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Black Friday '14: E-commerce Pages Far Slower Than They Were in 2013

Posted by timothy on from the scarce-resources dept.

An anonymous reader writes Black Friday news kicked off this weekend quite early when Best Buy was hit with a massive outage, but it turns out that was only half the story. The top 50 e-commerce websites were slower overall this year compared to last, suggesting customers were frustrated even if they could get to their favorite shopping site. Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint Systems looked at aggregate performance this weekend and compared it to the same timeframe in 2013. The results are notable: desktop web pages were 19.85 percent slower, while mobile web pages were a whopping 57.21 percent slower.

143 comments

  1. I did not participate by SternisheFan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think a big screen is worth dying for.

    1. Re:I did not participate by oobayly · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's only a bargain if you actually need it - not my words, but I did think along the same lines when I was watching the mayhem.

      Black Friday scuffles: 'I got a Dyson but I don’t even know if I want it'

      Frustrated with not being able to buy a Blaupunkt 40” TV reduced from £299.99 to £149.99, Haggerty rushed to pick up a Dyson Animal Vac, down from £319.99 to £159.99. “I don’t even know how much it costs, I don’t know even know if I’m going to buy it. I just wanted something,” she said. “There are lads in there three, four, five tellies. It’s not fair.”

      One of those lads was Andy Blackett, 30, an estate agent, who had two trolleys full of bargains. “I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you the prices, but I know they’re bargains.”

      Makes me proud of the country I live in.

    2. Re:I did not participate by istartedi · · Score: 5, Funny

      Jesus died for your sins. The least you can do is die for a TV. /sarc.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    3. Re:I did not participate by Skarjak · · Score: 2

      What a bunch of fucking morons. Meanwhile here I am reading reviews online to figure out which brand of rechargeable batteries to buy. I want to make sure this ~20$ purchase is the right one. Guess I'm a bad consumer.

      P.S.: It's the Eneloops, apparently.

    4. Re:I did not participate by reboot246 · · Score: 1

      Are you suggesting that a TV is a sin? If so, you're probably pretty close to being right. :)

    5. Re:I did not participate by plover · · Score: 2

      Clicking "buy now with 1-click" is rarely fatal.

      Or did you mean that you didn't participate in the brick and mortar competitive fracas, which has nothing to do with the response times of web pages, which is what TFA is actually about? Even reading enough of the article title to post what you wrote indicates the story is about web pages, which you can't "die for".

      --
      John
    6. Re:I did not participate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think a big screen is worth dying for.

      So you can get killed shopping online, too?

    7. Re:I did not participate by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      Glad to see shoppers in the UK are as brain dead as American shoppers.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    8. Re:I did not participate by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      Pounds? I didn't even know Black Friday was a thing in Britain. It's not here in Aus.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    9. Re:I did not participate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most of the stuff I want is available on Amazon, and not available in stores. It's been a trend that has kept me out of stores, lately.

      None of the stuff I have been looking at, but not able to justify actually buying, was on sale. It's been a trend that has kept me from participating in consumer events like these.

      I am not sure how common this is for others.

    10. Re:I did not participate by pspahn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Those Onion articles always crack me up. It's hilarious how close their satire comes to reality ... it's ... erh ... oh.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
    11. Re:I did not participate by oobayly · · Score: 1

      Shit, I didn't think of it like that - I've gone from laughing at these idiots to realising that part of my country's* population are a punch line. Next time I hear somebody over here talk about "Stupid Americans" - I'm going to point them to this article.

      * A non-card carrying British resident, but my English brother-in-law described me as being more English than he is.

    12. Re:I did not participate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      More important to go with a proper NiMH charger than the batteries, as otherwise you never know if batteries are crap or not.

      http://www.ebay.com/itm/Powere...

      That's the one I got number of years ago.

      PS. Eneloops are good for low discharge applications. If you want something for high discharge (like RC toys, camera, etc.), you can go with something else on that linked page.

      And beware cheap chinese counterfeits batteries on ebay.

    13. Re:I did not participate by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      It wasn't - but it got imported very recently. This year was the first I heard of it over here.

      We have the equivalent - Boxing Day (26th December, day after Christmas day) which is when the sales used to start, but for some crazy reason the shops decided to have sales *before* Christmas so everyone popped out and bought their Christmas presents on the cheap. I doubt Boxing day will see the same level of chaos.

    14. Re:I did not participate by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      I bought a "kit" of Eneloops a few years ago with a charger and 10 AAs, and it's still going strong. It has very easily paid for itself, probably several times over.

      The Eneloop Pros are even better, they have like a 10%-15% higher capacity. I don't know if that's worth the price.

      I want to find some AAAs now.

    15. Re:I did not participate by wiredlogic · · Score: 2

      On the bright side it's nice to have the reassurance that dumb people aren't exclusive to the US.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    16. Re:I did not participate by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      I think I'm pretty reasonable. I was looking for a TV. So I waited until Black Friday. Got a $3000 TV from Sears for $700 (46" 8 years ago or so). Still compares well to new TVs (full HD, but not LED).

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    17. Re:I did not participate by man+bear+nerd · · Score: 1

      Why in the world do retailers let so many bloody people in at a time? isn't there a risk of being sued by those who get injured it is murica? I could never handle shopping like that i am allergic to standing in line to spend money and crowds.

    18. Re:I did not participate by madbrain · · Score: 1

      Just wait until for the deadly delivery drones.

      --
      -- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
    19. Re:I did not participate by MrL0G1C · · Score: 1

      Get JCBs, long life, high power and don't cost an absurd amount.

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    20. Re:I did not participate by cdrudge · · Score: 1

      But we're celebrating his birth by buying TVs we don't need. I'll put off dying until late March/early April (check local lunar calendar for exact date) if you don't mind.

    21. Re:I did not participate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Eneloops are great. Tenergy Centura are almost as good and quite a bit cheaper.

    22. Re:I did not participate by coofercat · · Score: 1

      My favourite related joke: "You know you're working class when your TV is bigger than your bookcase."

      In these people's case, it's probably "if your TV has more inches than you have in IQ points" ;-)

    23. Re:I did not participate by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      I read that after panasonic took over they moved the eneloop production to china and quality took a nosedive, don't know if it's recovered.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    24. Re:I did not participate by bev_tech_rob · · Score: 1
      Was needing another monitor for my gaming pc. Checked Best Buy online and they had a very nice 24" Dell Flat Panel monitor for only $99 at Best Buy. Had to work the first half of the day Friday, so went Friday afternoon.

      Store was quite busy, but no lines outside or anywhere. Big stack of the monitors in the computer dept. Got what I needed and didn't have to pile onto a rugby scrum to get it. I can't stand that early morning madness. I always wait to later in the afternoon when the idiots have left.

      --
      You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
    25. Re:I did not participate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      isn't there a risk of being sued by those who get injured it is murica?

      I would imagine that depends. If they let in more people than the Fire Marshall says is safe, I would imagine that they definitely can be sued (and lose). But if they stay below that number, then I do not know.

