The web sucks if you have a slow connection

Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by 5ilv3r on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @05:16PM (#13602712)

High paying customers are going to have high speed connections. No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. If you are on a slow connection, they don't want your kind on their site. If you try, they will mock you for not knowing your place.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by iamdave on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @06:10PM (#13603088)

No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination.

This will make a few segments of people cringe because much like the topic of racism, there's a school of thought that it only counts when things are exhibited in severe forms like water cannons, attack dogs or restrictive housing covenants or otherwise people being directly being told 'no' because of superficial topics like race, gender or sexual orientation.

But as a tech guy who's slowly pivoting towards law, I've long held the belief that technology will become the next battle ground for civil rights-and has the potential to even change (in the sense of expanding the definition of) how we talk about civil rights. Think along the lines of people being left behind when it comes to accessing information they need to request public resources as more and more cities move towards online only forms, or even utilization of "entitlement programs" to pay for internet access (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-o...).

Now it may not be active discrimination in the sense that one will be outright told 'no', but disparate impact deserves to be at the table of discussing this sort of thing.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by emodendroket on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:04PM (#13604297)

It seems more plausible to me that they just don't want to take the trouble to support low-bandwidth connections than that they're actively pumping up the space to keep out poor people.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by rmc on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @04:54PM (#13602526)

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by 72deluxe on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @06:52PM (#13603365)

Yes and the average page size has sky-rocketed, despite there being no more actual content (i.e. text). Instead we have animations of images or text fading in as we scroll down a page and lots of Javascript to do things I do not know.

Kind of makes me miss the old plain HTML days - much less CPU intensive too.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by JustSomeNobody on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @07:20PM (#13603524)

But still should make sure low speed works. But try convincing some privileged 20 something developer of that.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by nindalf on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @07:32PM (#13603578)

It's really not about a privileged youngster, it's about business priorities. Most of the time the cost benefit ratio doesn't justify the effort to optimise for high latency high packet-loss connections. Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider.

At work we did something similar a few years ago with our Android app. We dropped support for Android 2.3 users because we only had a couple hundred of them and it didn't justify the developer cost to maintain it. WhatsApp only dropped support a month ago. I don't think that was because they were somehow less privileged than us.

The casual ageism in your comment is unbecoming. You could reconsider it.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by flukus on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @09:11PM (#13604074)

> Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider.

Your making it usable for that 1%, but you're making it better for the other 99%.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by emodendroket on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:05PM (#13604306)

You aren't necessarily, though. Efforts spent optimizing the existing functionality are not being spent adding new features.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by flukus on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:19PM (#13604381)

But your optimizing things people are using frequently, not adding things they probably aren't. Adding features is usually diminishing returns as well.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by emodendroket on Thursday February 09, 2017 @11:33AM (#13608133)

Even if you just want to polish or optimize existing functionality, bandwidth usage may not be the biggest bottleneck for all or most users.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by JustSomeNobody on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @08:23PM (#13603817)

I could, but I've worked with too many examples that only care about writing new code in whatever is the latest hotness and moving on. They[0] don't want to fix their bugs. They don't care about anything but "works on my machine." They certainly don't care about using bandwidth.

[0] The ones I've worked with

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by nsp on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @08:59PM (#13604003)

Bring it up! They're newer to development then you are, they're newer to life. They're far more likely to have always have had high speed internet growing up, and not have had that visceral experience. The initial reaction will probably be negative, but initial negative reactions to perceived increases in scope/work is basically a universal human trait, it's surmountable.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by gkya on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:04AM (#13606936)

What is an ageism? People are always inventing new ways to get offended...

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by freehunter on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:39AM (#13607181)

I've heard about ageism (like racism, but for people of different ages) since around 2000-2001. Really around the time baby boomers started getting close to retirement age and some companies decided it was a better deal to fire them or lay them off than pay the pensions they had earned, and also with the DotCom boom where startups would only hire 20-somethings. It's not really a new term.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by kuschku on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @04:00PM (#13602042)

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by timdavila on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @04:26PM (#13602274)

> which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G

source? the entire goal of AMP is to load pages quickly

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by acdha on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @05:05PM (#13602620)

Minutes might be slightly overselling it but AMP has a bit over 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript alone before you get the actual content.

Here's the current top story when I hit news.google.com in a mobile browser:

https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.was...

Loading that in a simulated 2G connection takes about 80 seconds and at least 30 seconds of that is waiting to display anything you care about. Looking at the content breakdown shows why: ~200KB of webfonts, 1.2MB of JavaScript, 275KB of HTML, etc.

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_DV_R2R1/2/details/...

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details

Loading the same page without JavaScript pulls the content render time down into a couple seconds, still over 2G:

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170208_5Y_R404/1/details/...

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by kuschku on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @05:35PM (#13602858)

On my throttled 2G connection, it’s ~2½ minutes, and because I rarely visit pages with AMP, it’s never cached.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by acdha on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @06:35PM (#13603262)

I live in a major city, have an iPhone 6S with good LTE coverage according to benchmarks, etc. and still routinely have AMP take 15+ seconds to render after the HTML has been received. I don't know if that's Mobile Safari applying strict cache limits or an issue in Google's side but the sales pitch isn't delivering.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by Bahamut on Thursday February 09, 2017 @07:28AM (#13606423)

I have all of those as well, and AMP takes < 1s for me to load pages.

Sounds like either a configuration issue on your end or maybe your wireless carrier.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by acdha on Thursday February 09, 2017 @10:05AM (#13607385)

Note that I did not say it always happens — when everything is cached, it performs as well as any other mobile-optimized site — or that it's specific to my device/carrier – it also happens on WiFi, Android, etc.

The problem is simply a brittle design which depends on a ton of render-blocking resources. The assumption is that those will be cached but my experience is simply that fairly regularly I'll click on a link, see the page title load (indicating the HTML response has started), and then have to wait a long time for the content to display. Many news sites also load a ton of stuff but since fewer of them block content display waiting for JavaScript, the experience under real-world wireless conditions is better in the worst case and no worse in average conditions.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by SquareWheel on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @04:47PM (#13602460)

Well, it would have to be downloaded once. It'd stay cached after that though so it's not really a concern. They use version numbers for cache busting.

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Re:The web sucks if you have a slow connection by flukus on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @06:29PM (#13603223)

On mobile cache sizes are very limited, and with the size of modern web pages it has to get reclaimed regularly. You can't rely on caching to solve poor performance.

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