How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

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.

Can you run all your traffic through a self-hosted pihole to avoid such things?

Even 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?!

I'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?

I 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.

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...

The first time I saw this blog posted on HN I wondered how it could possibly be popular with such horrendous layout.

The conclusion I came to is that the audience is very tech-savvy and is used to activating Reader Mode when they encounter pages like this.

max-width: 38rem; Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is.

How is it readable when you're limiting text width and not taking advantage of the whole screen you paid for?

[Turning 48 next month and wearing glasses.]

I'm 53 and I'm at least five years behind getting my specs sorted out - they are currently perched right on the end of my nose now and I have to get the angle right sometimes (astigmatism).

That page is nearly fine for me but I just hit CRTL + to scale up. That works for me.

That page is pure text with no or at least minimal fiddling. You have your solution for your use case and I have mine. A blind reader will also have their solution, so they can even access it. Thanks to the simplicity of the source: all solutions to accessibility are also going to be reasonably simple.

I think that Dan understands how to communicate effectively - keep it simple and don't assume that eyes will read your words. You can trivially (and you do) fiddle with the presentation yourself for your own purposes.

I think that if you don't like the presentation of something like this then you could reformat it yourself, prior to engagement. Dan has kindly provided his message as a simple text stream that can be trivially fiddled with.

> In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it readable

For cases when you don't agree with styles there is Reader Mode. Your way works also, but Reader Mode just simplier, it is just one click away.

I just activate reader mode on his pages, works great. (Not disagreeing with you, just stating another workaround)

Also wish his pages had dates on them (one or both of first posted / last updated) AFAIK he intentionally leaves them out, I don't get why.

I disagree. The user can change the window size, font size, colours, etc according to their own preferences.

I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to make it readable.

You shouldn't have to. You should be allowed to add a CSS file which can apply to multiple files, and then use that, instead of having to do it for each file individually.

Then adjust your browser settings to your preference, because that certainly isn't mine either.

I've had to remove "max-width"'s from a ton of sites using my filtering proxy. My window is this big, I expect your content to fill it!

You can change your browser's default font size if you find it too small. It's in Firefox's main settings page. Websites shouldn't force "font-size: 18px;" because it then makes the font smaller for users who picked a larger font in their browser.

Do you have any idea of the layers of tooling you must use these days to produce those 64 bytes, and how each of those layers change and remove was was fed from all the other layers? To get exactly those bytes out the other end of the tools would be a herculean effort.

Because we can’t just go around trying to understand basic web-based development without the frameworks … can we?

It’s pretty terrible on my phone too. Almost no margins and small font. Thankfully Reader Mode works in Safari, which fixes everything.

I agree that they should add some minimal CSS. But using your browser's Reader View also works, a click rather than multiple steps in DevTools.

Funnily enough, Dan calls out the differences of opinion of the styling of his site starting at this paragraph:

Just as an aside, something I've found funny for a long time is that I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on this page (and a similar volume of appreciation mail). …

If you can't read font-size: 14px, you got your resolution/scaling/screen size wrong. The default text size is similar to the standard text size of OS UI controls. If you can't read them, I'd suggest to reconfigure your setup: change resolution, change scaling, or configure the default zoom level.

I think your mods are sensible, however if Dan Luu added those CSS rules himself, there would be comments on here lamenting the low density and "excess whitespace". Luu's audience, on the whole, probably prefers the relatively unstyled approach.

I'd prefer to see the grey text trend die honestly. I think my number one style-rewrite is just setting `font-color: black` on things.

Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other codecs a while ago.

If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans

By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as plastic straw or bag bans.

I use Invidious for browsing the site, and watch the actual videos via a script that deobfuscates and gets the actual stream URL and then passes that to VLC.

As another data point, YouTube a decade ago would've been perfectly fine on that hardware too. The culprit is web bloat in general, and more specifically the monstrosities of abstraction that have become common in JS.

Even for those who don't believe at all in "climate crisis", there is something to be said for the loss of craftsmanship and quality over time that's caused this mess, so I think it's something everyone across the whole political spectrum can agree with.

I had to upgrade my 12" Macbook because Youtube Music brought it to a crawl. I could play music or work, but not both.

YouTube is definitely getting heavier. My early 2021 MacBook Air (Intel) now gets random video pauses under moderate load, something that never used to happen.