    26. Re:I did not participate by Cederic · · Score: 1

      To me a JCB is this:
      http://www.jcb.co.uk/Products/...

      I guess you maybe meant this?
      http://jcbpowerproducts.com/Pr...

      High power indeed, but not sure it's in the desired price range.

    27. Re:I did not participate by MrL0G1C · · Score: 1

      JCB Rechargeable AA and AAA batteries which hold their charge for a year:

      http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.ht...

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    28. Re:I did not participate by Immerman · · Score: 1

      I did a similar thing for a 40" Samsung for $999 many years ago. Quickly discovered that it wasn't nearly as good of a deal as it first appeared though - I actually ended up with a new stripped-down model made specifically to be a Black-Friday door buster, which lacked many of the features of it's lookalike "normal" model. But while I do occasionally wish it had a full complement of HDMI ports, and have my suspicions that the screen quality isn't fully up to snuff, overall it's been quite satisfactory for my usage as a computer/console gaming screen, especially since I never would have even considered paying twice as much for the normal model. And it's still going strong, so it looks like my old fat-framed clunker of a pre-LED screen is going to last me until quality 4k models get cheap enough to demand an upgrade.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    29. Re:I did not participate by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Hey, still better than those of us who have to face the future knowing that the majority of our country's population are punch lines, and that the politicians embrace that fact with unabashed glee.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    30. Re:I did not participate by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Strange. Where from? I know Best Buy generally tries to get special deals. I bough a washer-dryer combination there for a lot less than elsewhere, but they weren't directly comparable. The one at Best Buy was XXX-XX-XX-BB and the one at Sears was XXX-XX-XX-SR, or something like that. They code them like a different color, with extra part numbers on the end, do make price-matching impossible. But the units were physically identical. They even had the same part number on the manual and for the manual. But the manufacturer codes were different in stores so that price matching was impossible.

      The only problem with my Sharp TV (My only big Black Friday purchase, ever) was that the electrical specs weren't printed by the power port. The manual says is could be "world" or "USA only" power. But there's no way to know. I can plug it into my 240v 50Hz and see if it catches fire. Other than that, they can't say. Seems they used "world" power supplies in some TVs and USA-only in others. Mixed in the same product line with the same part numbers, with no identifiers for anyone to figure it out. From what support told me, even if I opened up the TV, I wouldn't know (or they don't know how I would tell). But that was a standard Sharp feature at the time, not special to the Friday deal.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    31. Re:I did not participate by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Walmart. And yeah, it seems that most everyone runs through stupid no-price-matching shenanigans for large merchants, but there's also the case, like mine, where they release a stripped-down budget model in anticipation of major sales. At first glance it looks very much like the usual shenanigans - same superficial appearance, the usual minor no-comparison variation in model number... but on closer examination is actually a very different model - mine lacked about half the inputs and most of the computationally intensive image-processing options available in the "base model". And like I said, I suspect the panel itself is not quite up to snuff (responsiveness, contrast, etc), though I've since heard rumors that Samsung likes to play bait-and-switch games with the panels in their TVs anyway. I mean bad enough swapping out the power supply with no model number change, but the panel - the most dramatically distinguishing component between TVs... swapping that around just seems like a good way to cannibalize your reputation. You'd think a company with a reputation for quality would try to avoid such things, but I suppose the value of the company's reputation generally isn't factored in to executive bonuses.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    32. Re:I did not participate by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Yep. Wal-Mart sucks that way. The Levis you get there are badged the same, but are cheaper material than elsewhere. They do the same with lawn mowers and such (there's a book written by a mower maker that turned down Wal-Mart that goes into details).

      All sorts of shenanigans are done in the goal of profits. Look at game consoles. They sell for a (small) loss day-1, and replace everything they can that won't break game compatibility with cheaper pieces. Eventually the loss is turned into a profit. Others have learned from that and do the same, replacing everything they can in their toys, as often as they can. That's why consumer desktop models don't restore to the same model. You could buy the first PC of a line and the last, and a backup from one wouldn't restore on the other. But the business lines would try to keep the compatibility up. Turns out that worked the other way. A 5 year old chip costs more than a 6 month old one (because the demand is so low, you have to pay extra so the chip maker doesn't re-purpose the fab). So that's one reason why business computers cost more.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    33. Re:I did not participate by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      High capacity Eneloop-Pros are much worse. The main advantage of Eneloops is the isolation layer inside the battery. This improves both their ability to retain charge over time as well as their expected lifetime to almost a quarter of normal AAs. In the high capacity version, this layer is thinned to make room for more active elements, reducing life expectancy of the battery .

      I currently use 3rd gen eneloops (HR-3UTGB). Best AA NI-MH batteries I ever used by far and wide, and I used Ni-Cd and Ni-MH rechargeables since the days of portable cassette-radio players back in 1990s.

    34. Re:I did not participate by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      Eneloops are fine for high discharge tasks. They still retain their main advantage, ability to retain most of the charge over many recharge cycles and years of usage.

    35. Re:I did not participate by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      I did notice on reading further about the Pros that the # of projected recharge cycles was far lower.

      By "better" I meant that they have higher capacity. But I did not know of this limitation at the time.

      And after having looked at the prices, my conclusion is that the Eneloop Pro is NOT a very good deal. They cost 50%-100% more, for 10%-15% higher capacity and shorter life. I suppose they might be worthwhile if your application absolutely had to have the highest capacity.

      In any case, I am happy with my standard Eneloops. Several years now and they are going strong.

  2. But why? by bleader · · Score: 0

    Is that due to more customers, or are this year version of the websites slower all the time (like a shift to an heavier web technology for the backends for example)?

    --
    /*raccoon powered*/
    1. Re:But why? by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think it's because FIOS, U-Verse, and Google Fiber all had good years worth of picking up subscribers, so customers want their pages faster and the server-side people didn't upgrade.

    2. Re:But why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Or maybe its because the ecommerce sites didn't pony up protection money to AT&T, Comcast, et al, so they all ended up stuck in the slow lane.

    3. Re:But why? by thogard · · Score: 5, Informative

      Page load times are down because pages are loading so many more tracking options and some of them are very abusive on the javascript engines. If you turn on the status line (even if you can as it is gone in some modern browsers), you will often see it saying "loading 159 out of 162" and those last ones never load. There is also something that is related to a compounding latency problem that many developers don't think about it because they don't see it when they are developing the platforms and modern tool kits help to hide it from developers too.

      I guess people don't like IBM's old work on the subject that showed dropping a 3 second response to just 2 seconds resulted in substantial improved efficiency. Maybe marketing groups need to understand that a customer stuck on a slow site is a bad consumer.

    4. Re:But why? by pspahn · · Score: 1

      This is part of it, yes.

      The fundamental problem is you have loads of ecommerce sites that were built as turn-key solutions and handed over to an "admin" for the company. They can start creating their own content to add to the site, so they start searching for things to add to their site. They find snake-oil dealers that offer them everything in exchange for a small script element inserted into the DOM.

      Additionally, the admins haven't taken the time to learn how to save images for the web properly, and they serve a 900x600 image that's a handful of MBs (x6 for a simple slideshow).

