4 ms·

When I see heavy web pages like this it makes me worry about the state of front-end web design. According to YSlow, the site came to 3.5MB, which is quite larg

by EnderMB 14y ago

When I see heavy web pages like this it makes me worry about the state of front-end web design. According to YSlow, the site came to 3.5MB, which is quite large when compared to the average home page. The site took at least five seconds to load on my fast dev machine, which is far too long. The nail in the coffin for me, however, is that this site does not work in older browser, namely IE7. I've worked with large clients and we've made sure that everything works in IE6 and above because they make the cost back from sales within hours. A large company like airbnb simply cannot afford to not support older browsers and I firmly believe that they'll lose a ton on money on their lack of support. All in all, I'm disappointed.

walru 14y ago
I agree with everything you've written, but I couldn't disagree more. Once the page loads it draws you in to wanting to visit nearly any of those places they've listed. Every shot looks like it was staged by an expert. Or to put it another way, I would rather have someone who's trying to sell me steaks show me pictures of mother-watering, expertly cooked beef, rather than show me a drop down menu of the types of steaks they have. No matter how fast the page loads. As for the Internet Exploder issue. In all honestly, anyone who is still using that browser probably wouldn't be very comfortable using AirBNB on their next vacation anyway.
- jacksonmohsenin 14y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself. That is some of the best landing page photography I've ever seen.
  - mnicole 14y ago
    At the same time, that's what makes me wonder if it is legitimate or just stock photography. I know that it isn't, but from a first-timer's perspective, it almost seems "too good to be true."
- EnderMB 14y ago
  Don't get me wrong. I love photography on web pages, but the page itself is similar to so many modern web pages. It's full of JS, it crawls on modern machines and just doesn't look nice enough to justify the size of the page. The page barely works with JS off, so I'd hate to imagine how a user with a screen reader would use it. As for IE7 users, you may be right, but it is my experience that sites that are the size of airbnb can happily spend £10,000 to make your site work in older browsers, because they'll get that amount back from new customers very quickly. Whether you like to develop for legacy browsers or not is irrelevant. It's poor practice not to.
  - Danieru 14y ago
    According to statcounter ie7 was at ~1.5% last month. It dropped a full percentage point from the month before that. Even Firefox 3.6 usage was higher. I think there is value in moving to faster deprecation. Plus even if it does make finicial sense for airbnb it is still a risky investment. Should a facebook, google, or wordpress drop ie7 support hard then all the sudden you've wasted money, developer time, and developer sanity.
    - EnderMB 14y ago
      Statcounter isn't your site. Everyone should look at their own site stats and make the case as to whether legacy browsers should be supported. Regardless, for new projects we still follow the Yahoo Graded Browser Support baseline, like many other agencies do. http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/
  - Evernoob 14y ago
    > Whether you like to develop for legacy browsers or not is irrelevant. It's poor practice not to. Following that logic, it's poor practice to develop anything in HTML5 since IE8 and below won't support it without a JS shiv that won't work with JS turned off. Half way through 2012 now, I've come to accept that anyone who is using a service like airbnb with IE6, or with JS turned off can just miss out. I'm not prepared to deny the 90%+ users a superior user experience in order to support buggy, insecure ancient browsers that should have died years ago. It's time to look to the future. The IE6 crowd can be happily left behind.
simonbrown 14y ago
It works for me in IE7 on IETester (mostly e.g. there's a correct mixed content error and the "popular cities" tab doesn't work). I assume they have looked at their stats and concluded that IE6/7 doesn't represent a large enough proportion of their market to support it. I also wouldn't regard airbnb as a large company.
untog 14y ago
It loaded for me in ~2 seconds, on a 2010 Macbook Air. I think we're at the stage where 'heavy' pages are permissible, and even advantageous at times.
- bengillies 14y ago
  It loaded for me in ~30 seconds on a 2011 Macbook Pro. I don't see what your loading experience has to do with anything. Different people have different connection speeds in different parts of the world (my connection speed varies within the same building depending on congestion, etc). That said, all the fancy pictures do look very nice, and certainly draw you in like no other travel site that I've come across (when it eventually loads).
  - untog 14y ago
    I don't see what your loading experience has to do with anything. I was responding to anecdotal evidence with contrary anecdotal evidence. In the big scheme of things neither really means anything, but it would be pretty tedious if I had to test a statistically significant number of machines every time I altered a page layout.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  Your computer is barely two years old, and doesn't reflect your internet connection. Most people are on far older, and probably far slower connections.
  - untog 14y ago
    "Most people" on the internet, or "most people" in AirBnb's user base? Because they could be very different. For once it would be nice to see HN give a site the benefit of the doubt in that they might have actually looked at their analytics and planned accordingly.
- ineedtosleep 14y ago
  It's still pretty heavily reliant on internet speeds. If you're using wifi at a coffee shop, or have a relatively congested work connection, the site does crawl -- though I can only attest to the latter case. Thankfully, I use noscript to cut down the loading a good amount, but the parent's issue is a very significant one.
freshfey 14y ago
But aren't people like you the reason why we still have to support IE6 and 7? I think depending on your customer base, you have to support it, but I'd bet that a lot of Airbnb's users aren't using an IE6 or 7.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  I currently work with a number of large clients in the travel sector, and you'd be very surprised. Yes, it's restricting at times, but any developer worth their salt can write code that works in all browsers fairly easily. I've spent enough time on Reddit to know that a lot of developers refuse to support legacy browsers simply because it's too hard. It is my belief that we'll have to support IE6-8 until XP dies, and I think that will happen when Windows 8 becomes the default install for most PC's. The real problem isn't older browsers, but older machines that need to upgrade their operating systems, and once that war is won the old browsers will drop like flies.
  - mixmastamyk 14y ago
    They can use FF/Chrome if they want to see the site correctly on XP. The faster people stop supporting broken browsers the faster they'll go away! If they can't/don't then they can suffer the trade-off knowingly. For a successful startup that needs to grow at a reasonable pace (not too quickly) select browser support is one way to apply some light breaking. In five years if/when the business has scaled on its merits, those browsers will be history anyway. That very early (==expensive) developer time would have been wasted when it could have been focused on building a product people want to use. Think of how Apple slowly removed restrictions to each version of iPhone so that they could handle the interest it generated. They simply couldn't have handled shipping 100 million the first year. So their focus worked out perfectly (despite all the bitching about cut/paste and At&t we had to listen to.) If they had wasted time on "perfection" it would have shipped for years.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pqdbr 14y ago
I run a vacation website in Brazil (Temporadalivre.com) and I wish I had quality pictures like this to use in our homepage. AirBnb is a monster so they can afford send photographers for free in each of the properties to take these amazing pictures. Even a slum would look nice via these lenses :) But the reality is that if you rely on your user's pics you will have a really hard time finding quality images to use.
hsuresh 14y ago
Considering that a (considerable/significant) section of their target audience could be "on the move" and not have a great internet connection, not sure if the 3.5MB gorgeous looking site is a good idea.
craigmccaskill 14y ago
More importantly than just being slow, the site crashes my iPad. After about 60-80% of the page loads, Safari closes to the home screen.
Marwy 14y ago
It crashed my browser (Opera) right after it loaded.