YouTube was not tested because monitors can't handle CMYK, and we need a lot of that extra coal black to color the results.

Its worth trying out different browsers. In my experience Chromium based browsers are a bit faster than Firefox on really low end devices (Pinephone, ...) as long as you have enough ram (>1Gb?).

E.g. On the OG Pinephone a 720p video on Youtube is running smoothly in Chromium, but not Firefox.

We need some watchdog group that watches page weight across sites and users and names and shames them.

Maybe they could do that Consumer Reports style, or maybe it’s an add on the works a bit like Nielsen ratings.

I've got an old Roku box that has started rebooting after a few minutes of playing youtube videos.

In your case, maybe pulling the video with yt-dlp then playing it works...

> That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. ... an alternate "lite/basic" mode

Why does this need to be the "alternate" choice though? What does current Discourse provide that e.g. PhpBB or the DLang forum do not? (Other than mobile friendly design, which in a sane world shouldn't involve more than a few tweaks to a "responsive" CSS stylesheet).

The only thing that might is a wholesale different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved successful

But it is gaining popularity with the unexpected rise of htmx and its 'simpler is better even if it's slightly worse' philosophy.

If all the sites tot more efficient it may also increase longevity of laptops and PCs where unsavvy people might just “need a new computer it is getting slow”.

Also applies to bloatware shipped with computers. To the point where I was offered a $50 “tune up” to a new laptop I purchased recently. Imagine a new car dealer offered you that!

For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship

I’m in Canada and have a single digit plan and I just upgraded from an almost decade old flagship. Most websites are torture.

For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs

I live in a poor Southeast Asian country.

People with small data plans don't use data from efficient websites, they use wifi which is omnipresent.

30GB of data on a monthly plan is $3.64. Which is about 4-6 hours of minimum wage (minimum wage is lower in agricultural areas).

But more to the point, people don't use data profligately like in the West. Every single cafe, restaurant, supermarket, and mall has free wifi. Most people ask for the wifi password before they ask for the menu.

I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up their data too fast.

It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country.

People here run out of data from watching videos on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Not from website bloat.

It's not even just the middle-income countries—I have an iPhone 13, so only three years old, on a US wifi connection with high speed broadband, and it can't handle the glitzy bloat of the prospectus for one of my ETFs. I don't understand why a prospectus shouldn't just be a PDF anyway, but it baffles me that someone would put so much bloated design into a prospectus that a recent phone can't handle it.

an alternate "lite/basic" mode.

In another world this mode dominated UI/UX design and development and the result was beautiful and efficient. Where design more resembles a haiku than an unedited novel.

We don't get to live in that world, but it's not hard to imagine.

Some of these sites are un-fucking-bearable on my gen old iPhone.

And the if I’m in a place with a shitty signal, forget about it, this problem is 10 times worse.

I’m not even talking about the cluttered UI where only a third of the page is visible because of frozen headers and ads, I’m talking about the size of the websites themselves that are built by people who throw shit against the wall until it looks like whatever design document they were given. A website that would have already been bloated had it been built correctly that then becomes unusable on a slow internet connection, forget slow hardware.

All that is to say, I can’t imagine what it must be like to use the internet under the circumstances in which you described.

I can only hope these people use localized sites built for their bandwidth and devices and don’t have to interact with the bloated crap we deal with.

Most of those users have the advantage of not using English - and so there are often sites in their native language that cater to lower power devices.

But if you’re in that middle world country AND your official language is English, you’re gonna have a hell of a slow time.

Could you elaborate on features and polish, i.e. give some specific examples?

Usually bad web software correlates with bad content. Therefore having a slow device is an excellent filter helping to avoid garbage.

"it's better for the company that I don't try, my time is expensive and any minute not spent on a feature is a waste of my salary" - is a common justification that I hear all too often.

That's not fair. Sure, if there's an experienced dev who _values_ efficiency on the team, who pushes for the site to be more efficient or builds it more efficiently to begin with, the page would be better off. But it's mostly about incentives. If management doesn't care, they will likely not react well to programmers spending time making the site more efficient instead of spending half the time to just get it running and then crunching through their backlog.

People who never worked with some of the bloated sites often forgot third party in the bloating.

Marketing team mandating inclusion of at least one "Tag Manager" (if they are especially bad, there will be multiple).