      Between the excess of HTTP requests added by the tracking scripts and the excess of MBs being downloaded for images / video, it is not a surprise that ecommerce sites are getting slower. I would expect this trend to continue to some degree.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
    5. Re:But why? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      or its because so many e-commerce sites are now hosted on the "cloud" rather than their own servers in a datacentre.

      Amazon created their cloud as they had lots of spare capacity in the off-peak so thought it'd be a good idea to sell it to businesses that would use it when the holidays were not on, and Amazon would use it for consumer ecommerce when the holidays were on.

      But now, both Amazon has sold its capacity to ecommerce places who need it when Amazon needs it... hence slower sites. I'm sure the same could go for Azure, too little capacity oversold.

    6. Re:But why? by lucm · · Score: 1

      The real issue is uninformed cloud bashing comments. They are so numerous nowadays that they clog the internet pipes and prevent ecommerce traffic to go thru.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    7. Re:But why? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      I think it's because FIOS, U-Verse, and Google Fiber all had good years worth of picking up subscribers, so customers want their pages faster and the server-side people didn't upgrade.

      It's because every web page wants to load a metric fuck-ton of third-party Javascript and Ajax code from 10 different sources - just to display their banner and navigation panels ...

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    8. Re:But why? by pooh666 · · Score: 2

      I don't know how this got moded up, it is nonsense. Most tracking happens post load/post interactive, and someone saying, "looking at your status line" is a telltale for this person not having a clue about website performance opt. I get this from JS devs and PM's all of the time, and I really do have to prove that the 1M of badly optimized images is more the problem.

    9. Re:But why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That depends on how the pay has been designed. There are plenty of massive sites that fail to render properly until some undefined div gets loaded from some overloaded third party site, likewise with waiting for external files to load because the main site isn't hosting the javascript engines and plugins.

    10. Re:But why? by vtcodger · · Score: 1

      It's because every web page wants to load a metric fuck-ton of third-party Javascript and Ajax code from 10 different sources - just to display their banner and navigation panels ...

      Sounds right to me. All I know for sure is that today's web has managed the rather remarkable feat of mostly being slower in use than Compuserve was in the early 1990s with a 1200 baud modem. And that's AFTER blocking about 16000 nuisances in /etc/hosts. Our EEE PC's where I don't currently have a hosts file, have become pretty much unusable in Firefox. My esteemed spouse has come to blame Firefox for the situation and would probably advocate execution of the Firefox programmers.

      Personally, I think the basic problem is that web site designers are often incompetent and almost universally nuts

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    11. Re:But why? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Nope. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the loading of tracking code usually happens after the page has been rendered. This is because the tracking/analytics code doesn't want to affect the loading or delivery of the page, as they are used to measure that (amongst other things).

      You appear to just be guessing...

    12. Re:But why? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      That would make sense if Amazon only offered their Christmas-peak infrastructure, and no more. As that's not the case, your argument is nonsensical.

      It's quite likely the cloud is helping, as now companies can fire up new servers and load balancers to deal with increased traffic in seconds, instead of quickly reaching the limit of their limited in-house, geographically-constrained infrastructure. These servers are located around the world, in places best suited to serve the increased load, giving a real benefit to the hosted sites and the users of said sites.

      Or you can just keep on shouting "durrr durrr cloud! durr!" and show everyone you really don't understand how the internet works these days. That'll really help.

    13. Re:But why? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      It's quite likely the cloud is helping, as now companies can fire up new servers and load balancers to deal with increased traffic in seconds

      then why didn't they?

      The cloud is just as resource-constrained as the old datacentres used to be, only shared across many customers. Its like all those customers joined together and put all their old servers into one big datacentre. "The cloud" doesn't magically increase the number of servers present, it just shares the load. Normally that's fine. But when everyone wants to use it all, all at once, even the cloud goes slow.

    14. Re:But why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or trying to connect to Facebook and/or Twitter for no good reason, which being blocked at work makes a lot of sites take ages to load (if ever) unless I install Firefox plug-ins whose whole purpose is to short-circuit those connection attempts so that the page will finally load.

    15. Re:But why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You appear to be a wannabe trying to play expert again, stupid. Don't: You fail at it. Badly.

    16. Re:But why? by Cederic · · Score: 1

      Clearly you missed the twenty minute period on Friday in which amazon.co.uk was returning HTTP 502 error codes.

      I guess they should've used some cloud servers to cope with the increased load or something, huh?

  3. WordPress by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WordPress and Virtual Machines.

  4. excessive scripts by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.

    Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    1. Re:excessive scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And redirects fifteen deep to other sites to serve adds ....

    2. Re:excessive scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All companies do this - they run like they're the only code you'll ever need, and the only thing you could possibly ever want to install. Then they fire all the original coders and hire interns to add the new features.

      Remember the systray in Windows 95? Remember the Quicktime icon that did nothing but tell you Quicktime was still a thing? Remember how EVERY company had an icon on the systray? I saw some horrendous Windows installations where the taskbar basically got no space because the systray was bursting at the seams. I'm rarely surprised when one of those apps proves to be looking for a printer that isn't connected and basically burns 99.9% of CPU resource in an idle-loop waiting for it to be plugged in. All the user can do is complain that bootup is slower...yeah, y'reckon?

    3. Re:excessive scripts by tepples · · Score: 1

      Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

      Would you say Phil's Hobby Shop is greedy?

    4. Re:excessive scripts by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      yeah I just reimaged an xp box, installed the ITE8212 RAID driver from binary instead of using the reference driver like I usually do - now I got some grey blob in the systray that has no business being there. YES, I KNOW I GOT A RAID INSTALLED, FUCK OFF ALREADY.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    5. Re:excessive scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What does Phil need from where.com? Looks like it's an ad for PayPal credit. Pulls in another domain (amazonaws.com) right on the spot, and when you click on it, it opens a pop up windows (!) which loads from billmelater.com, jquery.com and fonts.googleapis.com. Phil loads scripts and other resources that he has no control over from Amazon, JQuery, Billmelater and Google. Compared to most modern web sites, that's not a lot, but remember this is just for a single ad and you should start to see the problem.

    6. Re:excessive scripts by LordLucless · · Score: 2

      The javascript on the primary site I work on takes up about 50% of the page load time. None of it is to do with functionality - it's all analytics or A/B tests or performance measuring stuff. One day something broke with the tool the marketing guys use to insert all that guff, and the site performance doubled. Inspect the DOM tree after it's loaded, and there's 30-50 iframes and script tags that have been dynamically inserted on any given page.

      I'm not against javascript; it's useful for making sites do useful things. But this sort of crap just drags everything down.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    7. Re:excessive scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But if the website isn't full of JavaScript, how will the webdesigner show he knows how to use JavaScript? Sometimes I miss the rotating skulls that plagued websites in the late 90s.

