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posted by martyb on Monday September 16 2019, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the things-expand-to-exceed-the-space-provided dept.

https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn't updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured my connection, I found that the bandwidth was roughly comparable to what I got with a 56k modem in the 90s. The latency and packetloss were significantly worse than the average day on dialup: latency varied between 500ms and 1000ms and packetloss varied between 1% and 10%. Those numbers are comparable to what I'd see on dialup on a bad day.

Despite my connection being only a bit worse than it was in the 90s, the vast majority of the web wouldn't load. Why shouldn't the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? It would be one thing if I tried to watch youtube and read pinterest. It's hard to serve videos and images without bandwidth. But my online interests are quite boring from a media standpoint. Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. In fact, I recently tried using w3m (a terminal-based web browser that, by default, doesn't support css, javascript, or even images) for a week and it turns out there are only two websites I regularly visit that don't really work in w3m (twitter and zulip, both fundamentally text based sites, at least as I use them)[1].

More recently, I was reminded of how poorly the web works for people on slow connections when I tried to read a joelonsoftware post while using a flaky mobile connection. The HTML loaded but either one of the five CSS requests or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed out, leaving me with a broken page. Instead of seeing the article, I saw three entire pages of sidebar, menu, and ads before getting to the title because the page required some kind of layout modification to display reasonably. Pages are often designed so that they're hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it's quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.

[1] excluding internal Microsoft stuff that's required for work. Many of the sites are IE only and don't even work in edge. I didn't try those sites in w3m but I doubt they'd work! In fact, I doubt that even half of the non-IE specific internal sites would work in w3m.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @06:44PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @06:44PM (#894758)

    For those of us that actually care about the impact of bloat in general from bottom to top and not just at the level if the Web, there's a really good talk on YouTube by Casey Muratori [youtube.com] about how deep the problem goes. We're piling chairs on top of chairs, but we can't slow down now, and presumably nobody really cares anyway.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday September 16 2019, @07:50PM (1 child)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday September 16 2019, @07:50PM (#894780) Journal

    Discussing web bloat ... YouTube video ... um, okay ...

    Megabytes to say what can be done in kilobytes of simple searchable, cut-n-pasteable text. Oh, the irony ...

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    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @05:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @05:29PM (#895739)

      barbara hudson after seeing you blow it on C\C++ null-terminated string buffer overflows security issues and slower string performance both have and pascal doesn't https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33430&page=1&cid=889635#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] don't ever speak about code. You are a blundering idiot that was also caught red-handed stalking apk who totally destroyed you in that link easily hahahaha.