A "Tag Manager" is a piece of JS that is installed together with an API key in the site... and then it downloads whatever extra JS that was configured for given API key. The actual site developer often has absolutely no control over it (the closest I got once was PoC-of-PoC where we tried to put even inclusion of tag manager behind an actually GDPR-compliant consent screen).

Marketing team gets to add "tags" (read, tracking, chat overlays, subscription naggers, whatever), sometimes with extra rules (that also take time processing!), all without involving the development team behind the site.

About 5 years ago I applied for a job at a company that enabled people in rural Africa to more easily sell the goods they produced (farmers, basket weavers, what-have-you).

If you mainly target people in the US or EU, there's perhaps something to be said for not optimizing too aggressively for low-end hardware and flaky low-bandwidth high-latency connections. But if you're targetting rural Africa fairly aggressive optimisation seems like a no-brainer, right?

Their homepage loaded this 2M gazillion by gazillion pixel image downscaled to 500 by 1000 pixels with CSS. It got worse from there. I don't recall the exact JS payload size, but it was multi-MB – everything was extremely frontend-heavy, which was double ridiculous because it was mostly a "classic" template-driven backend app from what I could see.

I still applied because I liked the concept but the tech was just horrible. I don't really know why it was like this as I never got to the first interview stage, but it's hard to image it's anything other than western European developers not quite realizing what they're doing in this regard.

Is it really hard to believe that the solutions on offer are usually giant piles of steaming crap that do way more than they should but are nevertheless easy to get set up and get going? When programming ecosystems get big, they accumulate a ton of ways of doing things and people keep trying to put a layer on top on top of a layer on top of a layer (like floors in an old house). It doesn't matter if a thing underneath is O(n); someone will put another O(n) thing on top of that that represents all its data as strings and uses regex or horribly-inefficient JSON or something. Very few people ever think things from the ground up.

You are right.

I browse the web on Firefox with uBlock Origin, 3rd party cookies disabled, and so on.

So I am missing the bloat most people talk about.

But still apps like Clickup are really slow. It's just bad software.

we need some html tag or attribute for slow network detection.

instead of this nasty js feature detection that 99% of time no one does.

prefers reduce motion was a good start. although its rarely respected.

Probably a bit of both.

Client Side Rendering ( Regardless of Frameworks ) is hip, and gets more media attention. Sometimes backed by VC. It is new, it is complex. And fits both the hype cycle, software engineers complexity attraction, and Resume Driven Development model. And just like the article stated, it is suppose to bring so many good things in its idealogy to the table.

Since majority of software developers wants to works on it, so their Resume gets a tick and could jump to another job later. Management now faces lots of application for these technology and zero for old and boring tech.

great web programmers who don’t know much (and appear to not WANT to know much) about efficiency.

Remember when Firefox OS developers thought $35 dollar Smartphone will one day take over the world and CPU will be so much faster due to Moore's law, performance will soon becomes irrelevant.

I mean that is like Jeff hates Qualcomm, without actually understanding anything about Mobile SoC business nor the CPU behind it. And how ARM's IP works. A lot of people dont want to know "why" either.

A more accurate description and also a general observation. Most software developers and especially those on Web Development have very little understanding of hardware or low level Software engineering. Cloud Computing makes this even more abstracted.

The whole point of hierarchical organizations is that those higher up have more influence than those at the lower tiers. Cutting the blame in half doesn’t make sense.

I have worked with such people. When I asked them specifics about the "result" (HTML, CSS, JS) they looked at me as if I was talking another language. They came from javascript framework world, and there they didn't really think all that much about that.

My philosophy is nearly completely different, I ask myself what the minimum maintainable code is that would produce the equivalent of a well hand coded HTML+CSS+JS website. Usually the result is magnitudes smaller.

One of those people asked me how I did realtime list filtering on 1000 table rows and still have it load fast ans perform well on mobile. While that isn't really a feat, all I sid was deliver the whole data on the first request and then hide non-filtered data dynamically. That means the webserver didn't have to do anything wild, orher than deliver the same cached data to everybody who filters that list and because this was the only javascript going on on that site it was (to them) unusually performant. If you look at a comparable table row from their solution (some framework, didn't have much insight into it) the resulting html was 80% boilerplate that they didn't even use.

Web development is too entrenched and many wandered too far from the essentials of web technology.

