Gregory's ServerHow web bloat impacts users with slow devices:
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41 comments
 @jonathanavt @danluu I totally agree that page bloat is a problem. However, publishing things as a brutalist mess does not help communicating it. A few KB of CSS can improve that dramatically: Using the system font stack, limiting the content size to a comfortable width would already be enough. @jonathanavt @danluu 💯!  @fleg @jonathanavt @danluu looks ququite decent in "reader view" on firefox too. and that takes care of the whole wall of text with 50 word width problem.  @danluu You may also be interested in this series that I've been producing ~annually to help webdevs level-set: https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/ The latest post is here: https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/  @slightlyoff @danluu I hesitate to even ask this question because it betrays the depths of the problem, but: who is doing this _right_? If I want to vote with my keyboard and go work for a company that does truly care about this stuff, how would I even go about finding them these days? Where are people going if they want to spend their time sharpening their craft? @danluu Just a heads-up, the link highlighted in the screenshot below seems to be broken. It links to @danluu: You should become a member of the #250kBClub: https://250kb.club/ (Unfortunately the #10kBClub ceased to exist, but your homepage might have been eligible for membership there, too — it had additional prominence requirements, while the 250kBClub just looks at the size and that it's not just a random subpage.) @danluu couple typos I noticed: “need’t”, “performs poorly for then”, “in Vietnam them” Also “Appendix: articles on web performance issues” is missing size/Tecno numbers for your site I think.  @danluu misskey and its descendants would get a "DEVICE BLEW UP" rating on this list @chfour@wetdry.world @danluu@mastodon.social My network connection is so slow that it blows up in slow motion. Looks really cool :blobcatfluffevil:  @danluu Our personal website is slow on any device, because it is ran on a raspberry pi on our home network! It's true equality. (It's relatively simple HTML+CSS with a light sprinkling of JS for some gimmicks that gracefully disappear when JS is unavailable. Each page is a easily less than 100kb, except for the ones that have pictures.)
 That Discourse guy is a classic example of someone designing their product for the world they wished existed instead of the world we actually live in. Devices with Qualcomm SoCs exist in billions, and will keep existing and keep being manufactured and sold for the foreseeable future. No amount of whining will change that. Get over it and optimize for them. People who use these devices won't care about your whining, they'll just consider you an incompetent software developer because your software crashes.
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ninpnin, it depends. They probably also have apps and use websites that do more yet run smoothly.   @danluu The Itel P32 is a 1 GB RAM Smartphone. That's far from usable in 2024. That was pretty low in 2016. @danluu @whitekiba you may want to re-read the beginning of the article, as you may have missed important notes there @whitekiba @danluu until a couple of weeks ago I used an iPhone 8, which is like the Itel P32 from 2017 and has "only" 2 GB of memory. It was far from being unusable, except on websites that didn‘t give a flying fuck about their performance of course. Also: you probably didn‘t read the article and just looked at the colorful table. Not everyone lives in rich/western countries like we do.  @danluu Many of these I have given up on, at least in part due to poor performance. Some of which are ones that are very much on the "better end" of things. I'm not sure if that's because of slow network at the time (and still). @danluu what I got in response when I quoted parts of your post; as always, for these people ease of maintenance has higher priority than accessibility to pooper users @danluu I have trouble parsing this sentence: > "At a first glance, the table seems about in that the sites that feel slow unless you have a super fast device show up as slow in the table (as in, max(LCP*,CPU)) is high on lower-end devices)." Editing artifact? @danluu “At a first glance, the table seems about in that the sites”—missing word? “Although MyBB doesn't service up a mobile site” “If we tap again, we can get the dreaded situation where the first tap registers and then causes the second tap to register after things have started changing, causing us to tap some random target, but if we wait, we realize that the original tap didn't actually register”—grammatical but confusing   @danluu it’s not the same issue, but from what I hear from blind users there’s also a big accessibility difference: dynamic loading is easy to get wrong in a way which makes a confusing experience for screen reader users, which feels like another aspect of the same problem with developers optimizing for what they want to work on.  @danluu and that is why my company website is small: it can be used almost any where with little internet connectivity and is still readable even as plain text  @danluu thanks for the deep analysis. Apart from explicit web bloat regulation, I'm thinking if forbidding search engines to index content that requires JavaScript will cause a significant effect. Not only it will save computational energy on the crawlers, but it will force most sites to degrade properly without JS enabled.  @danluu 2/2  > While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites. If your website is 100x slower than PUBG then you may want to reevaluate what you've done :neofox_woozy:> > Google: Are 100% of users on iOS? > Discourse: The influential users who spend money tend to be, I’ll tell you that ... Pointless to worry about cpu, it is effectively infinite already on iOS, and even with Qualcomm’s incompetence, will be within 4 more years on their embarrassing SoCs as well I... I don't even know how to respond :floofWoozy: |
@danluu People have no idea how much I appreciate a bare page like this, even on a fast machine and connection. I open something and it’s just there. I can adjust the window width if I want. No distractions. Full focus on the actual content on both ends. I don’t care that it doesn’t follow the latest fashion.