Comment by jcelerier
21 hours ago
I challenge you to browse the web one week on this laptop part of the current top 10 Amazon best sellers on a gigabit fiber connection and tell me if you still think that this is the problem: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Everyday-Processor-Microsoft-Porta...
Please don't brush off parent's "slow connection". Many people are stuck with that.
A prime example: cookie dialogs. On a slow connection, page loads, large parts are rendered, and you start reading. After that, some script starts to present a cookie dialog, and everything freezes. Page doesn't scroll anymore, buttons don't work, sometimes a previously-readable page is darkened or otherwise obscured so you can't keep reading while this goes on.
Then a whole bunch of stuff is downloading, which (again: "slow connection") takes forever. Like 20s+. Halfway through you see "accept / reject / settings", but none of those buttons respond (except the dark pattern where "accept" often works faster or smoother than either "reject" or "settings". Aaargh!). When things respond again, consider yourself lucky when page re-renders as before.
Which also runs afoul of 1 of my pet peeves with user interfaces: DO NOT PRESENT A UI ELEMENT UNTIL CODE TO PROCESS ITS USE, IS PRESENT IN MEMORY & READY. Really simple right? Yet I see examples ignoring this oooften.
A 'slow' CPU, low RAM/swapping etc just makes this worse. Web developers tend to have fast machines & connectivity so they may not even be aware of this. Or think it's a non-issue even though it affects many users - existing or potential.
It is a problem and plays a role, then the rest of the SPA interactions are as bad. Amplified by 100+ third party scripts.
Stop building SPA, go back to HTML. Re-assess every third party. For extra performance and scaling, implement cache. Relax and see web experience healing.
There's definitely trade-offs. I actually prefer a proper SPA to pure HTML when on a slow connection and interacting with a site a lot.
Especially when trying to buy something. I much prefer to have a longer initial load and then have everything just work instead of waiting as I navigate between pages, the multi stage checkout, confirmation etc.
But yeah, if I'm just trying read a single article on a blog, preloading everything is pointless. A hybrid site with the initial page being server side rendered + progressive enhancement afterwards is theoretically optimal in my opinion.
You typically still have to wait for API calls between interactions, but error handling and number of requests (linked to experience on slow connection) tend to be worse.
If that's a connection-less interaction or something small that stays on the same page, sure it makes sense to keep it in the browser. You don't need to build your whole site as a bloated SPA just for few limited use-cases.
These people definitely have an overly rosy view of the past. The sites that are dog slow shit ux now still would be with server rendered html and jquery spaghetti, just like they were in the past.
Ever submit some giant form to get some random error and then lose the entire state of it? Used to be extremely common, even though it shouldn’t have been.
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In London in many apartment blocks one can only get wired internet via an old copper cable with speeds like 80mbit/s download in theory but in practice it can be below 30 with ping in 50ms range and much slower upload. And 5g does not help either as the signal can be very weak.
Try 10mbit/s down for a copper connection 30 min drive from Auckland (NZ) CBD Thank God for StarLink and other wireless options.
Okay so that's no excuse for whoever is providing your internet, coax can deliver 800+ Mbps no problem. And if you are actually saying you only get DSL through a phone line in London then holy shit I would be busting down the door of my landlord. They never in the last half a century got wired for cable?!
A phone line from before WWII works fine to make a call but absolutely sucks for DSL.
And in London many buildings are declared as historic making it hard to get a permit for any work. The best chance is to wait until old pipes bursts and digging has to be done in any case to put fiber along the pipes.
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I was using a laptop with windows 10 and 4GB of ram and an anemic CPU a few times a month two years ago. Even with a fast network, a laptop with no ram is gonna be slow to browse, and bloated pages are gonna be slower.
It will certainly help to download the bloat faster, but you've still got to do all the hydration as OP put it.
Based on my experiences with windows 11, that laptop seems like it will be quite a bit worse than the one I was using, even though mine probably has a much worse cpu.
> 【Processor】AMD Processor
> 【Graphics】 Intel Graphics
And this is why you don't buy laptops from Amazon. At best, the seller has no idea what they're doing, at worst, this is fraud.
my point is that as programmers we have to take into account that the average human today has a computer that likely struggles to open Win11 notepad. I don't buy random laptops from amazon, but an astonishingly high amount of people do and we have to work with that
Try it yourself on a gigabit internet. Put CPU throttling in devtools to 10x slowdown (assuming you have a fast computer) and see how fast it is even with super fast internet.