    8. Re:excessive scripts by plopez · · Score: 1

      And only developed for Chrome "bcaz it's kewl"

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    9. Re:excessive scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, basically the golden age of the internets is now pretty much over. It's all downhill from here with vast amounts of crap which are intended to 'enhance your browsing experience' and in fact do precisely the opposite.

    10. Re:excessive scripts by Razed+By+TV · · Score: 3, Insightful

      At the risk of sounding like a luddite:
      Off and on I will think about how people want to treat the internet as a utility. We try to conserve water, we try to conserve electricity, we are metered for these. For phones, we pay for minutes, though you can opt for unlimited plans, and the infrastructure is such that unlimited plans don't burden others. For cars, we have gasoline (though technically not a utility), and when gas is cheap, people buy larger vehicles. When the price of gas goes up, people become concerned about gas efficiency.

      Noone is terribly concerned about "conserving" the internet, or conserving computer resources. Every year computers get faster, and every year websites get less efficient. More bloat, bigger images, more script nonsense. They find more ways to update the browser, to make it smarter and yet more bloated. My NoScript and RequestPolicy plugins are so laden with websites that aren't obviously related to the one I'm on. If I'm lucky, there are one or two sites with a related name, or a CDN, and I can allow these and continue on. If not, I sometimes temporarily allow all, sick of going down the rabbit hole and just wanting to get to my destination.

      I'm sure there is an electricity cost related to the extra computing. The time required for page loads is simply time you've wasted, unless you have managed to multitask a few pages. A site taking 15 seconds more than it did a year ago isn't a lot one time, but it adds up page after page, day after day. Even mobile versions of sites, using 4G services, load slower than they did years ago.

      I just want my information, I want it simple, and I want it now. I'm sick of all this crap that is designed to make my life better somehow. I liked my life the way it was. I liked being able to do Verbatim searches on Google and actually getting verbatim results. I don't need fancy maps that take 10 times as long to load, I need simple maps that work fast when the network is congested. I don't need functionality changes to make things look slicker. I want to be able to do more with the hardware I have, and we just keep going in the opposite direction.

    11. Re: excessive scripts by snowsnoot · · Score: 1

      I hear ya bro. Just a bunch of asshats with make work projects and ppl trying to get rich. Simple is always better.

    12. Re:excessive scripts by pooh666 · · Score: 2

      It isn't the amount, as much as the complexity and the number of different vendors, programmers, companies that are represented. The post a way's up blaming "tracking" is way oversimplified and hitting the wrong issue. How do you debug a page for performance AND MAKE ANY CHANGES, if much of the code you didn't write and you can't change?

    13. Re:excessive scripts by pooh666 · · Score: 1

      What is the site? This smells of some poor choices, but mixing in A/B with Analytics in your description is not clear. Are your pages fully cached with a CDN? Are there major content decisions made only in the JS?

    14. Re:excessive scripts by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.

      Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

      The problem is that developer PCs are often some of the most powerful in the company because they are developers and can demand it. I mean, give a developer, web or otherwise a bog standard PC with less RAM that "average" people have and you'll get nothing but an endless stream of complaints.

      So yeah, web developers with Haswell 3.5GHz i7s and 16/32GB of RAM designing webpages. yeah, it loads fast, but bogs down someone with a 4 year old PC and barely 4GB of RAM.

      Then there's all the preparation for traffic - yeah, they get all the static CDNs up and running, the database servers are beefed up and the dynamic servers are beefy. Then they forget one script they have on every page references some dinky little server everyone forgot about. That server keels over and the page coding is such that the browser isn't able to render the rest of the page while loading it in the background. So now the pages load slower and slower and slower and everyone thinks it's either the static CDNs, the database or the dynamic views being generated, and not the server handling that one script which is vastly underpowered because it's hidden in the corner of the datacentre and forgotten about.

    15. Re:excessive scripts by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      Most of the JS that causes issues are third party scripts from various vendors, loaded from their sites. If their CDN chokes, it affects our site. All the assets we control are accessed via a CDN, and our pages are cached to the extent permissible by their content. It's the arbitrary crap loaded in from third parties (that can't be cached or handed off to our CDN because it's dynamically generated) that screws stuff up.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    16. Re:excessive scripts by vtcodger · · Score: 1

      > All the user can do is complain that bootup is slower...yeah, y'reckon?

      At least one can evict most stuff from the system tray if one works hard enough at it. And it is handy to have a volume control and possibly a few other things there. What, can be done about whackjobs who believe, almost always incorrectly, that javascript is essential to their user's "website experience?"

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    17. Re:excessive scripts by dave420 · · Score: 1

      So your dev team made some horrific choices, and that's the fault of JavaScript? Interesting.

    18. Re:excessive scripts by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      The dev team didn't make any choices at all. The dev team doesn't write their own requirements.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    19. Re:excessive scripts by dave420 · · Score: 1

      They have no say in the matter? Then the company in question is a joke, and to blame anything outside the company when that's the state within is sheer insanity.

  5. what is the primary reason? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is it increased demand (i.e. more customer-driven views) our decreased supply (e.g. shitty JavaScript implementations)?

  6. The problem is relational databases. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    The big performance problem for modern websites is the relational database.

    Even our favorite NoSQL databases are still relational. What is it that connects a document GUID and its data in a document database? A relation! What is it that connects a key with its value in a key-store database? A relation!

    Let me say it clearly: DATABASE RELATIONS NEED TO GO!

    We need to move to a database model where there are no relations at all. As we've seen, relations mean poor performance!

    Relational databases need to become old hat. Document databases need to become old hat. Key-value stores need to become old hat.

    Instead, we need database technology that is new hat. This database technology already exists, and they're called array databases.

    There are no tables. There are no documents. There are no key-value stores. There are just arrays.

    Each array element holds exactly one piece of information. That's what makes it fast! There aren't any relations to deal with. It's just pure data, as fast as can be.

    If you want to get your data, you just get it! There are no queries or mappings or any slow crap like that. Your website just gets the data it needs and displays it. It's fast because it's simple.

    If you want to sort your data, you just use quicksort. It's the fastest sort that exists.

    See, there's no SQL, there's no JavaScript, there's nothing that's slow! It's just arrays, and arrays are fast. That's what makes these databases so great. They're as fast as can be.

    1. Re:The problem is relational databases. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      Instead, we need database technology that is new hat. This database technology already exists, and they're called array databases.

      Array databases are web scale!.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    2. Re:The problem is relational databases. by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      what would you store this array on?
      A key-value filesystem such as ANY DISK BASED FILESYSTEM??

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    3. Re:The problem is relational databases. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You store the array on an array filesystem, obviously.

    4. Re:The problem is relational databases. by thogard · · Score: 1

      If the data is in cache, it is faster to open a file, read the data in as a text file, do a linear search, process the data, close the file than it is to just do a connection to an sql server. Most online stores are selling so few products that their entire product database should fit in L1 cache. If you want fast, make sure everything that has to be run can live in L1/L2 cache except what has to be be written out. Modern file systems are very good at writing out small files quickly without making the person in front of a screen wait.

