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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: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 17 2019, @05:34AM (4 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday September 17 2019, @05:34AM (#895014) Journal
    "There are such things in which not having your entire (in-house) userbase updating to the latest version of app from one day to the other can spell millions in loses"

    OK. So what? They can still do that either way.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday September 17 2019, @05:45AM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 17 2019, @05:45AM (#895018) Journal

    OK. So what?

    This means there are cases in which Javascript in browser delivers better** than any other solutions.
    Which means: "Javscript in browser is always the evil-incarnate" is not quite true.

    They can still do that either way.

    They can do it "the cross-platform native app way" iff they accept a higher dev cost and/or the potential risk of loses (because delays) and/or the extra cost of asking users (their employees) to take care to stay up-to-date.
    ** All the above translate in a cost they don't encounter on a "Javascript in browser" solution - therefore they actually can do it solely in the "Javascript in browser" way.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 17 2019, @06:36AM (2 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Tuesday September 17 2019, @06:36AM (#895032) Journal
      "This means there are cases in which Javascript in browser delivers better** than any other solutions."

      No, it doesn't.

      "They can do it "the cross-platform native app way" iff they accept a higher dev cost and/or the potential risk of loses (because delays) and/or the extra cost of asking users (their employees) to take care to stay up-to-date."

      Claiming the costs are higher only makes sense if you're setting an unreasonably short time span.

      "All the above translate in a cost they don't encounter on a "Javascript in browser" solution"

      But that "solution" has incalculably high costs.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:34AM (1 child)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:34AM (#895057) Journal

        Claiming the costs are higher only makes sense if you're setting an unreasonably short time span.

        And you think you can dictate the reality to reject the necessity of "unreasonable short time span" from everywhere, right?
        Darn bold and powerful of you, if I may say so.

        It seems unfortunate that JPMorgan and their ilk think differently, manage to maintain their needs above your boldness and make money out of it. Maybe that's the reality and you are wrong in your boldness?

        Well, "winning an argument" on Soylentnews is not something that I desire, thus I'll let the decision which of the two is true as your problem. Over and out

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 17 2019, @08:11AM

          by Arik (4543) on Tuesday September 17 2019, @08:11AM (#895069) Journal
          I'm not dictating, I'm observing. Single-minded pursuit of short term profits does not produce sustainable business. Just "vulture capitalism." Look around you. Think.

          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?