Having worked with the "big scary companies", I can say they are 100% to blame. It doesn't start with the developers but rather the budget. Unless folks at the top are tech savvy and/or have an engineering background, they typically only budget for new features and either under-budget or don't budget for maintenance and tech debt removal. And when they do budget for maintenance, it's handled almost exclusively by "maintenance teams" that are offshore and cheaper.

So you have a feature team that works on a feature for 6 months, does a 1 hour "KT Session" with the offshore maintenance team and hands them the code. The offshore team has some information on the feature but not enough to really manage existing tech debt, just to keep the lights on. And on top of this they know they are the lowest totem on the pole and don't want to get fired so they don't go out of their way to try and fix any existing code or optimize it, again just enough to keep the thing working.

Then this cycle repeats 100-1000x within an org and pretty soon you have a scenario where the frontend has 2M lines of code when it really should be 250k max. A new feature team might come on with the brightest engineers and the best of intentions, but now they have to work within the box that was setup for them. Say they have a number of elements that don't line up with their feature mockups. The mockups might be incorrect, there might have been an upgrade to the UI kit, or the existing UI kit might need refactoring. Problem is none of that is budgeted for so the team is told to just copy the components and modify them for their own use. And of course on handoff to maintenance team, the new team does not want to mess with the existing feature work so they leave it as is. Management is non-technical so they don't know the difference, and you end up with 50+ components all called "Button" in your codebase from years and years of teams constantly copy/pasting to accommodate their new feature.

I have noticed with two 7 year old Snapdragon 835 devices that RAM and running a recent Android version makes a huge difference.

I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to replace the battery and disassembling phones is a pain.

Meanwhile a Galaxy S8 with the same SoC, 4GB of memory and stock Android 9 with Samsung's modifications chugs like there's no tomorrow.

I can understand that having two more gigabytes of memory can make a difference but there is a night and day difference between the phones. Perhaps Android 14 has way better memory management than Android 9? Or Samsung's slow and bloated software is hampering this device?

Either way it's irritating to see that many companies don't test on old/low-end devices. Most people in the world aren't running modern flagships, especially if they target a world-wide audience.

Interesting that you have such problems with Amazon. I‘m using an iPhone XR (5,5 years old) and don’t have any problems using Amazon in the browser (Safari). And I’m on the latest iOS (17.4).

I recently visited Brazil and had my shiny new phone snatched from my hand ... now with my spare 4 years old phone, frankly dont see any difference. But I use Firefox with all the ad blockers, maybe that helps.

Did you try disabling JavaScript on Amazon? It actually doesn't function too badly. I know, I know, you shouldn't need to do it and I agree.

I have no issues with Amazon on my iPhone 8 running latest iOS 16

I have a Palm Phone. I generally consider web browsing to be almost impossible no it at this point lol

PUBG is now a very special beast: It's CPU bound = we are unlikely to ever see a "AAA" game with anything beyond it's complexity for eternity. You can run it on a 1030 GPU at 60 FPS.

These days they coerce the dev team into implementing a tag manager so they can add their filthy trackers without asking the dev team.

One time long ago, e-commerce company i worked for decided to add tiktok analytics to the front-end. The dev team added the changes but were worried it might impact performance and UX. As a solution we were told to run the performance tests to check it.

The performance tests were created to mimic user behaviour but only involved company APIs. Not third party requests. No one in the top level, cared about this bit of information. We ran this performance test and saw the the response times are almost the same so it's time to pat ourselves on the back and move on ...

(But don't under any circumstances break the four other trackers already running on the site.)

I imagine it has more to do with the monstrous website design than the tracking scripts. New reddit vs old reddit or desktop reddit vs mobile Reddit shouldn't be that different in terms of tracking. But the newer ones run like ass.

Just throw a ticket in jira for these stupid devs to "make it faster".

To be fair, it is usually difficult to tell the difference between 243 tracking scripts and 244.

The sad part being that traditional marketing cares very little about these users outside of the aggregation parts.

When the goal is to make people pay, a base strategy is to target user who are already spending money. So "fast enough on a current [device sales team is using]" becomes the baseline, and optimizing for older/weaker/cheaper environments isn't an proposition that will convince.

Except when you're ad supported. Then the balance will be a bit more in the middle.

Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to implement that new tracking script and everyone assumes that users won't even be able to tell the difference.

I mean, maybe they can but the business doesn't care. If you polled "users" of cable television I doubt anyone would say they prefer the experience of commercials.