    5. Re:The problem is relational databases. by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      I can vouch. I had an eshop in 2000 which carried over 3,000 products (RPG merch), I fit the lot, including images, onto a zip disk. The text portion (basically all that was in the database, the images were stored on the filesystem) fit on a floppy. Or, in the case such as mine that I had my own server on a colo backbone, loaded onto a RAM disk. Holy shit, that was one (relatively speaking) quick server.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    6. Re:The problem is relational databases. by plopez · · Score: 1

      That's just DBA 101, "always buy more RAM".

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    7. Re:The problem is relational databases. by plopez · · Score: 4, Funny

      I am glad you posted that. I am putting together a little project I call Distributed Integrated Scalable Array Database, DISArray. It will be a shardable web scale instantly consistent DB engine which will have kick ass performance and a Heisenberg query engine support by a look ahead design I have code named "Schroedinger".

      Now all I need a is cool mascot and I will be well on my way to becoming a bazillionaire. Zuckerberg better watch out! Look for it on GitHub.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    8. Re:The problem is relational databases. by Fnord666 · · Score: 1

      I am glad you posted that. I am putting together a little project I call Distributed Integrated Scalable Array Database, DISArray. It will be a shardable web scale instantly consistent DB engine which will have kick ass performance and a Heisenberg query engine support by a look ahead design I have code named "Schroedinger".

      This is going into my next system proposal to management.

      --
      'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
    9. Re:The problem is relational databases. by tompaulco · · Score: 1

      You sound like a guy I work with.He turned isolation level down to dirty reads and believes it will have no effect on relational integrity. It is already causing problems with programs picking up items to work on that are not in the correct status. He believes we can solve all these problems by rearranging code. However, if A and B both must happen for a transaction to occur, I don't see how doing B first instead of A but not doing it as a transaction is somehow going to fix the problem. What if you do B first and A blows up? Now you have data that is out of synch.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
    10. Re:The problem is relational databases. by pooh666 · · Score: 0

      Fucktard, you are an absolute moron. Anon coward or not it has to be said. Look up the term, middleware, PLEASE.

    11. Re:The problem is relational databases. by jbengt · · Score: 1

      Isn't the index used to access the array a key value?

    12. Re:The problem is relational databases. by userw014 · · Score: 1

      Perhaps if you have real hardware for your data, and your data is static. But once you escape into the real world, you shouldn't be designing web applications that depend on L1 (or L2) cache.

  7. Speculation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So many theories come to mind...

    Flat out more volume than last year. Retailers are reporting around 10% year to year increase in general.

    Retailers have moved much of the frenzy to Thursday (Friday actually saw a decline, but Thursday saw more than enough to make up the difference). Meaning some significant volume of consumers were home or otherwise ready to focus on online shopping than last year.

    Overconfidence in 'cloud bursting' strategies. More and more places are trying to aggressively reduce cost by scaling back their steady state capacity with the expectation they got the setup right for scaling up in time. This weekend presents a common opportunity for people to figure out they don't have the magic right. Some capacity might have been moved off-premise to lower performing systems that were formerly on-premise and performing ok.

    Of course on top of having data to substantiate or rule out these guesses, it'd be interesting to have data that would suggest whether the sluggishness had any business impact. It could be that this isn't even something that makes sense to worry about from a business perspective anyway.

  8. Too much coding on the pages by Karmashock · · Score: 5, Interesting

    More of the coding needs to be server side or not exist at all.

    The worst is the ads. I turned on NoScript and so many pages just fly now because the stupid javascript isn't allowed to run.

    --
    I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
    1. Re:Too much coding on the pages by sound+vision · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I recently installed NoScript for security reasons, but I was glad to find the speed improvements too. Also, the NoScript's domain list has shed some light on how many scripts really are on some of these web pages. They have their own scripts, plus several social networking sites, random CDNs, Google analytics, a couple of ad services... Then you hit "temporarily allow all scripts" and the NoScript list shows even more domains and you realize the scripts are being chain-loaded. Some of these sites end up with 25 domains listed. That means you are waiting on 25 servers to respond, 25 DNS lookups, before the scripts even get to executing, which is even worse.

    2. Re:Too much coding on the pages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually its worse than that, its 25 x "n" Where "n" is the number of times a counter has to be pegged to indicate you have that many eyeballs.

      Hence most online shoppers have more than eight "eyeballs" at the very least.

      The morons are the Advertisers paying for "eyeballs" counted by the "eyeball" chargers

    3. Re:Too much coding on the pages by Karmashock · · Score: 1

      whatever the reason, javascript and other active code that runs client side is a fucking pain in the ass. I'm making a point of disabling most of it unless absolutely required. It has the added benefit of acting like an adblock in most cases as well.

      I use a combination of adblock (only on sites I've never visited before or do not want to patronize), NoScript (because javascript should only be used when it is ACTUALLY needed.), and an Adobe Flash blocker that simply prevents Flash animations from running unless individually enabled.

      The AdBlock protects me from getting bombarded with porn ads, NoScript kills the popups and other annoying shit, and the flash blocker stops those fucking flash movies from running on some of the news sites. It is even great for youtube. I like to open five or six youtube windows at once and then play the movies one at a time. If you do it without a flash blocker they all start whenever the windows load rendering the activity counter productive.

      --
      I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
    4. Re:Too much coding on the pages by Karmashock · · Score: 1

      Yep. Which is why I keep noscript enabled.

      --
      I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
    5. Re:Too much coding on the pages by Lord+Duran · · Score: 1

      I find Ghostery to be helpful with that.

    6. Re:Too much coding on the pages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since I agree w/ speeding up webpages (ordinarily I don't use javascript since Opera 12.17 allows "by site" preferences, I really do NOT need NoScript here. I don't use javascript though, generally, & I mean @ ALL, unless I hit an "e-commerce" type webpage that demands it, ala shopping or banking online.

      (Which, of course, you know you need javascript active there for most of them, since they're largely DB driven & server-side CGI bins are no longer "in fashion" (smarter design imo - why? Keeps code SERVER-SIDE, vs. in documents like webpages (they learned NOTHING from macro viruses in Word DOCS etc.)).

      So yes, I agree that scripts in webpage documents are STUPID for those reasons (precedent set by OLE Compound documents by MS long beforehand)

      What gives you the BEST custom hosts file in the world, populated by 12 reputable sources in the security community?

      This does (by "yours truly"):

      APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit:

      http://start64.com/index.php?o...

      * Accept NO substitutes...

      APK

      P.S.=> Between NoScript (*IF* you use javascript, the "main delivery mechanism" behind MOST malware + malicious content online, hence my statements above about it & how I get around it myself) & custom hosts files? You can't lose - you'll go FASTER, SAFER, & more RELIABLY online (& get your money's worth from the bandwidth you paid for, stalling ads))... apk

  9. Results per site would be nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A while ago, Amazon.com did a study that indicated when it took them more than four seconds to render a page on their server, that they'd lose customers. I've also seen an argument that more than eight seconds to the end user (including transit time) is problematic. How many of these sites are falling below these goals?

