes happened multiple times every game. After maybe 10 games of this, I began closing and reopening the browser during every game break. I've experienced zero crashes since doing that. When the crashes started, I was using Chrome - but I still experienced BSOD crashes when I switched and tested Fox and Brave. Just very odd to start happening suddenly without any changes to my machine that I could pinpoint - no upgraded bios or nvidia that I can recall.
  • coolcoder613 3y ago
    > with 64kb of ram running windows 11 I hope you mean GB.
    • keernan 3y ago
      haha... yea, I was a bit off As an aside, I'll use this as a way to update my post. I found a discussion of someone having a similar problem and turns out it was a windows office driver relating to automatic office updates. I turned it off which has resolved the issue.
• aragonite 3y ago
  > Another example is Wordpress (old) vs. newer, trendier, blogging platforms like Medium and Substack. Wordpress (old) is 17.5x / 10x faster (LCP* / CPU) than Medium and 5x / 7x faster (LCP* / CPU) faster than Substack on our M3 Max ... It's a persistent complaint among readers of SlateStarCodex (a blog which made a high-profile move to Substack from an old WordPress site). Substack attributes the sluggishness to the owner's special request to show all comments by default, but the old WordPress blog loads all comments by default and was fine even on older devices. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/substack_makes_my_computer_crawl_to_a_halt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/sub... https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b9p55g/anyone_else_finding_the_website_astralcodexten_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b9p55g/any...
• publius_0xf3 3y ago
  He mentions Substack, which is maybe the most egregious example of bloat I regularly encounter. Like I cannot open Scott Alexander's blog on my phone because it comes to a crawl. But the Substack devs are aware of this. [They know it's a problem](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/substack_makes_my_computer_crawl_to_a_halt/k34jjmn/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/sub...). >I'm much more of a backend person, so take this with somewhat of a grain of salt, but I believe the issue is with how we're using react. It's not necessarily the amount of content, but something about the number of components we use does not play nicely with rendering content at ACX scale. >As for why it takes up CPU after rendering, my understanding is that since each of the components is monitoring state changes to figure out how to re-render, it continues to eat up CPU. They know—but they do nothing to fix it. It's just an impossibility, rendering all those comments.
  • hexage1814 3y ago
    >Substack I don't access this site a lot, but I remember until very recently they had other front-end, it worked great. Honestly, I think they will follow the path of medium.com, and start to make the user experience worse and worse. It's a site where people post text, a few images, maybe 1 or 2 videos per post. It shouldn't be complicated.
• Ruq 3y ago
  Related: Too much of technology today doesn't pay attention or even care to the less technologically adept, either. Smartphones in my opinion are a major example of this. I can't tell you the number of people I've meet who barely even or don't even know how to use their devices. It's all black magic to them. The largest problem is the over-dependence on the use of "Gesture Navigation" which is invisible and thus non-existent to them. Sure, they might figure out the gesture bar on an iPhone, but they have no conception of the notification/control center. It's not that these people are dumb either, many of them could probably run circles around me in other fields, but when it comes to tech, it's not for a lack of trying, it's a lack of an intuitive interface.
  • _gabe_ 3y ago
    > The largest problem is the over-dependence on the use of "Gesture Navigation" which is invisible and thus non-existent to them. This is uniquely an iPhone problem, not a smartphone problem. It’s been one of my biggest gripes after switching from android. Where the heck is my back button? Home button? Any buttons? I really despise Apple’s obsession with minimalism and will be switching back to android when this phone dies.
  • crabmusket 3y ago
    It appears to me, as an outsider, that interfaces are designed with a "one size fits all" approach, at least at the prestige end of town. Instead of allowing the user to choose design and interaction that works for them, the designer (or product owner) acts as if they know what's best for all users.
    • idle_zealot 3y ago
      What would the alternative look like? Applications shipping as a bag of arrangeable buttons and widgets that the user assembles into pages?
