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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.
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!
The problem is not opening 6 connections, or failure to retry, but a timeout that's too short.
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...
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.
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.