    If last year, desktop sites were taking five seconds to load and this year they are taking six, I don't think that's a problem. If most sites are taking about the same time to load and a few are taking a ridiculously long time, then I don't think that's a general problem.

    The issue is not whether the top fifty sites are taking longer on average. We should be looking at each site individually. Is Amazon.com taking longer? Etsy? Best Buy? And are they taking significantly longer (pushing them over the threshold where customers abandon them)? Or just normal variation?

    In terms of mobile sites, have they considered the possibility that last year the sites were stripped down more than they needed to be and this year they may be rendering at a more appropriate speed? I don't know, as I have no idea what speed they consider problematic. There's no data here, even when I did RTFA. They only barely have a list of the sites, much less the results from each.

  10. VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Virtualisation is the the problem. We have moved from ISP overbooking of bandwidth to hosting providers overbooking of cpu resources being the bottleneck.

    Virtualisation is killing the internet.

    1. Re:VMs by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      No we havent. ISP's still heavily oversell.

      at 8pm on a friday, I can not get more than 13mbps. I pay for 25mbps. Friends pay for 50mpbs and they cant get more than 13.

      ISP's are still dramatically oversold.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    2. Re:VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      13mbps is more than 1.5MB a second. If you rendered the web site into high quality full HD JPGs, you could transmit at a frame rate of 5fps via that bandwidth. A typical shop web page doesn't load in 0.2 seconds, it takes more than 15 times longer! You can fault ISPs for a lot, but slow web sites are not their doing.

    3. Re:VMs by alen · · Score: 1

      except you don't need even that much to surf a web site. virtualization is the problem. all the servers are oversubscribed to use every little bit of RAM and CPU so the bean counters can cream their shorts with higher return on asset ratios

      i could surf netflix and youtube just fine over the weekend. amazon was as fast as usual. but toys r us and best buy were like watching trees grow and toys r us store inventory checker was broken

    4. Re:VMs by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      The fact that slashdot on it's own requires 10.5mb in freaking Javascript is the other part of the problem.

      Low quality web designers that cant figure out how to do something without 600 pounds of "libraries"

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    5. Re:VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Given that the "high quality jpgs" I've been running into lately are 10MB each, that would be a resounding no. Also I doubt you'd get 13mbps if everyone in your neighborhood who used to be using 0.5mbps to load webpages every once in a while started streaming webpages instead. (This also affects DSL at the DSLAM and any ISP customer of any kind at some point in the routing).

      In any case, while I lament the fragmentation of js and wish they would compile them as part of the build process (with dynamic js all in one file on the server and static js all in one file on the cdn) I do have to say that wasting the resources of a highly distributed system is somewhat shameful. If you're doing anything significant (ie, not facebook) then there is no reason not to tap into the user's hardware. For example, why not set up local user datastorage for advanced additions such as detailed "last seen" features and other such things? It certainly scales far better than old-school caching, delayed data, excessive sharding, and guestimation hacks and it helps humanity avoid waste by taping into otherwise unused consumer CPUs.

    6. Re:VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, I'll partly rescind this statement. If you're linking against a popular library it makes sense to use a popular link since the user's browser likely already cached it. In fact, it even gives browsers the option to skip re-parsing that js every time. I guess when we start really squeezing for performance we'll see that. That said, if the libraries are customized for your site in any way they should be compiled into the two aforementioned scripts. And sites really do overuse js for bad reasons.

  11. .66 seconds? by Enry · · Score: 1

    FTFA:

    Median webpage response times for desktop websites for the entire group (aggregate) was 3.991 seconds, compared to 3.330 seconds in 2013.

    Do people even notice that? I mean, if I'm getting what I think is a great deal and it takes literally a fraction of a second more for the page to load I don't think I'm going to care.

    1. Re:.66 seconds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Put it this way, your IQ must be way less than 100 to counterbalance my IQ that's way higher than 100. Which is proven by the knowledge of statistics displayed in your comment.

    2. Re:.66 seconds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Noticing 3.3 vs 3.9? probably not. Noticing 3.9 vs the site loading in 0.05 the day before? Just a little.

    3. Re:.66 seconds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Over millions of users, a fraction of a second can have a major impact on sales.

    4. Re:.66 seconds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      significant figures! I can just see Dr. t running around rearing his hair out. significant figures!!!

    5. Re:.66 seconds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It doesn't though. People will buy at time+N.

  12. Fluff Piece by Baldrson · · Score: 0

    Due to caching, downloading Javascript pays off with faster response if you hit the same site enough times. Neither the article nor the Catchpoint Systems website say how many times they hit the same site, let alone how many times a customer is expected to hit the same site so essentially this article is fluff piece.

    --
    Seastead this.
  13. If you haven't seen RequestPolicy, install it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pages now include resources from literally dozens of domains. There are megabytes of images to load, and hundreds of kilobytes worth of compressed Javascript code to run. A web site like we used to make them 5 to 10 years ago loads instantly. Browsers have improved a lot, computers are much faster, but a modern web site drags it all down and makes you feel like you're using dialup again. So install the RequestPolicy addon and look at the train wreck that is the modern web. The icing on the cake is that recently web sites have started to load most of their static parts from separate domains. Why? To improve caching, because cookies on the main domain interfere with the default configuration of popular reverse proxy cache software. These morons create web sites which wouldn't load quickly if they were coming straight from local RAM, and then they try to make them fast by pulling tricks with CDNs, caches and multiple domains. The web is fucked up.

  14. Blame the ISP by Lumpy · · Score: 1

    All of the ISP's have NOT upgraded their backbone for years, they are now overselling it by never before seen levels making even 500Gb Cable Internet feel like DSL.

    The problem is people are not screaming about it to their congress critter forcing ISP's to deliver what they sell. They need to pay a $1000 per user per month fine for not delivering what they promise or advertise.

    That would get the lazy executives at Comcast moving.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  15. Too much coding on the pages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't web development, but one thing I suspect is it's often not the JS code that executes slowly, though that is not uncommon. But instead

    1. Any transaction over the network has round trip delay. And those are a lot longer than you think.
    2. Packets get dropped and requests fail, each time that happen you need a timeout and another round trip
    3. All those Javascripts are phoning home multiple times.
    4. Sequentially and dependently on each other.

  16. Nice web site you got there... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Be a shame if no one could get to it because you didn't pay us for a "fast lane."

  17. Websites slower in the Cloud? by lippydude · · Score: 1

    I've noticed a number of sites are hosted on some kind of content management platform, presumably aloft in the Cloud. Sometimes there's a noticable delay in getting the page to load.

    1. Re:Websites slower in the Cloud? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      So you are presuming they're hosted in "the cloud" and then assume that's what's causing the slowdowns? Holy ass-delving, Batman!

    2. Re:Websites slower in the Cloud? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you are presuming to actually KNOW something, stupid? Please: Give us a break. You're a no-mind, do nothing wannabe. Nothing more. Get over it. We know that much about you.

    3. Re:Websites slower in the Cloud? by lippydude · · Score: 1

      Our CDN was unable to reach our servers

  18. Because you started early by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 1

    "Black Friday" has been happening and advertised since 1 Nov. Friday Nov 28 just happened to be one day in the stream of pseudo sales between 1 Nov and 15 Jan.