Firing up my neoliberal brain.

We should just tax ad and spying on users bandwidth and front/backend end resource use.

readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly have.

But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now says that 2.4 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is fast now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit... (this is from 4 years ago, it's probably worse now).

You don't have to go far to see either Youtube loading 2.5 megabytes of CSS on desktop to the founder of Vercel boasting its super fast sites that take 20 seconds to load the moment you throttle it just a tiny bit: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1735338533303259571

...which is a long standing point of academic contention.

What contention? If anything, Luu is being rather generous–Knuth was just whining that the decades-long free lunch program was being cancelled.

what attitudes software engineers supposedly have

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company take performance seriously. No one scoffs when a simple API service for frontend has 500ms response time! How many engineers even know or care how much their cloud bill is?

Knuth is kinda right imo - parallelism as we have it now is unused by 90% of software outside of specialist use cases and running the same single-threaded program on multiple data items.

Programming languages and hardware both offer poor support for fine-grained parallelism and it's very hard to speed up classical software using parallel approaches.

I thought he summarised it pretty well. Jeff Atwood was only picked as example. But there are LOTS of high profile, huge followers web developments thought leaders constantly pump out similar views. And a lot of their followers just blindly accept what they were told.

You’re getting downvoted but I think despite the tone you are correct. 10 years ago corporate guidance on web dev was backwards compatibility going back several versions. Now it’s hardly any concern for anything more than 6 months old.

More than anything I think it’s because corporate IT has had to modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also cannot demand user use an old version of a browser that still supports some old plugin. And as a vendor it’s not profitable to support people who maintain that mindset.

Also “update to the latest version” is the new “turn it off and back on again,” when it comes to basic IT help.

Clues that a market is not competitive...

What most impresses me is that this happen on many markets that should be competitive by any sane rationale. Like group buying or hotel booking. Yet, they also do that kind of shit, and people still have nowhere to go.

The world economy became integrated and incredibly rigid.

It appears to me, as an outsider, that interfaces are designed with a "one size fits all" approach, at least at the prestige end of town. Instead of allowing the user to choose design and interaction that works for them, the designer (or product owner) acts as if they know what's best for all users.

I don't know, I've seen mature people who couldn't operate a cassette deck and likely would have trouble with a typewriter. These people definitely grew up around these devices.

I don't think (modern) technology is at fault here.

It doesn’t help when you get a new iphone it doesn’t ship with its documentation. You have to get to the actual documentation page on apples site, and then dig a little to get to a page that looks like this (1) that merely outlines a few possible gestures. Not which ones to use when beyond a one sentence example. And this is just for the OS. What apps ship with documentation that outlines how these gesture functions are used in their app?

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/learn-basic-gestures-...

Or HN. All that talk about "brutalist web design" yet most websites are more bloated than ever...

This loads faster than native apps serving local content on my device.

Ironically the modern web, built by programmers, is scorned by programmers. You all collectively, persistently, shamelessly decided AngularReactNodeWebpackViteBloat 200mb asynchronous hellspawn websites needed to be made this way.

When all this time, lightweight CSS and anchor links and some PHP was all we needed.

How crude. I can’t even post gifs. This is basically a glorified e-mail client, but with extra steps. No social media integration? What is this 2004? It’s not even decentralized like matrix.

Can’t even post inline videos, bro.

\s

Jokes aside, I do miss this type of interaction. Especially for open source projects. It made finding solutions to common issues much easier when documentation was lacking or has not been updated in a long time.

Now all or most projects have adopted some form of: discord channel, slack group, subreddit, twitter. I remember searching for my similar issue in a slack channel only to realize the chat history has been limited because the owners did not pay the extra amount to archive messages beyond what was given for free.

IIRC, the D forum also offers direct NNTP access. Would be interesting to compare web access with e.g. tin on a variety of devices…

What a refreshing experience.

Virtually all pharmaceutical advertising is targeted at prescribers, yet we all have to watch/view them.

I think you are close to the truth there.

But I doubt companies purposely increase their hosting costs as some kind of firewall to only include the rich. More like they just don’t care. Same reason for technical debt, everyone wants to grow and move needles.

If a company could magically make their site more available and efficient for free I am sure they would jump at the chance. But spending a million on that vs. a million on ads wont seem worth it.

Huh? I have a 5 year old, mid range android, and I still buy things online.