      • crabmusket 3y ago
        I think themes might be closer to what I'm imagining. For example, material versus skeumorphic. But as the OC was talking about interactions, I'd be interested in seeing a scale of assistance or explicitness. For example, at the "I've never used computers before" end of town, there should be lots of inline annotations about what buttons do, lots of dropdown lists, etc. At the "power user" end of the scale there would be keyboard shortcuts, icons, tooltips etc.
• illusive4080 3y ago
  My 2017 i7 MacBook Pro struggles on websites. It’s absurd.
• cubefox 3y ago
  I would still add that users running out of monthly mobile data volume are still a big issue, likely bigger than slow phones. They can't load most websites with 64 kbit/s, because they are multiple megabytes large, often without good reason. For example, when Musk took over Twitter, he actually fixed this issue for some time, I tested it. But now they have regressed again. The website will simply not show your timeline on a slow connection. It will show an error message instead. Why would slow connections result in an error message?! A simple solution that e.g. Facebook (though apparently not Threads) and Google use, is to first load the text content and the (large) images later. But many websites instead don't load anything and just time out. Probably because of overly large dependencies like heavy JavaScript libraries and things like that.
• ordu 3y ago
  > Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX But TeX was designed to run on a single CPU-core, so no surprise here. I wonder what TeX could become if all Knuth had at the time a multicore machine with cores managing maybe 0.1 MIPS each (or even lower). Like what the world would become if we lived in a counterfactual world where Intel and its buddies starting in 1970s boosted not the frequency and instruction per second per core but number of cores? My take we'd switched to functional-style programming at 1980s with immutable data, created tools to describe multistage pipelines with each stage issuing tasks into a queue, while cores concurrently picking tasks from the queue. TeX would probably have a simplified and extra fast parser that could cut input into chunks to feed them into a fullblown and slow parser which would be a first stage of a pipeline, and then these pipelines somehow would converge into an output stream. TeX probably would prefer to use more of lexical scoping, to reduce interaction between chunks, or maybe it would make some kind of a barrier for pipelines where they all stop and wait for propagation of things like `\it` from its occurrence to the end. This counterfactual world seems much more exciting to me than the real one, though maybe I wouldn't be excited if I lived there.
  • ahepp 3y ago
    I assumed that to mean the layout work is limited to a single thread. You need to know what content made it onto page one before you can start working on page two, right?
• smj-edison 3y ago
  I've always wondered why people removed parts of the page when they were scrolled out. Like, don't you think the browser would already optimize for that? And even if it's not stored in the DOM, it's still being stored in the JavaScript's memory. It's frustrating when people try to reimplement optimizations that the browser already does better.
  • mike_hearn 3y ago
    The browser does not in fact optimize that. Yes it's surprising. If you want it to do basic optimizations like not rendering invisible content you need to give it hints via obscure and relatively recent CSS rules nobody ever heard of.
• hotdailys 3y ago
  When websites pack in too many high-res images, videos, and complex scripts, it’s like they’re trying to cram that overstuffed suitcase into a tiny space. Your device is struggling, man. It’s like it’s running a marathon with a backpack full of bricks. So, what happens? Your device slows down to a crawl, pages take forever to load, and sometimes, it just gives up and crashes. It’s like being stuck in traffic when you’re already late for work. And let’s not even talk about the data usage. It’s like your phone’s eating through your data plan like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. Now, if you’re on the latest and greatest tech, you might not notice much. But for folks with older devices or slower connections, it’s a real pain. It’s like everyone else is zooming by on a high-speed train while you’re chugging along on a steam engine. So, what can we do? Well, we can start by being mindful of what we put on our websites. Keep it lean, mean, and clean, folks. Your users will thank you, and their devices will too. And hey, maybe we’ll all get where we’re going a little faster.
  • lmz 3y ago
    Maybe we'll see the return of the proxy + lightweight browser model like Opera Mini.
    • hotdailys 3y ago
      And lightweight APPs, one tap to load all...
