Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
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");