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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?
No idea how your connection speed adds anything to this.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tell that to all the people with slow connections, who's operating system is constantly phoning home to a dozen different servers and hijacking their bandwidth to spread itself on a p2p network.
I have the same problem with smartphone apps. If you don't have the highest LTE connection possible, the app is a pain to use. Go to a rural area, and you may not even get it to open. Web sites are the same way. They give developers super fast connections, and they develop applications that require that speed. They don't put them on slow networks and test to see if they are even useful on a basic level.
Most web browser engines are open source. Go and modify one or many of them to handle slow connections better.
all show which side their bread is buttered on.
When the advertising content loads first and the page rebuilds/rearranges itself 6 or 8 times and finally the content you want to see becomes visible or stabilizes enough to click a link.
I think some of the pages are designed to do this on purpose.
You get a glimpse of the content you are looking for and click on a link just as the page rebuilds itself and the link has changed to an ad and the cash register rings on a click through.
Rick B.
The digital divide in the US became most evident (to me) in this last election cycle.
If you look at the page weights of 'conservative' vs 'liberal' news sites the former are much smaller and tailored to people on even a dial up, in large part because they know their demographic. Rural internet in the US flat out sucks. We have counties in my state, not more than 3 hours outside of Chicago that still have dialup as a viable option.
Drudge Report loads amazingly fast. Huffington Post does not. Drudge was 1.13 MB in size with 44% of that images. (The site I used to analyze them was done with Drudge's 14 assets long before Huffington Post stalled at 220/222 assets.)
The art of optimization seems to have disappeared, it made a small resurgence when web developers tried to optimize for the mobile web, but it doesn't look like most developers ever tried that hard.
It's a closed feedback loop. Developers live in places with fast Internet, test in places with fast Internet and then don't understand what it's like anywhere else. Students on college campuses live with gigabit internet and Internet2 connections to peer universities. They move to cities that Comcast pays attention to.
The best suggestion I have: Turn off images, configure the browser not to thread connections, and get involved in local government to get faster internet to your area.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When a site refuses to load because of AdBlock, AdBlock is doing it's job correctly.
The point is, browsers can do this intelligently. Automatically. But they don't.
When I leave wi fi and fall back to 3g, I should not have to tell my browser to behave optimally each transition.