• nicbou 3y ago
  I travel a lot and experience a wide range of internet connection speeds and latencies. Hotel Wi-Fi can be horrible. The web is clearly not designed for or tested on slow connections. UIs feel unresponsive and broken because no one thought that an action might take seconds to load. Even back home in Germany, we have really unreliable mobile internet. I designed the interactive bits of All About Berlin for people on the U-Bahn, not just office workers on M3 Macbooks with fiber internet.
• avodonosov 3y ago
  Some years ago I tested real world web sites, turned out only about 30% of the javascript they load was actually invoked by the user's browser (even for sites optimied with Closure Compiler, that has some dead code elimination): https://github.com/avodonosov/pocl https://github.com/avodonosov/pocl The unused javascript code can be removed (and loaded on demand). Although I am not sure how valuable that would be for the world. It only saves network traffic, parsing time and some browser memory for compiled code. But js traffic in the Internet is neglidgible comparing to, say, video and images. Will the user experience be signifiqanty better if browser is the saved from the unnesessary js parsing? I don't know of a good way to measure that.
• bsdpufferfish 3y ago
  The most interesting part of this is the comments about software shifting from a normal career to a prestige target for wealthy families, and that this demographic shift has massive consequences on technology design and services.
• avodonosov 3y ago
  I think bloat could be prevented if it was noticed the moment it is introduced. After application evolves bloated, it's difficult to go back and un-bloat it. Bloat is often introduced accidential/y, without need, and unnoticed just because developers test on modern and powerful devices. If developer's regular test matrix included a device with minimal hardware pewer that was known to run the product smoothly in the past, the dev could immediately notice the newly introduced bloat and remove it. A bloat regression testing. I call this "ecological development". We should all do this. No need to aim for devices that already have trouble running your app / website. But take a device that works today and test that you do not degrade with respect to this device.
  • cuu508 3y ago
    > After application evolves bloated, it's difficult to go back and un-bloat it. It will be hard to get to pristine quality, but there ought to be some amount of low hanging fruit, where minimal changes bring noticeable improvement.
    • avodonosov 3y ago
      Maybe, but determining it will take some investigation. If the regular testing is done on a low profile device, developer knows as soon as possible that his recent changes introduced a bloat regression.
• julianlam 3y ago
  It's a shame that NodeBB was not included in the list of forums tested. We worked really hard to optimize our forum load times, and it handedly beats the pants off of much we've tested against. But that's not much of a brag, the bar is quite low. Dan goes on and lambasts (rightfully so) Atwood for deriding Qualcomm and assuming slow phones don't exist. Well, let's chat, and talk to someone whose team really does dogfood their products on slower devices...
  • julianlam 3y ago
    Well, to Dan's Credit, he kindly re-ran a subset of the tests for NodeBB: https://community.nodebb.org/post/98597 https://community.nodebb.org/post/98597
• jhatemyjob 3y ago
  Dan, I respect you and I feel your pain, but... > Another common attitude on display above is the idea that users who aren't wealthy don't matter. If you want to make money, then this is the correct attitude. You need to target the users who have the means to be on the bleeding edge. It may not be "fair" or "equitable" or whatever, but catering to the masses is a suicide mission unless you have a lot of cash/time to burn. This post reminds me of the standard Stallman quip "if everyone used the GPL, then our problems would be solved"
• richrichie 3y ago
  I wonder how much of the bloat of modern shiny internet widgets is pure lipstick that does not add any tangible value.
• coolcoder613 3y ago
  Compare with one of my projects, [1] It is a minimal, though modern-looking web chat. The HTML, CSS and JS together is 5024 bytes. The Rust backend source is 2801 bytes. It does not pull in anything from anywhere. [1] https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/minchat https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/minchat
  • cuu508 3y ago
    Is there a demo site or screenshots somewhere? Add them to README :-)
    • coolcoder613 3y ago
      I added a screenshot.
  • coolcoder613 3y ago
    Clarification: The frontend does not pull anything, the backend pulls in libraries for websockets and json using cargo.
