Slashdot Mirror
Google Tests 'Never-Slow Mode' for Speedier Browsing (zdnet.com)
At some point in the future, Chrome may gain a new feature, dubbed 'Never-Slow Mode', which would trim heavy web pages to keep browsing fast. From a report: The prototype feature is referenced in a work-in-progress commit for the Chromium open-source project. With Never-Slow Mode enabled, it would "enforce per-interaction budgets designed to keep the main thread clean." The design document for Never-Slow Mode hasn't been made public. However, the feature's owner, Chrome developer Alex Russell, has provided a rough outline of how it would work to speed up web pages with large scripts. "Currently blocks large scripts, sets budgets for certain resource types (script, font, css, images), turns off document.write(), clobbers sync XHR, enables client-hints pervasively, and buffers resources without 'Content-Length' set," wrote Russell.
Fucks sake - this is exactly the reason random web page X stops working.
Here's a hint google: You're fixing the WRONG problem.
The correct problem to apply pressure to:
1) Crap web code, and specfically better educating the people that write it.
2) Javascripts crappy threads.
Your 'never slow mode' should only ever be a debug tool for people making web pages.
Web pages load okay without all of the crap added to them.
i would turn off the tracking and monitoring and everything would be much faster!
Dump all the ads and it's gonna be blazingly fast.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's exactly what BlackBerry did with their system. They would strip off all code that wouldn't render on a BB and only transmit what would. Back then it saved money on data as well as sped things up.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I remember the days when a Flash ad would instantly peg CPU usage. I just killed Flash instead of looking into why. Maybe it was rendering 1000FPS instead of 60? Sure, I missed the latest Strong Bad Email, but those eventually disappeared, too.
Now it's not so much CPU as RAM. When closing one small page frees up 2GB, that's not a good sign.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Do we really need WebGL, canvas, wasm, node, jquery and all this HTML5 crap? I remember i could open hundred of tabs in Firefox on a system with just a gigabyte of ram back in 2004. Now Waterfox struggles with about 10 tabs on a 16gb system and I have to constantly re-open it. Just have HTML 4.01 with the video tag set to non autoplay and make the web simple.
... all broken, slow and bloated websites.
Many problems would go away really fast and in a year from now the essential web would suck way less because people would've adjusted with better code and better planning.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
How about they work on a 'never slow typing' mode for Android. How does everyone get this so wrong? Doesn't matter the phone, there's always a point where the text stops popping up as you're typing and then a ton of random characters barf out at once, cursor position getting switched around as you type, it's maddening.
Twinstiq, game news
about damn time web designers with heavy CSS and HTML need to tighten it up. they don't give an rats a** when they believe their mobile clients all have unlimited data and time to wait for their beautification to download; furthermore, been analyzing page loads for 3 months and so correct, out of 1.5 million home pages, of the 119 million to be processed, it appears that more that 3% have this problem as so reported and growing. side note: if you have a search engine with a spider and are looking for the title and keywords meta tag, you have to dig a little deeper. my hope and goal is to show that those elements are and should be within the first 1000 characters of any landing / home page.
1) Crap web code, and specfically better educating the people that write it.
Good luck with that. Exactly how do you plan to reach all these millions of developers writing "crap" code and forcibly educate them? Sometimes forced constraints are not such a bad thing.
Your 'never slow mode' should only ever be a debug tool for people making web pages.
Yeah, have you met people? Because NOBODY I know would stay in their lane on that, myself included.
Has anyone else noticed how painful it is use to CNN? I don't know what they do but the JS is constantly dynamically reflowing the page. I had to pull an old iPad (iOS 9) out of a drawer recently - and quickly noticed how slow the page is. While "struggles" is the wrong word, my new PC shows slowness while rendering and on the iPad it was unusable.
At first I thought - old iPad, bad iPad. Then I tried other news websites and it was fine. Its just friggen HTML. I can read the articles faster than the JS can render itself.
and for you comment moderators - while based upon real incidents, this post contains sarcasm.
In my experience, the slowest loading pages all have the same browser status: "waiting on google analytics"! They should start there!
I remember i could open hundred of tabs in Firefox on a system with just a gigabyte of ram back in 2004.
And I bet you are going to try to convince us that such a workflow is somehow practical too...
Now Waterfox struggles with about 10 tabs on a 16gb system and I have to constantly re-open it.
Then I suggest you switch to a browser that actually works because I have no such problem with Firefox or Chrome or Edge or Safari.
I have a better solution: how about we 'trim the fat' from the pages' sources themselves, instead of having these bloated monstrosities in the first place? I use NoScript and whitelist only a few domains, so for many sites I manually temporarily 'trust' only the domains I know are safe and don't collect data. When some website won't even load basic text without enabling Javascript, and when the NoScript list of domains that page 'needs' grows to the point where it's practically going to scroll off the bottom of the monitor, then I say there's something seriously wrong with the way webpages are created these days.
