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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 se
by 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]
- pixl97 3y ago> That means no ublock origin Talk about a catch-22 situation. The modern web is useless without adblocking. Especially when you get forever scrolling pages with random ads stuffed in there.
- squarefoot 3y agoAs a web developing illiterate, I wonder how hard would be writing a browser extension that loads a page, does infinite scroll in memory and in background, then while it is still loading the infinite stuff, splits the content in pages and shows them instead, so that the user can go back and forth to page numbers. This wouldn't reduce the network and system load, however navigating the results would be much more friendly.
- wolpoli 3y agoIt'll give a nicer experience and will eliminate situation where an element changes location just as you try to tap on it. The extension just needs to handle GDPR notice and Email subscription overlays.
- freedomben 3y agoProblem is, "infinite scroll" often is infinite, meaning it will load an ass load of data in the background and take up a ton of memory, and the user may never even end up looking at that data. I really hate the load on scroll (especially Google Drive's implementation which is absolute trash, and half the time I'll scroll too fast and it will just miss a bunch of files and I'll have to refresh the page and try again), but a better hack might be an extension that scrolls a page or two ahead for you and stores that in memory. If it was smart enough to infinitely scroll websites that are actually finite (like google drive) that would be amazing though.
- jwells89 3y agoIn these situations what’s eating up your resources usually isn’t the data being represented but instead the representation. This is why native apps use recycler views for not just infinite scroll, but anything that can display more rows/columns/items/etc than can fit on screen at once. Recycler views only create just enough cells to fill the screen even if you have tens of thousands of items to represent, and when you scroll they reuse these cells to display the currently relevant segment of data. When used correctly by developers, these are very lightweight and allow 60FPS scrolling of very large lists even on very weak devices. These are possible to implement in JavaScript in browsers, but implementation quality varies a lot and many web devs just never bother. This is why I think HTML should gain a native recycler widget of its own, because the engineers working on Blink, Gecko, and WebKit are in much better positions to write high quality optimized implementations, plus even if web devs don’t use it directly, many frameworks will.
- mattl 3y agoCan you run all your traffic through a self-hosted pihole to avoid such things?
- em3rgent0rdr 3y agoHaving a decent internet experience shouldn't require going through your own self-hosted server.
- mattl 3y agoAbsolutely not but then I never thought I’d need a 20,000 entry hosts file either.
- ericra 3y agoCertainly an option for me. But not a scalable solution for the large number of non-tech people with older devices.
- anon373839 3y agoI've got an old MacBook Pro from 2013 that I still keep around because the keyboard is the best Apple ever made. It's not fast by any means, but I haven't encountered any difficulty with websites whatsoever. They're not as snappy as I'd expect on new hardware, but perfectly usable. I do use uBlock Origin, however. Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?
- FabHK 3y agoI was forced to use an old 2011 (IIRC) MacBook Air in 2020 (my replacement BTO MacBook Pro was stuck in China due to the pandemic), and the OS and local apps were fine and reasonably snappy, but oh boy, the web sucked so bad. Slow slow slow. Couldn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs of "modern" websites (HN was fine, yay). Virtually unusable. I was shocked.
- ericra 3y ago> Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook? Yes. Definitely. a Macbook Pro from 2013 has between 4-16GB of memory for one thing. The lowest spec phone in the article (Itel P32) has 1GB. A 2013 Macbook Pro has a 4th gen i5 processor. This phone has a MediaTek MT6580. It's not even in the same ballpark. This is a bit of an extreme example, but the fact is that a very large number of people in many areas of the world use phones like these.
- jwells89 3y agoAdditionally, weak Android devices are not necessarily old Android devices. New underpowered Android stuff is sold every day. Cheap tablets are particularly bad about this — I have a Lenovo tablet that I bought maybe a year ago which uses a SoC that benches a bit above a 2015 Apple A9.
- neurostimulant 3y ago$50 android phones are still sold in developing countries and they usually have an MT6580 or UMS312 with 720p screen.
- gmokki 3y agoI wrote code to main nokia.com site 10 years ago where it used few ways to detect slow loading of resources and set a flag to disable extra features from the site. This was done because the site had to work in every country and many of the slowest phones sold were from said company.
- dijit 3y agoI also worked for Nokia 13 or so years ago, though not on Nokia.com Thanks for your work, one of the things that I really liked about Nokia was the passion for performance. On the flip side: I was on the Meego project and we joked that we had the most expensive clock application ever created, because it kept being completely recreated.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoI liked Meego and Maemo, I always felt that they were an expression of the idea that general purpose computing can work in the mobile form factor, which is something that tremendously appeals to me (I wish I still had my N900).
- swiftcoder 3y ago> 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. And honestly, that app is going to be a browser shell with a (partially) offline copy of the website in it, 9 times out of 10...
- MaxBarraclough 3y ago> that app is going to be a browser shell with a (partially) offline copy of the website in it, 9 times out of 10 If you're lucky. The main UI may just be a website, but as a native app is has a greater ability to spam you, track you, accidentally introduce security vulnerabilities, etc.
- bboygravity 3y agoEven if you do use a standard browser, companies will force you to use an app by making there website broken (on purpose?). Random recent example: Nike. Popping useless errors upon checkout in the webshop. Support: "oh, we're so sorry, just try the app, k bye". Another example of major companies with broken websites more often than not: (European) airline booking websites. And major companies think this is totally fine and doesn't damage their brand? I mean not being able to create a functioning website with unlimited funds in 2024 is not a bad look?!
- tracker1 3y agoMy response, "why should I trust you with greater access to my phone when you can't make your website work? How do I know you aren't bundling malware? Considering you are obviously using unqualified developers."
- LilBytes 3y agoReddit is another example where they've broken the mobile browser experience, to send you to another app. Arguably broken, but in different ways.
- rapnie 3y agoLinkedIn, leaders in deceptive design (though given recent HN on internal situation, a more favorable interpretation may be that they can't handle their own bloat and it shows).
- FabHK 3y ago> LinkedIn, leaders in deceptive design Oh, absolutely. One example: You want to connect with someone, and it'll throw up a dialog box on whether you want to add a note, with two buttons "Add Note", "Send". If you now decide that you don't want to connect after all, or want to look up something before composing the note, and close the dialog instead - it still sends the connection request.
- uaserussia 3y ago