• FridgeSeal 3y ago
  > As sites have optimized for LCP, it's not uncommon to have a large paint (update) that's completely useless to the user, with the actual content of the page appearing well after the LCP Aahh yes, the “I’ve loaded in my 38 different loading-shimmer-boxes, now kindly wait another 30 seconds while each of them loads more” Can we go back to “your page is loaded when _everything _ finishes loading” and not these unhelpful micro-metrics web devs are using to lie to themselves and users about the performance of their site?
• Razengan 3y ago
  Browsers should only display documents, not apps. That's what operating systems are for. Just give native apps what made the web popular in the first place: • Ability to instantly launch any app just by typing its "name" • No need to download or install anything • Ability to revisit any part of an app just by copy/pasting some text and sharing it with anyone. All that is what appears and matters to users in the end. -- But I suppose people who would disagree with this really want: • The ability to snoop and track people across apps (via shit like third-party cookies etc)
• porcoda 3y ago
  I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies. No developers appear willing to admit that there is a large cohort of not that great web programmers who don’t know much (and appear to not WANT to know much) about efficiency. They’re just as to blame for the sad world of web software as the big boss or corporate overlord that forced someone to make bad software.
  • dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
    >I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies. It ALWAYS starts at the top, no matter how you slice it. Why are the incompetent devs there in the first place?
  • niels_bom 3y ago
    It might also be people not willing to admit that they don’t know how to optimize website performance. And if you have a somewhat complex web app it can be complicated, especially if your stack doesn’t help you (looking at you React).
  • dijit 3y ago
    "it's better for the company that I don't try, my time is expensive and any minute not spent on a feature is a waste of my salary" - is a common justification that I hear all too often.
    • autoexec 3y ago
      "It's better for the company that I don't try" seems like a convenient take for a dev without the skills to have. I'd argue that performance is a feature, and if someone can't deliver it their salary is being wasted already.
      • TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
        Performance is a feature and management often doesn't care to optimize for it. If the market valued performance more then we would probably see competitive services which optimize for performance, but we generally don't. I'm sure there's plenty of developers that could deliver improved performance, it's just a matter of tradeoffs. Maybe the people who care this much about performance should start competing services or a consulting firm which optimizes for that. Better yet, they could devote their efforts to helping create educational content and improved frameworks or tooling which yields more performant apps.
• bradgessler 3y ago
  It also impacts users with fast devices. When I load a bloated website on an iPhone 15 Pro Max over a Unifi AP 7 Pro access point connected to a 1.2Gb WAN, it’s still a slow bloated website. If you build websites, do as much as you possibly can on the server. As an industry, how can we get more people to understand this?
• FrojoS 3y ago
  Has someone attempted to do the math on how much CO2 is emitted because of needless bloat and adds?
• pompino 3y ago
  I think it would be useful to separate data & code here. What if you kept the code the same, and downgraded the assets so the overall package is smaller/easier to process/execute? Or maybe tweaked the renderer so the same code & data can render quicker and slightly worse image quality consuming fewer CPU cycles? Basically I'm envisioning something like a game where the same game data+code can support multiple performance targets (except in this case the different CDN hookups to get the assets out, rather than everyone getting the bloated data download)
• apatheticonion 3y ago
  This is why I'm excited for Web Assembly. Writing an efficient high performance, mutli-threaded GUI in Rust or Go would be awesome. Just waiting on it to be practically usable
  • jenadine 3y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. The browser ultimately need to render the UI from the DOM which is intrinsically linked with JavaScript. Wasm can help for some of the application logic maybe. But it also comes at a cost of some fixed overhead to bring up the wasm blob. JavaScript performance aren't that bad for UI.