  19. Oblig. Tom Lehrer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ....
    Hark the herald tribune sings,
    Advertising wondrous things.
    God rest ye merry, merchants,
    May you make the yuletide pay.
    Angels we have heard on high
    Tell us to go out and buy! ...

    (Admittedly, no one actually reads a newspaper anymore....but, hey, work with me here...)

  20. Jeez, NewEgg by rrohbeck · · Score: 1

    I gave up browsing at some point, it was so bad. Amazon was a bit slow but worked OK.

    --
    thegodmovie.com - watch it
  21. Don't forget the browsers ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The browsers themselves have really gotten bad in recent years. Safari on Yosemite is so bad now it is ridiculous. Also, browsers don't seem to cache content very well. I can load a page, then do a reload and all the content is downloaded a second time. In the old days if a page took too long you could hit escape and the page would load with whatever content it had collected, now if you hit escape you get a blank page. Also, the end user has almost no control over popups and crap windows that appear, especially windows asking for you to subscribe to a site. Lastly, there ought to be a law against modal dialog boxes.

  22. Re:Custom hosts files complete the equation... apk by Karmashock · · Score: 1

    hey there APK... :-)

    --
    I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
  23. People are greedy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Its really sad that retail has made a once religious Christian holiday into a free for all to buy stuff. So much so, people are willing to trample, wrestle and fight for those material things. All supposedly in the name of giving in this Christian holiday? Have human's really advanced, or are we going backwards in our advancement of our race? Not only do we act like barbarians on Black Friday but now even Thanksgiving has become the holiday that is not for family and friends.
    But for working to save that bottom line for retail. The internet has certainly not helped this need for the best deal but I guess at least you cannot brawl on the internet for a big TV.

  24. Same old Game with Best Buy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have been a BestBuy Elite Plus member (spend $3,500.00 per year) 3 years in a row an elite member (spend $1,500.. per year) last year and this year and for all 5 years the following has happened

    1. No announcement on special pre black Friday sale to reward members; email was supposed to go out and never went out, no announcement on their website. You are just supposed to get an email. Usually the sale happens one week to 4 days before black Friday. Time and date changes each year. The only place you can find out the details is in their reward member forums if you don't get the email but they don't tell you to check there.

    2. All 5 years they were late starting the black Friday reward member sale

    3. All 5 years the site has locked up crashed etc. You put an item in your cart go to checkout and it freezes and says we're sorry you then repeat the process multiple times to get the same message. You then either lose the item out of your cart or are stuck in a loop of not being able to checkout. Get to the checkout point go to put in your credit card or account info and again you are met with error messages. Now if you finally go to checkout put in your info and hit checkout to order and pay for the item you get a message informing you that the status of the item in your cart has changed and is no longer available. You will spend 30 minutes to an hour trying to get that Black Friday item online. It is completely frustrating and ridiculous calls to best buy about it or posting on their forums is met with a standard issue apology but no corrective action is taken. Even when they pull up your account and see that you have spent over $13,000.00 in the past 5 years in their store. They just don't care. I really wish the board of directors were aware of this, they wonder why BB is tanking this is why.

    1. Re:Same old Game with Best Buy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      sounds great, you should continue giving them thousands of dollar every year

  25. Move along, nothing to see here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dave420 the wannabe expert is being stupid again trying to play "expert" and he's far from it considering he's nothing but a trolling "ne'er-do-well" loser.

  26. Can someone please make dave420 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stop talking? Each time he does I have to laugh at how stupid he is.

  27. Hahaha, hey everybody: Look! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dave420'S projecting his own issues again (insanity + stupidity) playing wannabe shrink!

  28. Thanks Obama! by ThatsDrDangerToYou · · Score: 1

    (disclaimer: opinions expressed do not necessarily represent my own...)

  29. Please: Try humor Dave420 - why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is Dave420 "LiVe" (absolutely live, lol): Explains it all http://www.softedconsult.com/i...

  30. I'm going to go with Angular/bootstrap FTW by Pherdnut · · Score: 1

    There's a whole new generation of JS devs who are complete slobs about dependencies. They will attach the entire Bootstrap library for one plug-in. I've seen libraries that embedded and minified it such that it wasn't even obvious they were using it and they weren't using it for much. 20 megabytes for a !@#$ing restful documentation widget whose own proprietary code was 20,000 lines long. It's just ridiculous. IMO, every client-side web dev should be forced to support IE6, then mobile, then write for the desktop browser. But people want the latest buzzwords, they want them fast and cheap and they want them now. This is what you get. A bunch of jr-level slobs writing e-commerce apps who knew what to say about how much they love these new frameworks at the interview.

  31. Cloud by NewYork · · Score: 1

    I'd blame the Cloud

    --
    Casteism
  32. Hi, & again: AGREED, 110% & why... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    CGI Bin or WinCGI were a safer design (server-side) http://entertainment.slashdot....

    * The "infamous they" who designed javascript carrying pages obviously didn't know their history (Word docs, Excel spreadsheets & their autoexec macros were a precursor to what we're seeing today: Exploit in documents, albeit this time, online instead...).

    Yes folks: THIS is what happens when you put webboys in charge of design vs. seasoned long time programmers.

    APK

    P.S.=> Which, *IF* you think about it, .NET designed pages are better since they do server-side work, submitting results BACK to users (not coding their documents client-side) + they do garbage cleanup too (they've always reminded me of ISAPI/NSAPI DLL work but with garbage cleanup, which was a big problem in in ISAPI)... apk

  33. Ghostery = Inferior + 'Souled-Out'... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See #2 below: My FREE program adds speed, security, reliability & more, doing more, more efficiently vs. addons + fixes DNS' redirect security issues:

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit:

    http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    ---

    A.) Hosts do more than:

    1.) AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... )
    2.) Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
    3.) Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

    B.) Hosts add reliability vs. downed/redirected dns (& overcome site redirects e.g. /. beta).

    C.) Hosts secure vs. malicious domains too -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... w/ less "moving parts" complexity

    D.) Hosts files yield more:

    1.) Speed (adblock & hardcodes fav sites - faster than remote dns)
    2.) Security (vs. malicious domains serving malcontent + block spam/phish & trackers)
    3.) Reliability (vs. downed or Kaminsky redirect vulnerable dns, 99% = unpatched vs. it & worst @ isp level + weak vs DGA, & Fastflux + dynDNS botnets)
    4.) Anonymity (vs. dns request logs + dnsbl's).

    ---

    * Hosts do more w/ less (1 file) @ faster levels (ring 0) vs redundant inefficient addons (slowing slower ring 3 browsers) via filtering 4 the IP stack (coded in C, loads w/ os, & 1st net resolver queried w\ 45++ yrs.of optimization).
    * Addons = more complex + slow browsers in messagepassing (use a few concurrently & see) & are nullified by native browser methods - It's how Clarityray's destroying Adblock.
    * Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption + excessive cpu use too (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...)