by EnderMB 14y ago

walru 14y ago

I agree with everything you've written, but I couldn't disagree more. Once the page loads it draws you in to wanting to visit nearly any of those places they've listed. Every shot looks like it was staged by an expert. Or to put it another way, I would rather have someone who's trying to sell me steaks show me pictures of mother-watering, expertly cooked beef, rather than show me a drop down menu of the types of steaks they have. No matter how fast the page loads. As for the Internet Exploder issue. In all honestly, anyone who is still using that browser probably wouldn't be very comfortable using AirBNB on their next vacation anyway.

jacksonmohsenin 14y ago
Couldn't have said it better myself. That is some of the best landing page photography I've ever seen.
- mnicole 14y ago
  At the same time, that's what makes me wonder if it is legitimate or just stock photography. I know that it isn't, but from a first-timer's perspective, it almost seems "too good to be true."
EnderMB 14y ago
Don't get me wrong. I love photography on web pages, but the page itself is similar to so many modern web pages. It's full of JS, it crawls on modern machines and just doesn't look nice enough to justify the size of the page. The page barely works with JS off, so I'd hate to imagine how a user with a screen reader would use it. As for IE7 users, you may be right, but it is my experience that sites that are the size of airbnb can happily spend £10,000 to make your site work in older browsers, because they'll get that amount back from new customers very quickly. Whether you like to develop for legacy browsers or not is irrelevant. It's poor practice not to.
- Danieru 14y ago
  According to statcounter ie7 was at ~1.5% last month. It dropped a full percentage point from the month before that. Even Firefox 3.6 usage was higher. I think there is value in moving to faster deprecation. Plus even if it does make finicial sense for airbnb it is still a risky investment. Should a facebook, google, or wordpress drop ie7 support hard then all the sudden you've wasted money, developer time, and developer sanity.
  - EnderMB 14y ago
    Statcounter isn't your site. Everyone should look at their own site stats and make the case as to whether legacy browsers should be supported. Regardless, for new projects we still follow the Yahoo Graded Browser Support baseline, like many other agencies do. http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/
- Evernoob 14y ago
  > Whether you like to develop for legacy browsers or not is irrelevant. It's poor practice not to. Following that logic, it's poor practice to develop anything in HTML5 since IE8 and below won't support it without a JS shiv that won't work with JS turned off. Half way through 2012 now, I've come to accept that anyone who is using a service like airbnb with IE6, or with JS turned off can just miss out. I'm not prepared to deny the 90%+ users a superior user experience in order to support buggy, insecure ancient browsers that should have died years ago. It's time to look to the future. The IE6 crowd can be happily left behind.