    • apatheticonion 3y ago
      The argument I'm making is one for increased choice in the technologies we have available to us as web developers, particularly when it comes to writing applications that aim to accommodate users with slower/more affordable devices. In a lot of cases, shipping a wasm blob is not that bad. Depending on the language; compressed and optimized blobs are only a few kilobytes and can be "code-split" such that they are lazy loaded. Wasm binaries also evaluate faster than JavaScript which could lead to better "web vital" metrics (like "time to first paint/interactive", though anyone can write a slow application in any language so that's not a given). Syntactically, there is nothing missing from other programming languages that make them unsuited to working with DOM APIs. The real blocker is waiting for wasm to gain access to DOM APIs thereby dropping the need for JavaScript glue code - once that constraint is lifted, I see no reason why it wouldn't be practical to use an alternative to JavaScript for web development. JavaScript is practical and useful in _most_ web development cases because the runtime is built in, the ecosystem around it is quite mature and the use cases aren't that complex - however there are many cases that would benefit from more performant languages (think YouTube, Jira, VSCode, banking apps, etc). When thinking about the "next billion" internet users (related to the topic of the article), we are going to see more users with affordable devices that feature many cores with lower clock speeds. In such contexts it is vital to efficiently leverage the available client device hardware resources - something that JavaScript isn't well suited to and something most of us don't experience (the privilege of having fast computing hardware). Take multi-threading as an example. JavaScript's single threaded non-blocking nature is safe/ergonomic from a programming perspective and fantastic on devices that feature fast individual cores - however it falls over when clients have slower devices with more cores. Ideally, we need _the choice_ to follow a more conventional multi-threaded model in cases where we care about performance (a UI thread + worker threads, like we see in native apps/desktop applications). The only initiative that has the potential to get us there is wasm.
• masa331 3y ago
  My own recent experience with this - i run a small sass web app and about a year ago i decided to partner with advertising company to help with the grow. Part of the plan was that they will remake our static homepage in Wordpress bc it will be easier to manage it for them and also easier to add a blog, which was part of the new plan. I know Wordpress is slow and i would say unnecessary also but i said yes bc i did not want to micromanage them. A year later we parted our ways and i was left with WP where the page load was abysmal(3-5 seconds) and about 10Mb of bs. There was something called "Oxy" or "Oxy builder" which would add a tons of style,js and clutter to the markup and kind of SPA page load style but horribly failing. So now i migrated the site to Jekyll, got rid of all the bs and it's back fast. And for me also again possible to really improve. So for my businesses i'm not touching WP ever again and that will be a huge bloat reduction in itself
  • askonomm 3y ago
    Seems like your issues were not with WP itself, but with whatever plugins and themes were added to it. Avoiding WP entirely for this is like avoiding a programming language because the 1 developer you had experience with sucked at it. WP itself can be very fast, as is evident by a ton of high profile sites running it (CSS-Tricks, TechCrunch, New York Times, Time Magazine, etc). I'm not a fan of WP myself, but that's just because I don't like how its built and how it entirely avoids modern programming standards, not because it is slow, which it most definitely doesn't have to be.
• anticensor 3y ago
  This is a manifestation of Wirth's law, again.
• ksec 3y ago
  >There are two attitudes on display here which I see in a lot of software folks. First, that CPU speed is infinite and one shouldn't worry about CPU optimization. And second, that gigantic speedups from hardware should be expected and the only reason hardware engineers wouldn't achieve them is due to spectacular incompetence, so the slow software should be blamed on hardware engineers, not software engineers. Not just the quote but the whole piece. I am glad this was brought out by Dan, and gets enough attentions to be upvoted. ( Although most are focusing on Server Rendering vs Client Side Rendering; Sigh) A lot of what it said would have been downvoted to oblivion on HN. A multi billion dollar company CTO once commented on HN, why should I know anything about CPU or Foundry as long as they give performance improvements every few years. Not only Jeff Atwood, there are plenty of other Software developers, from programming languages authors, backend and Frontend Frameworks authors, with hundreds of thousands of followers, continue to pump out views like Jeff on social media. Without the actual understanding of hardware nor the business or selling IPs or physical goods. Hardware Engineers has to battle with Physics. And yet gets zero appreciation. Most of the appreciations you see now around Tech circle are completely "new". For a long time no one heard of TSMC. ASML wasn't even known until Intel loss its leading node. Zero understanding of CPU design nor even basic development cycles. How it will takes years just to get a new CPU out. And somehow hate Qualcomm because they didn't innovate. A company that spends the highest percentage of revenue on R&D in tech industry.
