[HN Gopher] The modern web on a slow connection (2017) ___________________________________________________________________ The modern web on a slow connection (2017) Author : x14km2d Score : 166 points Date : 2021-06-05 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (danluu.com) (TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com) | istillwritecode wrote: | For many advertising-based websites, the value of the user is | often proportional to their bandwidth. | TacticalCoder wrote: | One of the problem is that a lot of devs have very good | connections at home. I've got 600 MBit/s symmetric (optic fiber). | Spain, France, now Belgium... It's fiber nearly everywhere. Heck, | Andorra has 100% fiber coverage. Japan: my brother has got 2 | Gbit/s at home. | | My home connection is smoking some of my dedicated servers: the | cheap ones are still on 100 MBit/s in datacenter and they're | totally the bottleneck. That's how fast home connections are, for | some. | | I used to browse on a 28.8 modem, then 33.6, then ISDN, then | ADSL. | | The problem is: people who get fiber are probably not going back. | We're going towards faster and faster connections. | | It's easy, when you're on fiber since years and years now, to | forget what it was. To me it's at least part of the problem. | | Joel is not loading his own site on a 28.8 modem. It's the | unevenly distributed future. | Black101 wrote: | > Joel is not loading its own site on a 28.8 modem. It's the | unevenly distributed future. | | I hope that no one are... and at least using 56k | pjmlp wrote: | Preferbly the dual mode versions then. | Black101 wrote: | " Dualmode faxmodems provide high-quality voice mail when | used with a soundcard. They also have both Class 1 14.4 | Kbps send/receive fax for convenient printer-quality faxing | to any faxmodem or fax machine. You can even "broadcast" | your faxes to multiple recipients, schedule fax | transmission, or forward them to another number. " | | I don't see the advantages | oblak wrote: | I think the problem is the vast majority of web developers | don't care. It's true. Sure, having nice connection helps. In | the sense that having a meal helps you forget about world | hunger... if you cared about it in the first place. | | Sans multimedia consumption, the modern web is fine on a | reasonable connection provided you're using noscript or | something like that. If you're not, then well, you're already | screwed either way. | | What's crazy to me is not that regular users put up with a ton | of bullshit - they have to. It's that lots of fellow developers | do and they most certainly don't have to. They simply don't | care. | mgarciaisaia wrote: | I guess most of the times it's not about a a dev not caring | about the issue - it's about not being paid to address this | scenarios. | | The default for most of the tools/frameworks is to generate | this bloat without a nice fallback for slow connections. | Because the industry is focused on people with good | connections, because that's where the money is. | | Whenever I develop a webapp whose users won't be having a | good Internet connection, there's a requirement to support | that use case, and I spend time making sure the thing is | usable on bad connections, and it's OK to sacrifice some UX | to get there. | | But on most cases, customers (both end-users and companies | that pay me to code something for them) prefer shiny & cheap | rather than "works OK for faceless people I don't know they | still live like I did 15 years ago". | | TL;DR: it's an economics issue, as usual. | | ---- | | PD: I've spent five hours yesterday to avoid a 70% packet | loss to the router in the place I've recently moved to. | There's a (top) 6Mbps connection on the other side of the | router. I'm suffering not being on a top-class connection - | but that's _my_ issue, not my customer's, nor my customer's | customers. | ajsnigrutin wrote: | > What's crazy to me is not that regular users put up with a | ton of bullshit - they have to | | Honestly, the number of people working in tech, not using an | adblock (and not even knowing that things like this exist) is | making me sad. | habibur wrote: | The modern web loads the whole website on your first visit, aka | SPA. | | Plus React 150kb, Bootstrap 150kb and all their plugins make it | multi megabyte. | | I was thinking about converting my old server rendered web site | into modern web. Still wondering if it's worth it. | grishka wrote: | Most often though, your first visit is your only visit. | bgroat wrote: | It isn't | sneak wrote: | The downside of this "modern" approach is that you break the | website for anyone with javascript off, or using a text | browser. | goodpoint wrote: | ...also everybody without modern and/or expensive hardware | AKA 2 billion people in the world. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | Doesn't it also break basic caching? That is, I can't | download a "modern" website to view it offline because it's | actually just a rendering shim that needs to phone home for | the content? | capableweb wrote: | That's last years modern web. This years modern web splits up | the JS bundle based on the pages so you only load what's | required for each page. So we're basically back to square one. | | > I was thinking about converting my old server rendered web | site into modern web. Still wondering if it's worth it. | | As usual guideline I tend to use: Are you building a website or | a web application? If you're building a website, you're best | off with just static pages or static pages generated | dynamically. If you need lots of interactivity and similar, | better to build a web application, and React fits well for that | purpose. | osrec wrote: | That's only when done poorly, which unfortunately has become | the norm. Properly done modern websites load things | incrementally, as and when they're needed, while cleanly | separating the front end logic from the back end. | bdcravens wrote: | The No True Scotsman argument could also be applied to the | technologies that "modern websites" were supposed to replace. | systemvoltage wrote: | I really like the idea of server side rendering. Flask/Django | style backend and use Jinja2 templates, sprinkle some vanilla | JS for interaction if needed. | | I wonder if it is safe to say vast majority of websites are | simple enough to use the aforementioned pattern? There are so | many "Doctors appointment" type dynamic websites that I don't | think need anything like React or Angular. | | I think React is great if you're building the next Notion or a | web-based application such as Google Sheets. | | Edit: Yeah, I am new to webdev and I find server side rendering | "refreshing" :-) | vbsteven wrote: | It's not just an idea. It's tech that has been around for | decades now. Rails, Django, Spring, Laravel, Sinatra, Flask | and hundreds of others. | | They work fine for a large chunk of modern websites. And | server side templating is not the only concept from that era | that is much simpler than what is popular now. Those | frameworks were primarily synchronous instead of | asynchronous. And they worked in pretty much every browser. | Without breaking the back button. With shareable links. And | no scrolljacking. | | For me personally the sweet spot for many | applications/websites is still just that: A synchronous MVC | framework with serverside rendering. With a sprinkle of | vanilla JS or Vue on select pages for dynamic stuff. | pjmlp wrote: | Same here, such approaches work and do the job just fine. | the__alchemist wrote: | I do this. It's remarkable this is considered to be a novel | pattern! (Note that some of the advances in modern CSS and JS | made this more feasible than it used to be) | yurishimo wrote: | Since you say you're new, it might be worth looking at | Laravel if you learned with the componentized JS approach. | The Blade templating language they've been perfecting for | years now has started to embrace composable components very | similar to a JS framework, but all server-side. | | https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/blade#anonymous-components | | https://laracasts.com/series/blade-component- | cookbook/episod... | strooper wrote: | I wonder if the experience improves by using proxy browsers, such | as- Opera (lite/mini). | judge2020 wrote: | I doubt it since most websites have moved to using geo- | distributed CDNs and sometimes app servers anyways. | fifilura wrote: | I am pretty sure it would, and that is one of the reasons | Opera Mini is still very popular in Africa. | | One of the things it does is to remove the need for hundreds | of requests to fetch every single image/script in the page | (from the client that is). Instead it is only one file to | fetch over http. Only that makes a huge difference. | thirdplace_ wrote: | We are soon coming full circle when this generation's programmers | realize they can render html templates server-side. | nunez wrote: | That's already kind of happening. Google and Mozilla both have | "accelerator" services that render pages in their data centers; | something similar to what opera was doing years ago. I also | think Node supports server side rendering. A parking web app I | used out in Lincoln NE takes advantage of that. | easrng wrote: | I know about Google's compression proxy but what's Mozilla | doing? I found something called Janus but it looks like it | was discontinued. Opera Mini is still around and there's also | the Firefox-based browsh. | pjmlp wrote: | We are already there, https://nextjs.org/docs/basic- | features/pages | | Naturally it has to be more clusmy than just using one of the | boring SSR that exist since 2000. | RedShift1 wrote: | But there is something to be said for SPAs and slow | connections. All the HTML and JS code is loaded beforehand and | afterwards only raw data is exchanged. If the API calls can be | limited to one call per user action/page visit, the experience | would be better because only some API data has to be | transferred instead of an entire HTML page. So your initial | page load would be slow because of all the HTML and JS, but | afterwards it should be faster compared to having server side | rendered pages. | grishka wrote: | In practice, there's rarely "afterwards". You visit some | website once because someone sent you a link. You load that | one page and that's it. You read the article and close it. By | the time you visit that website again, if you ever do, your | cache will be long gone, so you're downloading the 2-megabyte | JS bundle again. | | In other words, pretty often the initial load is the only | one. | handrous wrote: | I _very rarely_ see a "Web App" that's faster due to this. | Take Gmail: plain-HTML gmail transfers and renders a whole | page faster than full-fat Gmail does _most_ of the things it | does, which involve merely "some API data". The | activity/loading indicators on normal Gmail display longer | than the full-page load on plain-HTML gmail. | | This had some validity in the early days of AJAX when common | practice was to respond with HTML fragments and it was mostly | just a work-around for Frames not being very good at a bunch | of things they should have been good at. These days, not so | much. | zozbot234 wrote: | Makes sense. Roundtrips _will_ kill you on slow | connections, and the average SPA does lots of back-and- | forth roundtrips. Then the JS code has to tweak hundreds or | thousands of DOM nodes in a completely serial fashion to | reflect the new data. Much faster in practice to either | download or generate (preferably via WASM) a single chunk | of raw HTML and let the browser rerender it natively. | handrous wrote: | It's part of the cause of all the damn memory-bloat , | too. Receive some JSON (one copy of the data), parse that | and turn it into JS objects (at least two copies | allocated, now, depending on how the parsing works), | modify that for whatever your in-browser data store is, | and/or copy it in there, or copy it to "local state", or | whatever (three copies), render the data to the shadow | DOM (four copies), render the shadow DOM to the real DOM | (five copies). Some of those stages very likely hide even | _more_ allocations of memory to hold the same data, as it | 's transformed and moved around. Lots of library or | pattern choices can add more. It adds up. | swiley wrote: | They also handle errors by having the user reload the | page which means everything starts over. | | My experience growing up is that you don't notice the | issues on sane pages written by | hobbyists/professors/researchers and then you go to | something built by google and everything falls apart. | toast0 wrote: | It really depends on both latency and bandwidth. | | A reasonable POTS modem does ok on latency, but bad on | bandwidth. So roundtrip is fine until you send too much | data (which is real easy, modern initial segment limit of | 10 combined with a 1500 mtu is more than a second of | download buffer). If you kept the data small, many round | trips would be okish. | | On the other hand, traditional geosynchronous satellite | always has terrible latency, so many round trips is bad | regardless of the data size... One big load would be a | lot better there. | RedShift1 wrote: | It only works if the webapp can keep its calls limited to 1 | per page/user action. Lots of webapps make multiple | roundtrips (additional fetches triggered by earlier | requests so they can't be done in parallel) making it slow | even on fast connections (looking at you Quickbooks Time). | robertlagrant wrote: | This is exactly why BFFs exist. | goodpoint wrote: | Not at all: HTML compresses extremely well. CSS/favicon/etc | are cached. | | If you get rid of javascript frameworks used for SPA, the | overhead of delivering a handful of HTML tables and forms | instead of some JSON is negligible. | phil294 wrote: | > a handful of HTML tables and forms | | But that depends on the use case, doesn't it. Static sites | may as well be huge, and now you need to send all of the | surrounding html over, when only a small table or form | would need updating. So I am not so sure about your point. | The greater the complexity of the displayed page, the more | sense it makes to use a SPA network-wise. (edit: mostly | covered in sibling comments) | | You have a point about compression though. I now wonder | what the situation would look like if we had (had) native | HTML imports, as that would greatly help with caching. | ufmace wrote: | In theory I guess, but I'd bet that basically every SPA is | using enough JS libs that the initial load is much bigger | than a bunch of halfheartedly-optimized basic HTML. I bet | somebody somewhere has written a SPA-style page designed to | be super-optimized in both initial load and API behavior just | because, but I don't think I've ever seen one. | contriban wrote: | I agree with the general sentiment, but if you used | Facebook and YouTube you know they respond immediately on | tap, even if the view hasn't completely loaded. They are | SPA-style pages. | | Unfortunately they are the exception as there are a lot of | awful SPAs that focus on looking cool while they're barely | usable. Looking at you, Airbnb. | 10000truths wrote: | Facebook and YouTube can afford to use SPAs without | worrying too much about performance penalty because they | invest massive amounts of effort into highly optimized | and widespread content delivery networks, to the point | where many ISPs literally host dedicated on-site caches | for them. | doliveira wrote: | As someone who has lived with actual slow connection and | budget phones, I don't think I've ever seen this promise | fulfilled. | | It should work, but it's never so in practice. | marcosdumay wrote: | Just enable your web server's deflate middleware and you'll | see that raw data sizes aren't very different from fully | formatted HTML. | masklinn wrote: | There really is not. SPAs generally means tons more assets | being loaded and hard errors on on unreliable connections. | | On a web page, missing a bit of the page at the end is not an | issue, you might have somewhat broken content but that's not | a deal-breaker. | | With an SPA, an incompletely loaded API call is just a | complete waste of the transferred bytes. | | And slow connections also tend to have