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Most of the Web Really Sucks If You Have a Slow Connection (danluu.com)
Dan Luu, hardware/software engineer at Microsoft, writes in a blog post: 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! I can sometimes get some images to load by refreshing the page a few times (and waiting ten minutes each time), but why shouldn't the browser handle retries for me? If you think about it for a few minutes, there are a lot of optimizations that browsers could do for people on slow connections, but because they don't, the best current solution for users appears to be: use w3m when you can, and then switch to a browser with ad-blocking when that doesn't work. But why should users have to use two entirely different programs, one of which has a text-based interface only computer nerds will find palatable?
You can configure this setting in Firefox. It doesn't look like Chrome has a similar configuration.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Abou...
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server - default = 6
Try setting this to 1.
Source:
https://support.mozilla.org/t5...
Well, it does make sense to load the pictures simultaneously because they may come from different source and what if one of them stalls? The whole page would sit there and wait.
What gets my piss to a boil is that browsers still cannot load text first and ignore pictures until the rest of the page is done. Gimme something to read while your slow ass server eventually, maybe, finally manages to send the picture I don't give a shit about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ssh, and telnet work just fine over a slow connection and so does email so long as it doesn't have a load of attachments plus other protocols such as gopher. People did manage to use the internet over dial up before HTTP/HTML came along and sucked up as much bandwidth as it could!
There is a hilarious (and sad) commentary on website bloat at http://idlewords.com/talks/web... that shows truely outrageous examples of this sin.
1. Sites that play videos when the load.
2. Sites that display the entire page for three seconds and then cover it with a full screen ad.
3. Sites that constantly reorganize the page as it loads new ads.
4. Sites that load ads FIRST instead of the actual content.
Bottom line is the web sucks because Madison Avenue got a hold of it. They aren't content with placing an ad like they do in papers or magazines. They all in your face and FORCE your participation in message delivery. And before you even mention Ad Block, more and more sites simply refuse to load when you have that installed/enabled.
Most browsers open 6 connections because most connections these day can handle it. If you live in a time warp (like most of the US) with tech that's 20 years old, then you have to use 20 year old tricks of the trade.
"Back in the day" we had 56k at home or for the rich folk, 128k (ISDN), double ISDN if you were really lucky. We had the same problems, the 'web' was getting fancy with things like Flash, video and high-def images because all the 'work' was being done at places that had either access through an institution with at least Fractional T1's and things like 100Mbps home-internet copper/fiber connections for $10 were being promised as less than a decade away by the ISP's which were then repeatedly subsidized by the governments to do just that.
How did we do it:
a) Set up your own DNS caching servers
b) Set up your own HTTP/HTTPS proxy caching servers with giant caches
c) Proper QoS to make sure certain traffic had priority over others, small packets and small buffers
d) Set up your own servers (such as IMAP/SMTP, gaming etc) and have them sync during times of lesser activity. These days, with a bit of API tinkering, even social media can be done that way.
We had LAN parties with 100's of computers behind a 1Mbps cable modem, no problem.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Be sure to run adblockers, stripping out adverts makes a big difference.
But even slashdot is a big fat bloated pig. no reason at all to load everything and a giant pile of JS.
I highly recommend https://alterslash.org it removes all the bloat from slashdot.org Thanks to Jonathan Hedley!
If you use firefox, or a derivative, put this in your user.js file (or set it through about:config).
user_pref("media.autoplay.enabled", false);
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");
Also, in about config, enter network.http.max
Reduce these to sane numbers.