Each tab should have its own "main thread" right?
Or it not, then a tab's content that is found to be using resources greedily should be re-located to its own thread, which can be de-prioritized so that browsing elsewhere, and main browser controls, are not affected much performance-wise.
Then I suppose "never-slow mode" could be enabled/disabled by user wrt a particular tab, or particular content, upon prompting from browser performance pop-up modal dialogs.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Has anyone else noticed how painful it is use to CNN?
No because I don't visit their webpage. Just looked however and it is fine for me. Bear in mind though that I have Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus and the built in Firefox privacy settings running so I'm killing a TON of tracking and add stuff. Kind of feels like fucking with 4 condoms on though when I go to sites like that.
That's a damn good idea.
User gets to enable bloat crap-ware per tab and only when they need it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Reminds me of the time I got a call about one of our configuration interfaces not working. User kept getting XSS errors and the page wouldn't even load.
Needless to say I was quite impressed to find out browsers were employing black box naive heuristic filters that not only were not effective and could themselves be leveraged to mask attacks and as vectors for denial service they also caused random failures in non-defective code due to chance coincidence and naming conventions.
The last thing the web needs is Nondeterminism. This not only pisses off users and developers alike it will be exploited to harass people and deny service. It's hard to think of a more asinine scheme than time based limits that depend on the characteristics and state of each device at the time document is being rendered.
So I won't have to block 6 trackers and 9 scripts here on /. myself?
This will just result in broken pages. And broken pages that are broken differently based on each device's specs and load from other applications at the time.
clobbers sync XHR
Some people like to design things such that events and procedures happen one after the other, you know. Some people need consistent and deterministic logic and data. Some people care about race conditions.
sanic is that u?
Too many designer crooks
FTFY.
Desktops and mobile devices have very different input and output devices. You shouldn't be using the same human interface for both of them.
Good point. This raises two questions: First, which not-a-web-browser desktop app player is compatible with all major desktop and laptop platforms (X11/Linux, macOS, Windows, and Chrome OS)? Second, which not-a-web-browser mobile app player is compatible with both major touch-driven platforms (iOS and Android)?
you could easily create a lot of well designed, cross-platform libraries that did work between machine types and were far, far easier to develop with than when targeting a browser.
However, this raises two issues. First, let's assume for a moment that a developer doesn't own a Mac yet. Even assuming such a developer can figure out how to cross-compile a macOS application on GNU/Linux, how would such a developer cross-test the macOS build to make sure that the application has no macOS-only bugs? Second, Apple has reserved the right to block an application from being made available for iOS devices through its App Store. It'd face a lot more uproar if it tried to block a web application from being made compatible with the Safari browser.
Hopefully, with a relatively fine-grained exception system that allows this to be overridden explicitly when it makes sense to.
This raises two questions: First, how would a non-technical user learn to operate "a relatively fine-grained exception system" with the appropriate balance between safety and convenience? Second, how would a developer go about proving its application worthy of such an exception?
So your alternative is to make the browser broken in a way that some things that now work fine will just never work again?
"Broken"? Are you seriously arguing that everything is working fine now? Look, I have no idea if this proposal by Google is a good idea or not and I wasn't commenting on that. I'm merely arguing that the "solutions" proposed by the post I responded to are non-starters. You aren't going to educate developers into doing the Right Thing. There are ALWAYS idiots out there making crap code and by and large the only way to deal with them is with technical constraints. A lot of developers just aren't as good as they think they are or the people paying their salaries aren't willing to pay the cost of Doing It Right. Putting technical constraints on a bit of technology can be a net gain if done right because it forces those same idiots to do things in a sane(r) manner. Some can handle the flexibility but lots more developers really actually do need some lanes for them to follow.
A good example of a constraint that worked out well is how Apple forced developers to use touch and did not provide a stylus for the iPad/iPhone for a long time. Developers on Windows historically tended to be lazy and treat the stylus as a sort of exotic mouse rather than the completely different writing device it really is. You've probably seen some of their work with a touch interface clumsily layered on to a mouse driver - it almost always sucks. And because they weren't forced to do it Right they never really wrote the software to take full advantage of a touch and stylus interface. Apple had to introduce an artificial constraint to force them to actually write software that wasn't just a minimal update of software designed for a keyboard and mouse. Developers and the companies that pay their salaries are to a degree understandably lazy and often don't want to do more than they have to if they have something that kinda-sorta-works.
Also the notion that you could introduce a tool that would make web browsing faster and have only developers use it only for debug is ridiculous. Literally everyone would use such a tool whether or not it was a good idea. You would, I would, and so would everyone you know.