{"id":17155,"date":"2017-02-09T16:56:23","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T21:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=17155"},"modified":"2017-02-20T17:16:21","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T22:16:21","slug":"most-of-the-web-really-sucks-if-you-have-a-slow-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/09\/most-of-the-web-really-sucks-if-you-have-a-slow-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"Most of the Web Really Sucks If You Have a Slow Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Luu<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

While it’s easy to blame page authors because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on the page side, there’s just as much low-hanging fruit on the browser side. Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I’m on a slow satellite connection? That just guarantees that all six images will time out!<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

For another level of ironic, consider that while I think of a 50kB table as bloat, Google’s AMP currently has > 100kB of blocking javascript that has to load before the page loads! There’s no reason for me to use AMP pages because AMP is slower than my current setup of pure HTML with a few lines of embedded CSS and the occasional image, but, as a result, I’m penalized by Google (relative to AMP pages) for not “accelerating” (deccelerating) my page with AMP.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Previously: Web Bloat Score Calculator<\/a>, The Problem With AMP<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Update (2017-02-10): Bill Murray<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Before you marry a person you should first make them use a computer with slow internet to see who they really are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2017-02-20): See also: Juho Snellman<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Luu (Hacker News): 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1463,338,346,96],"class_list":["post-17155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp","tag-css","tag-javascript","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17155"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17260,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155\/revisions\/17260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}