alt Hacker NewsI 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...
Replies
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.
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.
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.