    Instead, work w/ a more capable native kernelmode part you already have - hosts (An integrated part of the ip stack)

    APK

    P.S.=> "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend"

    ...apk

  34. AdBlock = Inferior + 'Souled-Out'... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My FREE hosts program adds speed, security, reliability & more, doing more, more efficiently vs. addons + fixes DNS' redirect security issues:

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit:

    http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    ---

    A.) Hosts do more than:

    1.) AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... )
    2.) Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
    3.) Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

    B.) Hosts add reliability vs. downed/redirected dns (& overcome site redirects e.g. /. beta).

    C.) Hosts secure vs. malicious domains too -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... w/ less "moving parts" complexity

    D.) Hosts files yield more:

    1.) Speed (adblock & hardcodes fav sites - faster than remote dns)
    2.) Security (vs. malicious domains serving malcontent + block spam/phish & trackers)
    3.) Reliability (vs. downed or Kaminsky redirect vulnerable dns, 99% = unpatched vs. it & worst @ isp level + weak vs DGA, & Fastflux + dynDNS botnets)
    4.) Anonymity (vs. dns request logs + dnsbl's).

    ---

    * Hosts do more w/ less (1 file) @ faster levels (ring 0) vs redundant inefficient addons (slowing slower ring 3 browsers) via filtering 4 the IP stack (coded in C, loads w/ os, & 1st net resolver queried w\ 45++ yrs.of optimization).
    * Addons = more complex + slow browsers in messagepassing (use a few concurrently & see) & are nullified by native browser methods - It's how Clarityray's destroying Adblock.
    * Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption + excessive cpu use too (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...)

    Instead, work w/ a more capable native kernelmode part you already have - hosts (An integrated part of the ip stack)

    APK

    P.S.=> "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend"

    ...apk

  35. Ask yourselves these questions... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can adblock do 15 things hosts files can for more speed, security, reliability, & more:

    1.) Secure you vs. known malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious adbanners - see 2 thru 6 below next)
    2.) Secure you vs. downed DNS servers aiding reliability
    3.) Secure you vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns servers
    4.) Protect you vs. fastflux using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
    5.) Protect you vs. dynamic dns using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
    6.) Protect you vs. domain generation algorithm using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
    7.) Speed you up for websurfing not only by adblocking but also hardcoding favorite sites
    8.) Get you past a dnsbl you may not agree with
    9.) Keep you off dns request logs
    10.) Do all of those things and block ads (better than adblock) more efficiently in cpu cycles and memory usage
    11.) Work on ANY webbound application (think stand-alone email programs, for example).
    12.) Give you direct, easily notepad/texteditor controlled data for all of the above
    13.) Block out trackers
    14.) Block spam mails sources
    15.) Block phishing mails sources

    "?"

    * Simple YES or NO answers will do for repliers to this - that's all.

    APK

    P.S.=> The ANSWER ="NO" to each enumerated item above as far as "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" (crippled by default & 'souled-out' defeating it's very base purpose) is concerned -> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/...

    So, *IF* you feel like doing things LESS efficiently as well -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... ontop of doing less than hosts do (by far) with more complexity + from a slower mode of operations (usermode with more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode, also starting up w/ the IP stack itself, before REDUNDANT inefficient addons even BEGIN to operate, & as the 1st resolver queried by the OS as well)?

    That's illogical: I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make them drink!

    ... apk

  36. True story, AdBlock vs. Hosts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    W. Palant wrote me by email 1st saying "hosts are a shitty solution" to which I replied:

    "Show us adblock can do more for added speed, security, reliability, & anonymity than hosts can, + that adblock does it more efficiently than hosts"

    Which on my latter 'point-in-challenge' on efficiency AdBlock's proven by research to be MASSIVELY inefficient -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... & adblock does FAR less than hosts (especially crippled by default).

    I sent Wladimir Palant that challenge in response to his statement from 2 different email addresses I use!

    Result = Still no answer from him in regard to my challenge put to him to this very day MONTHS later - that tell you anything? It did me!

    He knows his addon is less efficient & features laden by FAR vs. hosts - Wladimir Palant RAN like a scared rabbit!

    ClarityRay's also DESTROYING AdBlock - via native browser methods to DUMP what addons you use (it can't DO THAT to hosts files).

    I only tell it how it is on hosts' superiority vs. AdBlock - Funny part is, Wladimir Palant running does too!

    Especially considering "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" has 'souled-out' -> Google And Others Reportedly Pay Adblock Plus To Show You Ads Anyway: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

    APK

    P.S.=> Bottom-Line: Hosts = a superior solution that also fixes DNS redirect security issues (vs. browser addons & their inefficiencies + messagepassing overheads as well as myriad lack of abilities hosts have from 1 file that's part of the IP stack itself - faster, more efficient, & less redundant as well, since TCP/IP has 45++ yrs. of refinement & optimization in it, & runs in a higher CPU serviced ring of privelege & operations in kernelmode vs. slower usermode layering over browsers slowing them more, & hosts = 1st resolver queried by the OS itself also)... apk

  37. Ask yourselves these questions... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can ghostery do 15 things hosts files can for more speed, security, reliability, & more:

    1.) Secure you vs. known malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious adbanners - see 2 thru 6 below next)
    2.) Secure you vs. downed DNS servers aiding reliability
    3.) Secure you vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns servers
    4.) Protect you vs. fastflux using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
    5.) Protect you vs. dynamic dns using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
    6.) Protect you vs. domain generation algorithm using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
    7.) Speed you up for websurfing not only by adblocking but also hardcoding favorite sites
    8.) Get you past a dnsbl you may not agree with
    9.) Keep you off dns request logs
    10.) Do all of those things and block ads (better than ghostery) more efficiently in cpu cycles and memory usage
    11.) Work on ANY webbound application (think stand-alone email programs, for example).
    12.) Give you direct, easily notepad/texteditor controlled data for all of the above
    13.) Block out trackers
    14.) Block spam mails sources
    15.) Block phishing mails sources

    "?"

    * Simple YES or NO answers will do for repliers to this - that's all.

    APK

    P.S.=> The ANSWER ="NO" to each enumerated item above as far as GHOSTERY (a 'souled-out' to advertisers fox guarding a henhouse -> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/...

    So, *IF* you feel like doing things LESS efficiently as well ontop of doing less than hosts do (by far) with more complexity + from a slower mode of operations (usermode with more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode, also starting up w/ the IP stack itself, before REDUNDANT inefficient addons even BEGIN to operate, & as the 1st resolver queried by the OS as well)?

    That's illogical: I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make them drink!

    ... apk

  38. Is the problem the servers or the network? by TonyXL · · Score: 1

    If the network is hitting capacity, why would a network company want to invest in higher speeds, if the gov't is going to tell them how to run their network?

  39. problem isn't with the dev machines by Chirs · · Score: 1

    Those developers may very will need those fancy machines.

    But whoever is doing usability testing should be testing on fast machines, slow machines, new machines, old machines, mobile devices, etc. If they're not, then they aren't doing the job properly.