much larger latencies. | Care to guess what's an issue on an SPA which keeps firing | API calls for every interaction? | | > So your initial page load would be slow because of all the | HTML and JS, but afterwards it should be faster compared to | having server side rendered pages. | | The actual effect is that the initial page load is so slow | you just give up, and if you have not, afterwards it's | completely unreliable. | | Seriously, try browsing the "modern web" and SPAs with | something like a 1024 DSL with 100ms latency and 5% packet | loss, it's just hell. And it's the sort of connections you | can absolutely find in rural places. | RedShift1 wrote: | Won't loading an entire HTML page be just as bad on such a | connection? There's a lot more data to transfer. | misnome wrote: | > On a web page, missing a bit of the page at the end is | not an issue, you might have somewhat broken content but | that's not a deal-breaker | | - the argument is that most of what you probably want is | better than nothing. | | Although I can imagine sites thus prioritising ads even | more... | ratww wrote: | Not at all, unless there is an absurd amount of content | on the page that is unrelated to the data being fetched | (like title, footer, sidebar). An HTML-table, for | example, is in the same ballpark size-wise as a JSON | representation of the same data. And that's without | taking into account the fact the JSON can potentially | carry more information than necessary. | | Facebook is an example of a website where there is such | an absurd amount of content that's not the focus of the | page: the sidebars, the recommendations, the friend list | of the chat, the trends, the ads. It sorta makes sense | for them to have an SPA (although let's be frank: most | people in slow connections prefer "mobile" or "static" | versions of those sites). | | The impetus for SPAs was never really speed. The impetus | for SPAs is control for developers, by allowing | navigation between "pages" but with zero-reloads for | certain widgets. It was like 90s HTML frames but with | full control of how everything works. | lhorie wrote: | > So your initial page load would be slow because of all the | HTML and JS, but afterwards it should be faster compared to | having server side rendered pages | | TFA is arguing that a user on a bad connection won't even | make it to a proper page load event in the first place. | | It's probably also worth mentioning that the "gains" from | sending only data on subsequent user actions are subject to | devils in details, namely that response data isn't always | fully optimized (e.g. more fields than needed), and HTML | gzips exceptionally well due to markup repetitiveness | compared to compression rate of just arbitrary data. | Generally speaking you can rarely make up in small | incremental gzip gains what you spent on downloading a | framework upfront plus js parse/run time and DOM repaint | times, especially on mobile, compared to the super fast | native streaming rendering of pure HTML. | ratww wrote: | _> If the API calls can be limited to one call per user | action /page visit, the experience would be better because | only some API data has to be transferred instead of an entire | HTML page_ | | HTML pages are not that big, though, unless you put a lot of | content around the data. Not to mention JSON can be wasteful, | and contain more data than needed. And lots of SPAs require | multiple roundtrips for fetching data. | | And even if you do have lots of content around your data, | there are alternatives, like PJAX/Turbolinks that allow you | to only fetch only partial content, while still using minimal | JS compared to a regular JS framework. | CPLNTN wrote: | Look up React Server Components | hackernewslol wrote: | YES! | | I've started using Tailwind and Alpine (with no other frontend | framework). A basic page with a couple of images, a nice UI, | animations, etc only takes up ~250kb gzipped. | | It loads quickly on practically any connection, is well- | optomized, and generally just works really well. The users love | it too. | | Coupled with a fast templating system and webserver (server-side | in Go is my personal favorite but there are plenty of others), it | isn't hard to get a modern featureset and UI with under 300kb. | | I hope the push for a faster internet continues. Load-all-the- | things is great until you're on a bad connection. | | Sourcehut comes to mind as a great model/example, using a simple | JS-less UI and Go server-side rendering. | morpheos137 wrote: | what do people think is the best approach to incentivise lean web | design? The bloat of the modern web is absolutely ridiculous but | it seems to be the inevitable result of piling abstraction on top | of abstraction so that you end up with a multimegabyte news | article due to keeping up with the latest fad framework. | tomaskafka wrote: | What every large company does - make an employee VPN (for | laptops and phones) that simulated poor internet connection | (slow, packet loss, lags), to let the developers feel the pain. | marcosdumay wrote: | The joke is on them (well, yeah, but figuratively too). The | VPN is only slow for external sites that the developers can | not fix, while internal ones load at the full speed the | middlebox can handle. | | Companies are grooming the developers so that they will never | have difficulty hiring people that can diagnose a broken | firewall, but they are