• cettox 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons I've started building https://formpress.org https://formpress.org. Seeing the bloat in many form builder apps/services, I've decided there is need for a lightweight and open source alternative. How we achieve lightweightness? Currently our only sin is, our inclusion of jquery, that is just to have some cross browser way of interacting with DOM, then we hand craft required JS code based on features used in the form builder. We then ship a lightweight runtime, whose whole purpose is to load necessary JS code pieces to have a functional form that is lightning fast. Ps: we havent gone to the last mile in optimizations, but we definteley will. Even with current state, it is the most lightweight form builder out there. It is open source, MIT licensed, built on modern stack(react, node.js, Kubernetes and Google Cloud) and we are also hosting a freemium version. I think, there will be ever increasing need and market for lightweight products, as modern IT means a lot of products coming together. So each one should minimize their overhead. Give our product a go and let us know what you think?
• khiqxj 3y ago
  the web is a pile of horse shit why is this even news. the best part is how all the SJW apple tesla cloud smart tech yuppies in tech dont care about how 99% of the world who cant afford to buy a new machine every year have an experience on their product worse in every way than dial up as they force every formerly paper transaction onto web. just opening firefox with blank home page can take deciseconds and even minutes. even opening a new blank tab is unresponsive and lags up the UI. on anything but mid-high range desktop hardware. how does this even have 200 upvotes? i cant count more than 1 or 2 websites that doesnt have infinite bloat for useless nonsense like the cookie popup social media whatever 10 meme frameworks and 100 js libs injected into the page. HNers just read "bad stuff bad", respond "yup" like a zombie, and continue doing bad stuff
• hacker_88 3y ago
  PUBG runs on 60fps , Web runs 0.4fps. Oh No Optimization
• torginus 3y ago
  I feel like there's a good point made by the Discourse CEO about Qualcomm (and competitors) - the product decision to segment their CPU line by drastic differences in single-threaded CPU perf is a highly anti-consumer one. In contrast AMD and Intel use the same (or sameish) CPU arch in all of their lineup in a given generation, the absolute cheapest laptop I could find used a Pentium 6805, which still has a GB6 score of well over 1000, sold in a laptop that's cheaper than most budget smartphones. In contrast, Qualcomm and Mediatek will sell you SoCs that don't even have half of that performance as a latest-gen 'midrange' part.
• eneville 3y ago
  Some might be interested in pre-compressing their sites: https://gitlab.com/edneville/gzip-disk It doesn't stop client CPU burn, but it might help get data to the client device without on-the-fly compression a bit quicker, which in my experience is helpful from the server side too.
• automatic6131 3y ago
  >Just as an aside, something I've found funny for a long time is that I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on this page (and a similar volume of appreciation mail) Yes! I've definitely felt like this while using his website. Of course, today I just fixed it with main { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto; } but tbh, I don't want to install an extension to customise the css on this one site...
  • augustk 3y ago
    I have never understood why web browser designers don't care to provide a default style sheet that makes unstyled web pages look nice i.e. with proper spacing of elements and sizes of headings etc.
• gcanyon 3y ago
  I've had this same experience with low-bandwidth situations while traveling: more than a few times I've cursed Apple for not making iOS engineers test with 3G or even 2G connections.
• bloatedforever 3y ago
  I think Web bloat started with pretty urls, they provide nothing on top of traditional urls yet every request has to parse them unnecessarily. It's such a waste on a huge scale, especially for slow languages plus the expensive regex processing as well.
