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).
I think flipping the question makes more sense, why do you think some forums switched to or started using discourse instead of just using phpbb? I can guarantee you that it's not just to follow a fad or whatever, most niche or support forums don't care about that.
I say this as someone that frequently uses and enjoys both rue brutalist design of a text web browser and the emacs mastodon client.
Why shouldn't the default be: does this website work in Lynx? I think that's a damn good baseline.
And in response to the other parent post, on a (almost) new iPhone, both news sites & Twitter continuously crash and reload for me. I'm not sure what the state of these other popular sites are because I don't use them.
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!
Remove the mcafee nuisance popups and any browser "addons" that were badged/branded. and IIRC we charged more than $50 for that service back then.
No one wants to tell a customer that they need to find better adult content sites, and that we won't be cleaning their machines without payment anymore!
And that is not more work?
It was usually the way I did it, too. But this requires checking with the owner what apps are important, saved preferences, where are the important files stored (they never know) etc.
I’m in Canada and have a single digit plan and I just upgraded from an almost decade old flagship. Most websites are torture.
that would last for a few hours of lightweight (not youtube/images/etc) browsing now.
I never used it. I don't do a lot. WiFi at home, drive to work, WiFi at work, drive to home.
Travelling with the kids I've found the new plan makes life easier.
Even so, we should avoid pigeonholing those who have limited access to data as poor people. There are other reasons.
But it is gaining popularity with the unexpected rise of htmx and its 'simpler is better even if it's slightly worse' philosophy.
It should be easy to use this as a "north star" and your only job is to not screw it up hardly at all.
Some people are just worse screw-ups than others.
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.
If we had modern computers in 200X, we wouldn’t just have music on our myspaces, we’d put whole games there I bet.
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.
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.
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.
I think one way for first world country citizens to empathise with this is how people behave when on roaming data plans during overseas trips. One does keep to public WiFi as much as possible and keep mobile data usage to a minimum or for emergency purposes.
You mean, the one developing country you live in.
You are also missing the full spectrum of users. People don't just browse the web for fun. They look for important information like health or finance information, they might not want to do that in a public place or they might not be able to put it off for when they next have wifi.
If you are building an e commerce website it might not matter, but you could be building a news site, or any number of other things.
>It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country.
I once loaded a site that loaded approx 324mb "Super resolution" image (I knew it was high res, but I thought it was like 30-40 mb at best). Took care of 1/3rd of my monthly data in a single page load.
Is this because the website usage doesn't add up or because they don't have the tools to track which sites are using how much data?
I live in a major city in the Philippines, and free WiFi is becoming more of a rarity nowadays. Not even Starbucks and other big chain restaurants, malls, and cafes offer WiFi anymore because of how widely available data is. They expect you to bring your own data and tether if you want to browse or do some work.
In more rural areas, WiFi is definitely not widely available. On the rare chance it’s even offered, it’s usually “piso WiFi” paid by the minute.
That 30GB plan is more than some people with phones earn here
I work with parolees and they get the free "Lifeline" phones the federal govt pays for. You can get one for free on any street corner in the poor 'hoods of the USA. They are the cheapest lowest spec Android phones with 15GB data/month. That data is burned up by day 3 due to huge Web payloads and then the user can't fill out forms he needs for jobs/welfare and can't navigate anywhere as he can't load Maps.
As for users with the lowest-end devices like the Itel P32, Dan's chart seems to prove that no amount of incremental optimization would benefit them. 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: the empathy problem returns in a different guise, as US-based developers often make the wrong decisions on which features/polish are essential to keep versus discarded for performance reasons.