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As a web developer I actually resisted much faster internet for ages. Until 2022 I had a rock-solid, never-failed 7 megabit/s-ish down, 640k up connection and

As a web developer I actually resisted much faster internet for ages. Until 2022 I had a rock-solid, never-failed 7 megabit/s-ish down, 640k up connection and I found it very easy to build sites that others describe as blazing fast. This was slow really by the standards of much of the UK population even by 2015. So all I had to do was make it fast for me. A change of provider for practical reasons gave me an ADSL2+ connection that is ten times faster; still arguably slower than a lot of residential broadband in the UK but not so helpfully. So now I test speed on mobile; even in the south east of England it is not that difficult to find poor mobile broadband. And when it’s poor, it’s poor in arguably more varied ways.

oefrha 2y ago
As a web developer you can just throttle your connection in developer tools though, no self-limiting required. But nobody does that in big corporations building most of the sites needed by people with slow connections.
- throw46365 2y ago
  Yeah, though it doesn’t quite capture all of the experience of working with slower broadband. For example if you have a website that is meant to be used alongside a video call or while watching video, it’s difficult to really simulate all of that “feel”. Using a link that is slow in practice is an invaluable experience.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    You can install programs at software level to emulate it as a whole. I remember using one for OSX and it working pretty well.
    - Aachen 2y ago
      In fact, you probably already have that program and just need to tell the OS what parameters you want
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  In my experience, browsers limit speeds in a way that's kind of nice and stable. You tell them to stick to 100kbps and they'll have 100kbps. Packet loss, jitter, it's all a single number, and rather stable. It's like a 250kbps fiber optic connection that just happens to be very long. In my experience, real life slow internet isn't like that. Packet loss numbers jump around, jitter switches second by second, speeds vary wildly and packets arrive out of order more than in order. Plus, with sattelites, the local router sends fake TCP acknowledgements to hide the slow data transfer, so the browser thinks it's connected while the traffic is still half a second away. There are software tools to limit connectivity in a more realistic way, often using VMs, but they're not used as often as the nice browser speed limiter.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    Good points, but it would still be a major step forward if websites start handling browser-simulated 3G well. Right now the typical webshit used by regular people more often than not ranges from barely usable to completely unusable on browser-simulated 3G, let alone browser-simulated 2G or real world bad connections. As a first step, make your site work well on, say, 200ms and 1Mbps.

oefrha 2y ago

As a web developer you can just throttle your connection in developer tools though, no self-limiting required. But nobody does that in big corporations building most of the sites needed by people with slow connections.

throw46365 2y ago
Yeah, though it doesn’t quite capture all of the experience of working with slower broadband. For example if you have a website that is meant to be used alongside a video call or while watching video, it’s difficult to really simulate all of that “feel”. Using a link that is slow in practice is an invaluable experience.
- xandrius 2y ago
  You can install programs at software level to emulate it as a whole. I remember using one for OSX and it working pretty well.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    In fact, you probably already have that program and just need to tell the OS what parameters you want
jeroenhd 2y ago
In my experience, browsers limit speeds in a way that's kind of nice and stable. You tell them to stick to 100kbps and they'll have 100kbps. Packet loss, jitter, it's all a single number, and rather stable. It's like a 250kbps fiber optic connection that just happens to be very long. In my experience, real life slow internet isn't like that. Packet loss numbers jump around, jitter switches second by second, speeds vary wildly and packets arrive out of order more than in order. Plus, with sattelites, the local router sends fake TCP acknowledgements to hide the slow data transfer, so the browser thinks it's connected while the traffic is still half a second away. There are software tools to limit connectivity in a more realistic way, often using VMs, but they're not used as often as the nice browser speed limiter.
- oefrha 2y ago
  Good points, but it would still be a major step forward if websites start handling browser-simulated 3G well. Right now the typical webshit used by regular people more often than not ranges from barely usable to completely unusable on browser-simulated 3G, let alone browser-simulated 2G or real world bad connections. As a first step, make your site work well on, say, 200ms and 1Mbps.