• uaserussia 3y ago
  I have modern I7, 64GB RAM, RTX3090, a 7gbps NVME SSD and a 1Gbps internet connection. Can run pretty much any game maxxed out in 4k with 100 fps. Download 100GB files in few minutes. Can do all sorts of tasks and workloads. Can calculate the 20th billionth number of PI in a microsecond. What I cant do however is use twitter without stutters and hitches, or windows, or any shopping website. Nice work, webdevelopers!
  • azangru 3y ago
    > or any shopping website Could you give an example? I used a shopping website yesterday, both on a laptop and on an android phone, and apart from cookie banner popups (design choice, not hardware limitation), did not have any significant inconveniences.
    • uaserussia 3y ago
      Amazon, Ebay, Yeezy (which was better than most), Armani, Nike, any assortment of the regular webshopping webiste, even computer parts shopping websites lol. They're all slow and a glithcy mess. They're all horrible. Trying to browse them on my old 13inch screen thinkpad is akin to torture.
• archy_ 3y ago
  > Something I've observed over time, as programming has become more prestigious and more lucrative, is that people have tended to come from wealthier backgrounds and have less exposure to people with different income levels. An example we've discussed before, is at a well-known, prestigious, startup that has a very left-leaning employee base, where everyone got rich, on a discussion about the covid stimulus checks, in a slack discussion, a well meaning progressive employee said that it was pointless because people would just use their stimulus checks to buy stock. This person had, apparently, never talked to any middle-class (let alone poor) person about where their money goes or looked at the data on who owns equity. And that's just looking at American wealth. When we look at world-wide wealth, the general level of understanding is much lower. People seem to really underestimate the dynamic range in wealth and income across the world. Perhaps the falling salaries for programming in the US could be a good thing in that regard. So many people get into this career because they want to make it big, which seems to drive down the quality of the talent pool.
• Zpalmtree 3y ago
  I don't care. Upgrade your device. You don't make me money.
• npteljes 3y ago
  It's interesting research, but at the end of the day, the websites are there to make money. Well, looking at the table, maybe the author's own isn't, but the rest is. And so, I think the businesses don't optimize more because there isn't much more money to be made that way. Instead, the same effort is better spent elsewhere, like marketing, having a software that's quickly adaptable, that's easy to get interchangeable developers for. So they are optimized, just not for the speed on low-end devices. Different goals.
  • lmpdev 3y ago
    I was thinking about this the other day I’d happily pay $100/month to access the internet similar to that of pre-2005ish As in, banning almost all commercial activity I truly believe Google isn’t getting worse, just the incentives behind the creation of web content have become progressively maligned with that of the user’s desires I want a high quality internet, and am willing to fork out large sums of money to access it I hope I’m not alone
    • npteljes 3y ago
      Well, that's not the pre-2005 internet I remember. What I remember are popups, pop-unders, poisoned search results due to crude SEO tactics like including small background-colored text on websites, endless rings of web pages referring to each other, heavily blinking banners, and even the best ad blocker being so slow on the machine that it's no joke. And this is the commercial abuse only, there was a lot of other types going around. I do despise many aspects of the current internet, but I think that it's the fallibility of man that poisons the nice things, and I don't think that it was ever too much different in this regard. For a different internet, there are ways to go about it. I'm not sure how much of it you already know. Millionshort provides alternative search results to queries. I think this is similar to what you're looking for, and it's free. Alternative networks spring up from time to time, like the Gemini network. I'm not sure how much of a content desert they are, as I'm not a frequent user. Generally if you hang around in free software / open source spaces, they have a lot of people with an alternative take on the modern things, including people taking part of an internet that's not mainstream, for example by excluding running any JavaScript. This can lead to other places, forums, and so on. I wish you luck. But be prepared that the past is gone. Maybe never existed in the first place.
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  I believe HTML, CSS and JS needs an overhaul. There’ll be a point where maintaining backwards compatibility will result in more harm than benefit. Make a new opt-in version of the three which are brutally simplified. Deprecate the old HTML/CSS/JS, to be EOL’d in 2100.