Not everyone cares about phones.

This is addressed in TFA and is not true. The bloat is a symptom of what I've seen referred to as the "laptop class" and is unrelated to any feature adjacent.

Well that take sure goes from 0 to 60 real fast. Can you really be sure that only people with good phones and connections have money to spend? Just to poke some obvious holes: what about old rich people who have a distaste for modern phones but spend lavishly on vacations every year? Or outdoorsy rich people who are frequently in areas with poor cell coverage but are constantly purchasing expensive camping/climbing equipment? How about people who aren’t rich, but work for companies where their input is part of a purchasing process with millions of dollars of budget? Those people are all super-lucrative advertising targets, I don’t think advertisers are intentionally weeding them out.

The last decade of my life has been a speedrun in "less than ideal conditions" for computing. CGNAT, 5mbit dsl, spotty "fixed wireless" and my latest debacle: starlink, although that seems to be getting better slowly; used to drop 15/60 seconds, now it drops more like 4/200 seconds. Constant power issues and lightning strikes - i only have 1 computer that has a working NIC, because evidently tiny power fluctuations are enough to send most chipsets into the graveyard. I had to switch to full fiber between all compute sites on my property, and a wifi backup, because copper is too risky.

What I find interesting is that design of websites is often 'mobile first' but rarely 'mobile connection first'.

Developers are expensive, so we give them fast connections and fast computers. Then we act shocked when modern software/web requires fast computers.

Unless it's somehow regulated that people test less than ideal conditions it won't happen, yet most people (myself included) don't really want that either.

I call this "Designed in California" like some fruity company proudly says on their devices.

For software this means designed on top of the line hardware, with fast low latency internet. TFA describes the consequences.

For hardware it means designed inside climate controlled dust free offices and cars for people with long commutes to work on straight roads where you don't have to pay much attention.

Think phones shutting down if you have a real winter. Think smart turn stalks that can't signal a left turn on a crossroads that's not at 90 degrees. Think ultra thin laptops where the keyboard is so dust sensitive it lasts 3 months if you use them outdoors. Think a focus on audiobooks and podcasts because you're stuck in traffic so much.

I live in some hills and some days I need to fully drive out of them to get google maps to load the map. The map I am using half a gb to cache locally on my phone already. Whats even the point of that cache? Same thing with spotify. Why is there latency searching my downloads library in offline mode?

Whenever I pull out old machines I’m a little shocked at how responsive they are running a modern OS (Win10 or Linux), so long as the modern web is avoided. Anything with a Core 2 Duo or better is adequate for a wide range of tasks if you can find non-bloated software to do them with.

Even going back so far that modern OS support is absent, snappiness can be found. My circa 2000 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9.1 doesn’t feel appreciably slower than its modern day counterpart for more than one might expect, and some things like typing latency are actually better.

I remember going trough a similar situation when using a netbook. At first they were ok for doing light work and even accessing websites, but as time went on websites and browsers became more and more heavy. Youtube was a struggle, even Google felt laggy. Want to browse a map? You are better off getting a physical one! But, no worry, it was still fine for other low intensity things and some programming projects I worked on. About two years later and both KDE and GNOME would struggle to run on it, it was painful. Maybe I should have switched to an all CLI/terminal workflow but eventually I bought a used thinkpad X220 which was like taking a breath of fresh air after holding it for years. But now I do see the same pattern emerging, much slower mind you, but it is surely happening. Some websites feel sluggish, some gnome apps also feel sluggish and I have to avoid electron apps like the plague. But at least it has enough brawn (16GB of RAM and an SSD) to cut trough the bullshit and work ok on most things. Maybe I should have embraced that terminal lifestyle after all...

Hm, not entirely true, depending on what you mean with "the internet shifting".

The internet has grown, and the free sharing is still going strong. Have a look at Wikipedia, Hacker News, Arxiv.org.

To be honest, the stuff that was shared freely in 2000 was not all that great, and most of that which was, is still available. Remember that you had to buy a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica back then, and to all the academic journals.

Granted, there are some non-free information silos, but generally I'm pretty happy with the procrastination advice on Reddit being surrounded by annoying ads that drive me away.

the tragedy of the commons

PO

What's the acronym?

Unfortunately acronyms are context sensitive and many users here are not in your context... Maybe try to avoid using acronyms!