not getting faster web pages out of | the deal. | MattGaiser wrote: | I think you would need to prove that it matters in terms of | increasing revenue and is more valuable than other things you | can spend your engineers on. | | I would be surprised if this discussion has not taken place at | Airbnb and they apparently decided it did not matter. | MarkusWandel wrote: | My mom's cellular data plan (used for rural internet access | through a cellular/wifi router) has a 128kbps fallback if you use | up your main data allotment. | | 128kbps isn't so bad, is it? More than 3x the speed she used to | get with a dialup modem. | | But no. We ran it into the fallback zone to try it out. And half | the sites (e.g. the full Gmail UI or Facebook) wouldn't even load | - the load would time out before the page was functional. | | The 128kbs fallback is meant to be as a lifeline, for email and | instant messaging communications. And that's really all it's food | for any more. | johnmorrison wrote: | This article gave me a random push to nuke the size of my site - | just brought it down from ~50 kB on text pages all the way to | ~1.5 kB now, and from 14 files to 1 HTML file. | superkuh wrote: | >You can see that for a very small site that doesn't load many | blocking resources, HTTPS is noticeably slower than HTTP, | especially on slow connections. | | Yet another reason to not get rid of HTTP in the HTTP+HTTPS world | just because it's hip and what big companies are going. | ev1 wrote: | This is an old article. 0RTT TLS 1.3 + QUIC is on par with HTTP | usually, based on our RUM/telemetry. | superkuh wrote: | 0RRT only applies to connections after the first load. And | what cloudflare does is certainly not what most people on the | internet (as opposed to most mega-corporations) should do. | Grimm1 wrote: | That's a really bad take on HTTPS. HTTP helps to enable a bunch | of trivial but damaging attacks on an end user. If you run | anything maybe more complicated than a static blog, and even | then for your own security, HTTP is the wrong choice. | k__ wrote: | Interesting that it mentions the book "High Performance Browser | Networking". My feeling after reading it was that latency is all | that matters, not page size. | AlexanderDhoore wrote: | Page size becomes latency when your connection is slow. | k__ wrote: | Yes. | | Every round trip adds up. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | > I probably sound like that dude who complains that his word | processor, which used to take 1MB of RAM, takes 1GB of RAM | | Well, 1MB is way too small, but 1GB is way too large. Conserving | resources is important. | brundolf wrote: | I was expecting an empty rant, but this was even-handed and made | some good points | bo1024 wrote: | If you don't know Dan Luu's blog, I suggest reading the rest! | ansgri wrote: | From a capitalist devil's advocate point of view: does it really | matter that your website works poorly with 90% of the web when | these 90% either don't have any disposable income (there's got to | be a correlation) or are too distant geographically and | culturally to ever bring you business? The "commercial quality" | (i.e. to avoid looking worse than competition) web development | has become unbelievably complicated and expensive, so in reality | probably only individual enthusiasts and NCOs should care about | the long tail. Local small businesses will just use some local | site builder or social media, so even they don't matter. | bdcravens wrote: | The assumption you are making here is that the preferred | customers you're talking here are always on quality | connections, and that poor connections are limited to undesired | customers. The same user who accesses your site from an 800MB | wifi signal may need to access the same site in spotty 4G | scenario. | hokumguru wrote: | From the other capitalist point of view, wouldn't it be more | ideal to squeeze every single percentage of the market if you | could? I think most companies would gladly take a 10% boost in | sales. | | Furthermore, that's only the bottom 10% of America, appealing | to their audience appeals to maybe the top percentage of India | and Asia as well which are giant markets | pjscott wrote: | That depends on how much money it takes to get a bit more of | the market and how much money you expect to get from them. | Ideally you'd reach the point where those two derivatives are | equal, then stop. | mumblemumble wrote: | These sorts of characterizations are just way, way, way too | simplistic. | | Assume that I earn a six figure income and live in a major city | with reasonably fast (though not necessarily top tier) | Internet. So, y'know, theoretically a fairly desirable customer | and not a subsistence farmer or some other demographic that's | easy to give the cold shoulder. But still -- | | Bad Internet day, maybe someone's getting DDoS attacked? If | your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by | the jank and leave. | | It's Friday evening and the Internet is crammed full of | Netflix? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get | frustrated by the jank and leave. | | Neighbor's running some device that leaks a bunch of radio | noise and degrades my wifi network? It's Friday evening and the | Internet is crammed full of Netflix? If your website isn't | lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. | | I'm connecting from a coffee shop with spotty Internet? If your | website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the | jank and leave. | | I've got 50,000 tabs open and they're all eating up a crapton | of RAM? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get | frustrated by the jank and leave. | | I'm browsing while I've got some background task like a big | compile or whatever chewing up my CPU? If your website isn't | lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. | | I'm accessing from my mobile device and I'm in a dead zone | (they're common in major cities doncha know)? If your website | isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and | leave. | | etc. etc. etc. | | Meanwhile, while it may not be the style of the times, it's | absolutely possible to make very good looking websites with no | or very little JavaScript. Frankly, a lot of them look and feel | even better than over-engineered virtual DOM "applications" do. | Without all that JavaScript in the way, the UX feels downright | snappy. https://standardebooks.org/ is a nice example. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | That assumes that you can appropriately target the 10% that are | profitable. If you can't reliably do that or the profitable 10% | isn't 10% with the highest performance computers and | connections, then you probably are better served by casting a | wide net. | blowski wrote: | What if, to take advantage of the profitable 10%, you are | better off providing a rich page, albeit with a large | filesize? I have no evidence to support that claim, other | than that large profitable companies generally seem to think | this is the case. | nunez wrote: | It does if your business is low margin high volume and the 90% | you reference have _enough_ disposable income to buy the | basics. I.e. literally all of retail and consumer banking. | | Most businesses fall into this category. Facebook, Amazon, and | Netflix fall into this category. That's why their reliability | engineers are amongst the highest paid engineers in those | businesses. They literally cannot afford to be down. | | The ironic thing about your argument is that I've found | recently that the more something costs, the more difficult it | is to procure, ESPECIALLY online. Some of the most expensive | items out there simply cannot be purchased online end-to-end. | | looking to rent an apartment online? Easy. Looking to rent or | buy a house? A billion moving parts, with half a million of | those parts needing to be done face to face. | Seirdy wrote: | Strong disagree but upvoting for a good discussion. | | Some situations to give your "capitalist devil" pause: | | - A train passenger on the way to their summer home enters a | tunnel. Packet loss goes through the roof and nothing but HTML | loads. | | - A hotel room housing an attendee of a local shareholder | meeting has awful shared wi-fi. | | - Ping speeds plummet on a politician's private jet. | | - Someone hoping to buy a new Rolex at the mall can barely | connect in the underground parking garage. | | Everyone hits the bottom of the bell curve. | goodpoint wrote: | - Plenty of wealthy people on cruise ships or yachts with | high-latency uplinks | | - Approx 1 million crew are at sea at the same time on | average | ufmace wrote: | Depends on the site. It'd be nice if somebody's individual blog | about the cool tech thing they built was accessible to everyone | everywhere. If you are a business that can fundamentally only | serve customers in city X, then it's perfectly reasonable to | use tech that might not work for people outside of city X. | There's a lot of space in between those, so use your judgement | I guess. | toast0 wrote: | This falls down because people with lots of money have cabins | in the woods with garbage internet. If they can't load your | page from there, there goes that lucrative customer. Or they | may be on a ferry, or a small aircraft or etc. | goodpoint wrote: | I've never seen any example of businesses making deliberate | choices on websites size and loading time. | | The web "development" world is just too messy and hype driven. | dustractor wrote: | Between 2010-2016, I lived in a rural area where we had one | option: Satellite internet from HughesNet. Prior to that, the | only option was dialup, and since it was such a remote area, the | telephone had grandfathered a few numbers from out of the service | area as free-to-call, to allow for residents to use the nearest | isp without extra toll charges. | | So we went from paying 9.95/month for average 56k service, to | 80/month for a service that was worse than that. | | To add insult to injury, a local broadband provider kept sticking | their signs at our driveway next to our mailbox, and we would | call to try and get service, but we were apparently 200 feet past | the limit of their service area. People who lived at the mouth of | our driveway had service, our neighbors had service, but we were | too far out they said. | | I repeat: as late as 2016 I WOULD HAVE KILLED TO BE ABLE TO JUST | USE FREAKING DIALUP! | 1MachineElf wrote: | In rual Virginia I had a very similar experience during the | exact time frame as you. Verizon and Comcast would say we could | be connected over the phone, send equipment (which I'd pay | for), then turn around and say it was too remote. Neighborhood | down the street had their service though. The ISP we ended up | with was a couple with an antenna on top of a local mountain. | Our service was capped at 2GB per day and blowing through it | (which was very easy) meant being throttled to the point of | nothing working anymore. It was several long years of | frustration. | fossuser wrote: | Starlink is a life saver for this situation. | | Family in Placerville CA went from unusable <1mbps viasat to | 50-190mbps overnight. | | I hope it puts all the geostationary satellite companies into | bankruptcy. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | They're not competing for bandwidth with anyone else yet. | Wait til the service is open to everyone. | pjscott wrote: | In rural areas, contention should stay low enough that the | speeds will continue to be at least decent. And of course | the latency is much lower than geosynchronous satellites, | independent of bandwidth. | walrus01 wrote: | They're limiting the number of CPEs per cell to a maximum | number of sites, and volume of traffic, such that the | service won't degrade to a viasat/hughesnet like terrible | consumer experience. I can't say how I know, but some _very | experienced and talented network engineers_ are designing | the network topology and oversubscription /contention ratio | based out of their Redmond, WA offices. | nunez wrote: | I feel bad for y'all rural folk. I paired with some people who | were living out there, and Internet was always a problem for | them. | walrus01 wrote: | I have been using another person's starlink beta terminal since | November of last year, and have had my own since late January. | It's at a latitude sufficient that packet loss and service | unavailability is averaging about 0.25% (1/4th of 1 percent) | over multi day periods. | | It's a real 150-300 down, 16-25 Mbps up. In many cases it | actually beats the DOCSIS3 cable operator's network at the same | location for jitter, packet loss, downtime. | | The unfortunate economics of building 4000-6000 kg sized | geostationary telecom satellites with 15 year finite lifespans, | and launching them into a proper orbit ($200 million would not | be a bad figure for a cost to put one satellite in place) mean | that the oversubscription/contention ratios on consumer grade | VSAT are extreme. | | Dedicated 1:1 geostationary satellite still has the 492-495ms | but is remarkably not bad, but you're looking at a figure of | anywhere from $1300 to $3000 per Mbps, per direction, per month | for your own dedicated chunk of transponder kHz for SCPC. | You're also looking at a minimum of $7000-9000 for terminal | equipment. That's the unfortunate reality right now. | | I feel sorry for both viasat/hughesnet consumer grade | customers, who are suffering, and also the companies, who are | on a path dependent lock in towards obsolescence. Even more so | if various starlink competitors like Kuiper, Telesat's LEO | network and OneWeb (not exactly a competitor since it won't be | serving the end user, but same general concept) actually launch | services. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | > I WOULD HAVE KILLED TO BE ABLE TO JUST USE FREAKING DIALUP! | | I know you're saying this in jest, but joking about committing | murder to get Internet access isn't actually funny. | jlund-molfese wrote: | It's a common English idiom, and like "raining cats and | dogs," the meaning of the phrase doesn't correspond literally | to the words. The parent comment isn't actually joking about | committing murder. | | As someone whose only internet options for a few years were | satellite and WISP that cost several hundred dollars for 8 | Mbps down, I understand where they're coming from :) | hypertele-Xii wrote: | Raining cats and dogs would be a natural phenomenon, not an | act of violence. | | What if this has been the "idiom"?: | | > I WOULD HAVE RAPED A NIGGER TO BE ABLE TO JUST USE | FREAKING DIALUP! | | Would it still be funny? Maybe this is an American thing, | where violence is glorified and totally ok to joke about. | If you said "I'd kill for ______" in my country, you'd get | some _very_ concerned looks from your peers. | tom_ wrote: | It's a standard English idiom, universally understood not | to be taken literally. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | "The standard" is primitive, barbaric, and violent. It's | high time to evolve and civilize. Language shapes | thought. Thought can shape language. Stop glorifying | violent idioms. | theshadowknows wrote: | Who says they're joking. They didn't say they'd kill a human. | Maybe they'd kill a goat. | MattGaiser wrote: | It seems to work for aircraft maintenance. | | https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nepal-airline-odd- | idUSEIC... | rvba wrote: | A football player's family sacrificed some 3 poor cows to | win a final. It didnt work. Imagine being a cow and dying | for Liverpool FC... | | As for the plane: there is a reason why European Union | bans aircraft from many countries. Why not get... good | technicians? | temporama1 wrote: | Time for some fresh air | detaro wrote: | No neighbor that let you piggyback on their connection? (That | of course doesn't change the fundamental shittyness of the | overall lack of available access) | Causality1 wrote: | Yes that was my first thought. Offer to pay half the bill and | pick up a giant yagi antenna for twenty bucks. Only downside | is it's technically illegal to combine that much power and | that much gain but I've known people who did it for a decade | with no FCC call. | afavour wrote: | Depending on how far we're talking you could also just run | network cable... | dghughes wrote: | The problem with comparing the Internet now vs 25 years ago is | back then you didn't live on the Internet all your waking hours. | You jumped on, got what you needed and got off again otherwise | you'd be paying a high hourly premium. And to top that off you'd | power off your computer and cover it and the monitor with a dust | cover. | | Now with phones and always on connections it's not even | comparable. I spent more time using my computer; programming, | graphics, learning about it, yes the physical thing in front of | me than on the Internet in the early 1990s even later 1990s. | gscott wrote: | Plus 25 years ago images were a few k in size. Now with the | average webpage being a megabyte in size, it is outrageous. | tomjen3 wrote: | The images were a few kilobytes in size because they were | 120x80 pixels GIFs. | | Now they are 1200x750 high resolution JPGs, but that is a | worth while tradeof when we have screens that can display | them. | | The real issue is Javascript. | afavour wrote: | Actually in terms of bandwidth JavaScript isn't the | problem, you can fit an entire SPA into the bandwidth | required for one large image (it is a problem in terms of | CPU usage on underpowered devices though) | | Large images being "worth the trade off" is debatable | depending on your connection speed, I think (though at | least you can disable images in the browser?) | marcodiego wrote: | Nevermind connection speed, the modern web is unbearable without | ad blockers. | jart wrote: | Finally, an influential developer who cares about the other 99%. | | I've lived in dozens of places. I've lived in urban areas, | suburban areas, rural areas. I've even lived on a boat. With the | exception of wealthy areas, reasonable internet is a constant | struggle. | | It's also never due to the speed though, in my experience. The | biggest issue are always packet loss, intermittent outages, | latency, and jitter. High speed internet doesn't count, aside | checking off a box, if it goes out for a couple hours every | couple hours, or has 10% packet loss. You'd be surprised how | common stuff like that is. | | Try visiting the house of someone who isn't rich and running mtr. | Another thing I've noticed ISPs doing is they seem to | intentionally add things like jitter to latency-sensitive low- | bandwidth connections like SSH, because they want people to buy | business class. | | In many ways, 56k was better than modern high speed internet. | Because yes, connections were slow, but even with 300 baud the | latency and reliability was good enough that you could count on | it to be good enough to connect to some central computer and run | vi, which Bill Joy actually wrote on that kind of connection, | which deeply influenced its design. | Tade0 wrote: | > If you think browsing on a 56k connection is bad, try a 16k | connection from Ethiopia! | | No need to travel that far. During my time in my previous | apartment I had two options for connecting: | | -The landlord's mother's old router behind a thick wall (400kbps | at best, 300-400ms latency with 10-30% packet loss). | | -A "soapbar" modem we got along with my SO's mobile plan. 14GB a | month, slowing down to a trickle of 16-32kbps when used up. | | Things that worked on such a connection: | | -Google | | -Google Meet | | -Facebook Messenger | | -Hacker News | | The rest of the web would often break or not load at all. | giantrobot wrote: | The performance numbers are a really helpful illustration of the | problem with a lot of sites. A detail it misses and I see people | constantly forget, is any individual user might have one of those | crappy connections at multiple points during the day or even move | through all of them. | | It doesn't matter if your home broadband is awesome if you're | currently at the store trying to look something up on a bloated | page. It's little consolation that the store wrote an SPA to do | fancy looking fades when navigating between links when it won't | even load right in the store's brick and mortar location. | | Far too many web devs are making terrible assumptions about not | just bandwidth but latency. Making a hundred small connections | might not require a lot of total bandwidth but when each | connection takes a tenth to a quarter of a second just to get | established there's a lot of time a user is blocked unable to do | anything. Asynchronous loading just means "I won't explicitly | block for this load", it doesn't mean that dozens of in-flight | requests won't cause _de facto_ blocking. | | I'm using the web not because I love huge hero images or fade | effects. I'm using the web to get something accomplished like buy | something or look up information. Using my time, bandwidth, and | battery poorly by forcing me to accommodate your bloated web page | makes me not want to give you any money. | ajsnigrutin wrote: | Yep... in large stores like ikea, i've had huge problems with | my connection falling down to 2g speeds, and finding anything | online was a huge pain in the ass. First thing to load should | be the page layout with text already inside, then images, then | everything else... some pages ignore this, load nothing + a | huge JS library, then start with random crap, and i get bored | and close my browser, before i get the actual text. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-05 23:00 UTC)