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There seems to be an expectation these days that everyone's on a 50Mbit+ connection with an ultra mega blazingly fast computer, and nobody tests their sites on
by erso 14y ago
There seems to be an expectation these days that everyone's on a 50Mbit+ connection with an ultra mega blazingly fast computer, and nobody tests their sites on anything but that setup.
Example: The Verge. Chrome reports theverge.com as making 118 requests with 2.62MB transferred, taking 11.04s (onload: 6.42s, DOMContentLoaded: 3.32s). Kotaku: 234 requests, 1.35MB transferred, 11.93s (onload: 10.91s, DOMContentLoaded: 4.28s).
I tested this on a maxed out 2010 MacBook Air, and that's with AdBlock Plus and ScriptNo.
The Verge is basically unusable while it loads and Chrome struggles to render it after it has loaded while scrolling on my machine. This is all-too-common these days.
- Retric 14y agoFor comparison: I got theverge.com in ~3 seconds from first click Using Chrome on a 40MB FIOS connection i7 2500k @ 3.6ghz w SSD & 16GB RAM on windows 7 without add-block or no script. My PC is over a year old so it's probably the internet connection and then again the CPU is also 2-3+x as fast.
- oxide 14y ago...its not your connection. its the 10mb pageload.
- emp_ 14y agoNot disagreeing on ridiculous amount of requests, but The Verge (specially) and Kotaku audiences should lean towards high-end users.
- anigbrowl 14y agoWhat if I'm trying to read their offerings on my phone or tablet? A lot of the things these pages load are not worth the time it takes to load them.
- ghshephard 14y agoThey have mobile offerings. Theverge, in particular, Loads in about a second on my iPhone5.
- w1ntermute 14y agohttp://mobile.theverge.com/ http://mobile.theverge.com/
- anigbrowl 14y agoMobile sites suck. I often change the user agent so I can see the desktop site on tablet or tethered laptop.
- runn1ng 14y agoIn that case I don't understand your argument. You don't want to use full site because it has too many features and have, therefore, too big size. You also don't want to use mobile site because it doesn't have all the bells and whistles. Chose one :) ... or use Opera Mini and/or ziproxy on your server
- chris_wot 14y agoFalse dichotomy... Either use a broken mobile site with half the content, or a full site that barely loads.
- anigbrowl 14y agoNo, I'm saying that the 'features' on the full site are rarely worth the time and bandwidth required to load them. I'm not complaining about things like Google Earth or other high-bandwidth services, but the amount of visually and functionally useless cruft on many sites, news sites in particular.
- Joeri 14y agoIn the case of theverge that works, but some "mobile-optimized" sites are worse than the desktop site. For example, navigating to extremetech.com from my ipad 1 takes 20 seconds over wifi before the page is interactive. After load, interaction is still slow and unreliable (and downright buggy). If i force it to use the desktop site the page loads faster and interacts more smoothly. It's amazing but many mobile editions same to only be designed to make a screenshot to demonstrate to management that the site team did something mobile. Doesn't anybody ever actually try out these sites?
- erso 14y agoI did consider this when using those as examples, but they were the first that sprang to mind. The sites that are utterly unusable tend to be forgotten entirely.
- nfm 14y agoIs there a consulting market for fixing these kinds of examples? I quite enjoy optimizing these kinds of issues, but perhaps the value is too implicit or too low for them to bother.
- lincolnbryant 14y agoThe issues these optimizations pose for the workflows of the whole team and the maintenance requirements are the blocker. You must be able to convince people that so much of their time are worth the gains (the same people that use high level languages and JS frameworks they may not need very much of for productivity boosts).
- keithpeter 14y agoSee my comment to the grandparent post. Just a 'skip to content' link at the top of the page and a way of accessing comments without javascript. People on text only clients are away then. http://diveintoaccessibility.info/day_11_skipping_over_navigation_links.html http://diveintoaccessibility.info/day_11_skipping_over_navig...
- Cthulhu_ 14y agoBut for the slow sites highlighted, I don't understand why client-side performance and bandwidth usage apparently isn't a priority; I mean, their site, their front-end is their primary product, the thing they make money off of. A ten second load time is simply unacceptable; just look at the performance guys at Google, who have and are working hard to shave milliseconds off of page load time. I'm probably going to offend a few people here, but creating a website without or with minimal performance optimization is just plain sloppy and uncraftmanshiplike work. Get your act together, or get a different job.
- dpcx 14y agoYou have to think about the target demographic. The guys at The Verge are probably targeting those with faster computers, faster internet connections. Google is targeting everyone.
- keithpeter 14y agoTry it on a command line web client in your terminal. I use w3m as it has vaguely Vim like shortcuts. Loads the front page in about 5 seconds on a 24 Kbit/s connection in the UK. They could include a 'skip to content' link for those using text or audio interfaces, because the entire navigation stricture of the site appears to be included on every page. They also could make comments available in a way that makes them visible to a basic http client. Two minor mods like that would mean fast access to their reading material for cli nerds
- cocoflunchy 14y agoJust tried theverge.com on a not so powerful computer : 35 seconds and 6.50MB transferred !