simonbrown 14y ago

It works for me in IE7 on IETester (mostly e.g. there's a correct mixed content error and the "popular cities" tab doesn't work). I assume they have looked at their stats and concluded that IE6/7 doesn't represent a large enough proportion of their market to support it. I also wouldn't regard airbnb as a large company.

untog 14y ago

It loaded for me in ~2 seconds, on a 2010 Macbook Air. I think we're at the stage where 'heavy' pages are permissible, and even advantageous at times.

bengillies 14y ago
It loaded for me in ~30 seconds on a 2011 Macbook Pro. I don't see what your loading experience has to do with anything. Different people have different connection speeds in different parts of the world (my connection speed varies within the same building depending on congestion, etc). That said, all the fancy pictures do look very nice, and certainly draw you in like no other travel site that I've come across (when it eventually loads).
- untog 14y ago
  I don't see what your loading experience has to do with anything. I was responding to anecdotal evidence with contrary anecdotal evidence. In the big scheme of things neither really means anything, but it would be pretty tedious if I had to test a statistically significant number of machines every time I altered a page layout.
EnderMB 14y ago
Your computer is barely two years old, and doesn't reflect your internet connection. Most people are on far older, and probably far slower connections.
- untog 14y ago
  "Most people" on the internet, or "most people" in AirBnb's user base? Because they could be very different. For once it would be nice to see HN give a site the benefit of the doubt in that they might have actually looked at their analytics and planned accordingly.
ineedtosleep 14y ago
It's still pretty heavily reliant on internet speeds. If you're using wifi at a coffee shop, or have a relatively congested work connection, the site does crawl -- though I can only attest to the latter case. Thankfully, I use noscript to cut down the loading a good amount, but the parent's issue is a very significant one.

freshfey 14y ago

But aren't people like you the reason why we still have to support IE6 and 7? I think depending on your customer base, you have to support it, but I'd bet that a lot of Airbnb's users aren't using an IE6 or 7.

EnderMB 14y ago
I currently work with a number of large clients in the travel sector, and you'd be very surprised. Yes, it's restricting at times, but any developer worth their salt can write code that works in all browsers fairly easily. I've spent enough time on Reddit to know that a lot of developers refuse to support legacy browsers simply because it's too hard. It is my belief that we'll have to support IE6-8 until XP dies, and I think that will happen when Windows 8 becomes the default install for most PC's. The real problem isn't older browsers, but older machines that need to upgrade their operating systems, and once that war is won the old browsers will drop like flies.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  They can use FF/Chrome if they want to see the site correctly on XP. The faster people stop supporting broken browsers the faster they'll go away! If they can't/don't then they can suffer the trade-off knowingly. For a successful startup that needs to grow at a reasonable pace (not too quickly) select browser support is one way to apply some light breaking. In five years if/when the business has scaled on its merits, those browsers will be history anyway. That very early (==expensive) developer time would have been wasted when it could have been focused on building a product people want to use. Think of how Apple slowly removed restrictions to each version of iPhone so that they could handle the interest it generated. They simply couldn't have handled shipping 100 million the first year. So their focus worked out perfectly (despite all the bitching about cut/paste and At&t we had to listen to.) If they had wasted time on "perfection" it would have shipped for years.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pqdbr 14y ago

I run a vacation website in Brazil (Temporadalivre.com) and I wish I had quality pictures like this to use in our homepage. AirBnb is a monster so they can afford send photographers for free in each of the properties to take these amazing pictures. Even a slum would look nice via these lenses :) But the reality is that if you rely on your user's pics you will have a really hard time finding quality images to use.

hsuresh 14y ago

Considering that a (considerable/significant) section of their target audience could be "on the move" and not have a great internet connection, not sure if the 3.5MB gorgeous looking site is a good idea.

craigmccaskill 14y ago

More importantly than just being slow, the site crashes my iPad. After about 60-80% of the page loads, Safari closes to the home screen.

Marwy 14y ago

It crashed my browser (Opera) right after it loaded.