3 ms·

I travel a lot. Slow internet is pretty common. Also, right now my mobile data ran out and I'm capped at 8 kbps. Websites that are Just Text On A Page should l

by nicbou 2y ago

I travel a lot. Slow internet is pretty common. Also, right now my mobile data ran out and I'm capped at 8 kbps. Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load. The worst problem is that most UIs fail to account for slow requests. Buttons feel broken. Things that really shouldn't need megabytes of data to load still take minutes to load or just fail. Google Maps' entire UI is broken. I wish that developers spent more time designing and testing for slow internet. Instead we get data hungry websites that only work great on fast company laptops with fast internet. --- On a related note, I run a website for a living, and moving to a static site generators was one of the best productivity moves I've made. Instead of the latency of a CMS permeating everything I do, I edit text files at blazing speed, even when fully offline. I just push changes once I'm back online. It's a game changer.

habosa 2y ago
> Google's API docs never load I used to work on the team that served those docs. Due to some unfortunate technical decisions made in the name of making docs dynamic/interactive they are almost entirely uncached. Basically every request you send hits an AppEngine app which runs Python code to send you back the HTML. So even though it looks like it should be fast, it’s not.
Tade0 2y ago
One additional benefit of static sites, which I learned the hard way, is that you're mostly immune to attacks. I have a domain that's currently marked as "dangerous" because I didn't use the latest version of Wordpress.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I had a client that I set up with a static site generator. Sadly the client changed their FTP password to something insecure and someone FTP'd in and added a tiny piece of code to every HTML file!
daveoc64 2y ago
>Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load. Things aren't always that simple. I'm in the UK, and my ping time to news.ycombinator.com is 147ms - presumably because it's not using a CDN and is hosted in the USA. cloud.google.com on the other hand has an 8ms ping time. So yes, Hacker News is a simple, low-JS page - but there can be other factors that make it feel slow for users in some places. This is despite me being in a privileged situation, having an XGS-PON fibre connection providing symmetric 8Gbps speeds.
- toast0 2y ago
  I have experience with having a webpage with a global audience, served from random US locations (east/west/texas, but no targetting) and pretty unbloated, to something served everywhere with geodns and twice the page weight... Load times were about the same before and after. If we could have kept the low bloat, I expect we would have seen a noticable improvement in load times (but it wasn't important enough to fight over)
- Sesse__ 2y ago
  HN loads quickly for me _despite_ the 147 ms. I guess partially because it doesn't need 20 roundtrips to sent useful content to me. At some point, I wrote a webapp (with one specific, limited function, of course) and optimized it to the point where loading it required one 27 kB request. And then turned up the cwnd somewhat, so that it could load in a single RTT :-) Doesn't really matter if you're in Australia then, really.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Google used to be good about slow apps. Using gmail on the school computers in the day, the site would load so slowly it would detect that and instead load a basic html version. Now a days I download a 500mb google map cache on my phone and its like there is no point. Everything still has to fetch and pop in.

by nicbou 2y ago

habosa 2y ago

> Google's API docs never load I used to work on the team that served those docs. Due to some unfortunate technical decisions made in the name of making docs dynamic/interactive they are almost entirely uncached. Basically every request you send hits an AppEngine app which runs Python code to send you back the HTML. So even though it looks like it should be fast, it’s not.

Tade0 2y ago

One additional benefit of static sites, which I learned the hard way, is that you're mostly immune to attacks. I have a domain that's currently marked as "dangerous" because I didn't use the latest version of Wordpress.

qingcharles 2y ago
I had a client that I set up with a static site generator. Sadly the client changed their FTP password to something insecure and someone FTP'd in and added a tiny piece of code to every HTML file!

daveoc64 2y ago

>Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load. Things aren't always that simple. I'm in the UK, and my ping time to news.ycombinator.com is 147ms - presumably because it's not using a CDN and is hosted in the USA. cloud.google.com on the other hand has an 8ms ping time. So yes, Hacker News is a simple, low-JS page - but there can be other factors that make it feel slow for users in some places. This is despite me being in a privileged situation, having an XGS-PON fibre connection providing symmetric 8Gbps speeds.

toast0 2y ago
I have experience with having a webpage with a global audience, served from random US locations (east/west/texas, but no targetting) and pretty unbloated, to something served everywhere with geodns and twice the page weight... Load times were about the same before and after. If we could have kept the low bloat, I expect we would have seen a noticable improvement in load times (but it wasn't important enough to fight over)
Sesse__ 2y ago
HN loads quickly for me _despite_ the 147 ms. I guess partially because it doesn't need 20 roundtrips to sent useful content to me. At some point, I wrote a webapp (with one specific, limited function, of course) and optimized it to the point where loading it required one 27 kB request. And then turned up the cwnd somewhat, so that it could load in a single RTT :-) Doesn't really matter if you're in Australia then, really.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Google used to be good about slow apps. Using gmail on the school computers in the day, the site would load so slowly it would detect that and instead load a basic html version. Now a days I download a 500mb google map cache on my phone and its like there is no point. Everything still has to fetch and pop in.