I think Let's Encrypt made a heroic effort. They deployed a hack to support Androids long abandoned by the operating system maintainer and manufacturer. If you want to blame LE for the breakage then also blame: GOOG for using the IBM PC clone business model without a device tree standard, QCOM for selling chips but very quickly cutting support, the manufacturer, and cellular carriers who prefer to lock you into another 24 month installment plan than approve an update for your existing handset.

The problem is that this attitude infects even government departments, which ought to serve all citizens, not just the rich ones.

A lot of companies don't care about end user performance experience. Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus, endpoint monitoring, TLS interception, Microsoft Teams, etc. If there's no explicit responsiveness goal, then performance dies by a thousand cuts.

Eh. Cloudfront pricing starts at 8.5c per GB and goes down to 2c. I think you’d struggle to use that pricing as a justification when compared to the software engineer hours required to shrink down a CSS bundle. (don’t get me wrong, 2MB is insane and ought to be a professional embarrassment. But I think you’re going to struggle using bandwidth bills as the reason)

I agree with you about frameworks, though. So much waste in creating everything as (e.g.) a React app when there’s no need. Sadly the industry heavily prioritises developer experience over user experience.

It's a numbers game. Mostly the difference doesn't matter at all to the vast majority of users. Optimizing for the bottom 1 or 2 percent that don't have any disposable income to update their phones, or pay for your wonderful products or services is not a big priority. And not all companies have rockstar developers working for them. That's why things like wordpress are so popular.

I actually pulled the plug on a wordpress site for my company last week. We now have a static website. It's a big performance improvement. But the old site was adequate even though it was a bit slow to load. So, nobody really noticed the improvement. Making it faster was never a requirement.

What is worth optimizing for is good SEO. There's of course a correlation between responsiveness and people giving up and abandoning web sites. That's why big e-commerce sites tend to be relatively fast. Because there's a money impact when people leave early.

What I find ironic is that the people complaining about this stuff are mostly relatively well off developers with disposable incomes and decent hardware. If they use crappy/obsolete hardware it's mostly by choice; not necessity. Some people are a bit OCD about performance issues as well. They notice minor stutters that nobody cares about and it ticks them off.

2MB is nothing. I'm saying this as somebody who used cassettes, and later floppy disks with way less capacity. But that's 35 years ago. The only time when this matters to me is when I'm on a train in Germany and my phone is on a really flaky mobile network that barely works. Germany is a bit of a third world country when it comes to mobile connectivity. So, that's annoying. But not really a problem web developers should concern themselves with.

It’s a performance optimization for rendering a large amount of html. If the DOM had all the items in memory it would perform much worse. Thankfully browsers are working on a feature where you can keep the markup in the DOM for things like CTRL-F without hurting performance.

Granted the main reason such a technique is needed is designs that avoid pagination.

This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.

Meanwhile watches a team build a cathedral when all they needed was a shack.

Yes, on Thursday Google ended their only viable "product".

RIP Google.

The new Reddit is unusable, and the old is well too old.

Twitch is borderline usable, with chat and video stream problems...

The list is long...

All changes are bad when you have the final formula because they are job security.

Eventually the monkeys on this ball of dirt will realize that jobs and money don't exist, but then it will be to late... oh that is now!

RIP Humans.

"Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to use "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to data collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and Google."

Partly for sure, but Amazon for example? Or Decathlon? (a big sports/outdoor chain in europe)

Their sites are just horrible on a mobile (or in Decathlons case also on a Desktop, that is not high end), but they also don't offer me their app in plain view, so I have to assume it is just incompetence. The devs only testing everything on their high end devices connected to a backbone.

It’s not just weak connectivity. I know people in rural areas who still have less than 1 Mbps internet speed over their DSL landline. Using the internet there isn’t a lot of fun.

Reddit for me is the slowest site. And while old.reddit fixes this they try to steer you back to main reddit at any opportunity!

YouTube doesn’t feel zippy as a website but the reliable and speed of videos have been very good for me. I remember the days when buffering videos was hell.

This is trolling, right?

Lemme just give my grandma a list of instructions for doing this so she can get to Facebook. I'll let you know how it works out.

Who's going to pay for that server? We're talking about $50-100 phones here.

webdevs and their managers should use these web "apps" on bad machine over VNC on a slow connection for a few months. these javascript hellpages are basically crime against humanity and do contribute a lot to e-waste, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions

That is one performance metric. What about energy use and loading search results not just the home page. I find DDG faster from a perception point of view. I imagine on sone metrics it is faster.

