
Page Weight Matters (2012) - janvdberg
http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
======
user812
The web has become a three-class system:

\- Creators and tech-savvy people are able to cut out the bloat and enjoy a
fast and secure web because they live in rich countries with good
infrastructure

\- The average user. Ironically the first group creates the bloated web to
extract money from the average user. The average user in rich countries can
count on the infrastructure to have at least an acceptable browsing
experience.

\- People in poor countries like Africa, which need to count on browsers like
Opera to compress the web, to make it usable at all. Even with compression
techniques everything is still a struggle, because the average size of web
pages seems to increase more and more.

~~~
tobr
I had not expected to have to point this out on HN of all places, but Africa
is not a country.

~~~
user812
English isn't my first language, so I made a translation mistake there.

~~~
posterboy
It's 99% countryside, forest and mountains, so it's not all that wrong, is it?

------
xg15
This also shows how important it is to keep in mind whether or not you know
about the causes of an effect or just about correlations:

> _... somehow the numbers were showing that it was taking LONGER for videos
> to load on Feather. ... I was just about to give up on the project, with my
> world view completely shattered, when my colleague discovered the answer:
> geography._

If the colleague hadn't had that hunch, he might really have given up and
changed his world view - and we might have an "actually, studies at google
show that lean pages are _bad_ for latency" meme going around now, keeping
people from fighting page bloat.

------
3pt14159
I have a general question. How hard is it to render a page on computer X but
display it on computer / phone Y?

I don't want a proxy. I want a headless browser on a server somewhere and a
head in my pocket. Something like Ember Fastboot, but for everything. Ideally
it could reduce image size via aggressive lossy compression.

When I'm travelling around the most frustrating thing is not being able to
browse the web on my phone because websites are garbling down 5mb a load and
opening up a bunch of tracker connections.

~~~
jotto
I made a SaaS does this:
[https://www.prerender.cloud/](https://www.prerender.cloud/)

    
    
      curl https://service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://google.com/ > out.jpg
    

and a chrome extension that doesn't return a screenshot, but:

1\. disables JavaScript 2\. pre-renders the site (executes the JS) 3\. returns
HTML

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prerendercloud-
dis...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prerendercloud-disable-
js/bdbogimamneemjcpjaoeemndoopldiig)

[https://github.com/sanfrancesco/prerendercloud-
chromeextensi...](https://github.com/sanfrancesco/prerendercloud-
chromeextension)

~~~
3pt14159
This is almost exactly what I want. I have two things that I still want
thought:

1\. (And this is obvious, I know, but...) I want to run your stack on my own
gear.

2\. I want this to work on my phone, which is, unfortunately an iPhone so
browser extensions are blocked by Apple policy. I'd have to create my own
browser. Yuck.

As an aside, are you caching public tweets, etc, by any chance?

~~~
jotto
2 layers of caching:

1\. a configurable cache per URL that defaults to 5-minutes (can be disabled
or increased up to 1 month)

2\. and non-configurable http caching within chrome (cache-control headers),
but since the cluster is auto-scaled, this cache naturally purges every few
hours.

------
jwilk
(2012)

Discussed in 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957992)

And in 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393930)

~~~
A2017U1
It's quite disheartening to ponder solutions to this stuff and yet see that
discussion 6 years ago from far more capable people.

Perhaps the vast majority of Internet consumers is actually ok with the status
quo.

~~~
jim-jim-jim
I don't think they're okay with it; they just can't pinpoint the problem, and
resign themselves to the "fact" that using a computer is an inherently slow
and unreliable experience, since it's been that way for as long as they can
remember.

Older and non-technical people are just as vexed by bloated pages as anybody
else, but without the language to describe the problem, they seem more likely
to blame the reliability of their connection or even the age of their hardware
rather than the poor design choices that web authors make. I've saved multiple
people from replacing their "old" phones by showing them how to toggle
javascript.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Or _" viruses"_. This is what I usually hear from my non-tech family &
friends. "Could you take a look at my computer? It's acting slow, I probably
have some viruses."

Turns out it's not viruses, it's ever increasing website bloat that very
quickly renders reasonable machines unusable. A good portion of it can be
eliminated by installing an ad blocker, but this still makes people throw away
perfectly good machines, because companies on the web don't care about user
experience.