Is there a demo site or screenshots somewhere? Add them to README :-)

Clarification: The frontend does not pull anything, the backend pulls in libraries for websockets and json using cargo.

or any shopping website

Could you give an example? I used a shopping website yesterday, both on a laptop and on an android phone, and apart from cookie banner popups (design choice, not hardware limitation), did not have any significant inconveniences.

The engines are perfectly fine.

It's the websites/web developers that are the problem.

I was thinking about this the other day

I’d happily pay $100/month to access the internet similar to that of pre-2005ish

As in, banning almost all commercial activity

I truly believe Google isn’t getting worse, just the incentives behind the creation of web content have become progressively maligned with that of the user’s desires

I want a high quality internet, and am willing to fork out large sums of money to access it

I hope I’m not alone

addressed in the article

Contrast is good.

https://bestmotherfucking.website/

Maybe we'll see the return of the proxy + lightweight browser model like Opera Mini.

Or they take the route to say “not for you”

After application evolves bloated, it's difficult to go back and un-bloat it.

It will be hard to get to pristine quality, but there ought to be some amount of low hanging fruit, where minimal changes bring noticeable improvement.

I wouldn't be so sure. The browser ultimately need to render the UI from the DOM which is intrinsically linked with JavaScript. Wasm can help for some of the application logic maybe. But it also comes at a cost of some fixed overhead to bring up the wasm blob. JavaScript performance aren't that bad for UI.

Because non-web applications are always very efficient and high performance, right?

The problem isn't the technologies available to us. Majority of devs just have no desire to write efficient code.

New Reddit, per the appendix. I think that Old Reddit is likely to be fairly competitive (I would guess placing near Wordpress), and yeah I agree it would be interesting to have in the table to see how far it's fallen.

The browser does not in fact optimize that. Yes it's surprising. If you want it to do basic optimizations like not rendering invisible content you need to give it hints via obscure and relatively recent CSS rules nobody ever heard of.

You missed the point, which is that it's better if users with slow devices see actually useful content rather than a splash screen.

Substack

I don't access this site a lot, but I remember until very recently they had other front-end, it worked great. Honestly, I think they will follow the path of medium.com, and start to make the user experience worse and worse.

It's a site where people post text, a few images, maybe 1 or 2 videos per post. It shouldn't be complicated.

I assumed that to mean the layout work is limited to a single thread. You need to know what content made it onto page one before you can start working on page two, right?

thing is, boss is not a dev. He is a business man.

Seems like your issues were not with WP itself, but with whatever plugins and themes were added to it. Avoiding WP entirely for this is like avoiding a programming language because the 1 developer you had experience with sucked at it. WP itself can be very fast, as is evident by a ton of high profile sites running it (CSS-Tricks, TechCrunch, New York Times, Time Magazine, etc). I'm not a fan of WP myself, but that's just because I don't like how its built and how it entirely avoids modern programming standards, not because it is slow, which it most definitely doesn't have to be.

with 64kb of ram running windows 11

I hope you mean GB.

What about pride in your vocation?

Yeah this is exactly the kind of nuance I'd love to see explored but as you say, auditing native apps is difficult, and it's really hard to compare apples to apples unless you can really compare equivalent web and mobile apps.

reducing the number of requests required to load a page

In practice this pretty much requires pure SSR and "multiple page" design, given the amount of network roundtrips on typical SPA sites. (Some lightweight SPA updates may nonetheless be feasible, by using an efficient HTML-swapping approach as seen in HTMX as opposed to the conventional chatty-API requests and heavy DOM manipulation.)

I can vouch that my 2017 MacBook Pro struggles with all kinds of tasks, especially web ones.

I have never understood why web browser designers don't care to provide a default style sheet that makes unstyled web pages look nice i.e. with proper spacing of elements and sizes of headings etc.

Presumably Ookla.

As a hobbyist, I cannot justify the cost of McMaster. I will confess that I often use it to find the precise name of a part for purchasing on Amazon/AliExpress.

Maybe a quality service really does cost that much? But the gap in performances and usability is so great, it seems that something else must be at play sometimes.

I'm glad people remember what WW in WWW means. :)

Welcome to the Wide Web, where bloat is the norm.