T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem.
While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exceed a few megabytes. I even had a few website block me because of my "ad blocker" because the adverts didn't load timely enough.
Makes me feel for people in like rural India or other places still only at 2G or similar speeds. It is great for some things, not really useable for general purpose web browsing any longer.
PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.
I use NoScript. The web is much less annoying by default, and I can still enable scripts for those sites where I think it might be useful.
There are a good number of sites now which have entirely given up on progressive enhancement and simply don't show you anything without JS... but I generally find I just don't care, and just close the tab and look at the next thing instead.
I found that, usually, the ones that don't show anything when javascript is disabled are the ones loading scripts from ajax.google.com.... it might appear to be so because google is so much larger (or maybe Google did that on purpose)
I started using "Image On/Off" and "Quick Javascript Switcher" plugins to easily toggle images and js while traveling South America in 2014 to increase speed and save costly bandwidth.
Still using them for the side effects. Its nice to be able to start reading an article immediately without waiting for the jumping around of content to stop. And actually read until the end without having modal dialogs shoven down my the throat.
> You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster.
And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy.
I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'
Well, that's quite unfair. JavaScript is also used for creating interactive web applications - not just tracking users. Really your attitude comes off unnecessarily aggressive.
There are exceptions where JS is needed. They are exceptions though. A vast majority of the sites I see now are web-pages that think they need to be SPAs. Sorry, sucks to be them, but if they didn't mis-design, I wouldn't mis-interpret their intentions.
I think it depends on what the JavaScript is used for. I agree that blogs and news site should be static, but forums - and in general, sites with a high degree of user interactivity - can see significant UX improvements with some JavaScript, for things like asynchronous loading, changing the UI without reloading the page, and even nice animations (although many of those can be done in CSS these days). However, graceful degradation is very important - disabliing JavaScript on these sites shouldn't break them, merely impact the UX.
[Edit] "blogs and news sites should be static" -> this should read "blogs and news sites don't need JavaScript"
How can one know that first time viewing a webpage? I just enable some particular websites to run JS because I know that they are indeed interactive web applications that I want to (read: have been constrained to) use. Also, most interactive web applications can stay just as interactive even though they were to reduce the amount of JS and CSS libs, fonts, images, icons, videos and other stuff that they thoughtlessly pull in. I disabled fonts loading on webpages and all the search boxes are now an "fl" ligature for me, though many times I see that it's not more cryptic then before I disabled fonts, because weird icons some people invented are just as meaningless to me as random letters. I've gotten used to the fact that an identity sign is for a meny, but every other day someone invents another one that now I can't click anything without fear and uncertainty, as most of the time no-one bothers to put a tooltip or a litte label.
It takes more work to have a bloated JS mess of a site, than it is to have a small, simple, clean site. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot in the first place.
Not really. It's very easy to get bloat if you integrate ad-networks, analytics tools, social media tools etc. willy-nilly without looking at all the resources they fetch.
The lazy approach WILL lead to bloat.
No news agency is running a plain jane HTML website.
Your kind of proving my point. If you add these things in, it's more work. If you make a plain html site, which is what these sites should be doing, then you aren't going to add that stuff in, which means less work.
I think you're forgetting content creators that aren't developers - although to be fair I don't see why you can't create an interface for the user that spits out / retroactively updates old pages/links/images.
There is definitely a trade-off between ease-of-use and cost-of-use and I feel this gap is bridged by the content created by those who could not publish bare bones.
> I think you're forgetting content creators that aren't developers
I don't understand what you mean by that. Content creators don't need to be developers for us to use simple, reliable systems.
> There is definitely a trade-off between ease-of-use and cost-of-use and I feel this gap is bridged by the content created by those who could not publish bare bones.
Yes, but I personally find the "ease of use" to be worse on heavy, slow, bulky sites. If content is "easier to use", then why are people constantly angry at slow, non-responsive interfaces? I see and feel this all the time, yet it's somehow "easier to use"? I don't see people complain when sites are fast, responsive and simple. Everyone's top complaint is that their computer/phone is "soooo slooow". Why is this, when we have extremely fast computers?
If you're hand coding it either way, maybe but, at least in my personal experience, it's much faster/less effort to drop bootstrap and jquery on the page and get to something acceptable looking then to hand code just the 50 lines of js/CSS I actually need. Obviously there are many benefits to the latter approach, especially in the long run, but it's definitely not the lazier approach.
Quite the opposite actually, people don't know how to set up a website, let aside making a simple, static one. Many websites are created on services like Squarespace, wordpress (used by many as a CMS), CMSes, Blogger, etc. And then for who knows to edit text files, it's easy to start with a tutorial and end up with a +1Mb hello-world website.
Or, they assumed everyone nowadays has a browser with javascript and don't care about people who won't accept to using js or even know about these people existing
Cannot help but chuckle at the irony when I forget to allow goog/gstatic when using gmaps and get the non-blank-page stating "without js all that's left is a blank page".
This is the main reason why Brave is my default browser: you can set the default to disable JavaScript and enable it only on sites which actually do something useful with it. My data usage dropped something like 1GB the first month I switched.
You could have used an iframe for each button instead of a normal form to prevent the reload of the page. Using an iframe with data: should take no longer to load than a normal form.
FWIW, I just tried this in Firefox (set javascript.enabled=false) and went to my bank's website to see how it would fare. Firefox crashed. Tried again with no other tabs open, still crashed. Crash report sent.
OTOH, in Chrome the website actually works fine and feels more snappy with JS disabled. So, thanks for the tip!
Can you share the crash report IDs from your Firefox's about:crashes page? Can you share a link to your bank's crashing web page? I'd like to try to reproduce the crash. Thanks!
Note though that disabling JavaScript can also slow down many sites. One good use of JavaScript is to detect the speed of the user's connection and then load in smaller and lower-quality assets. Disabling JavaScript can result in the default assets being loaded, which rapidly offsets the benefit of not loading that JS. Other sites will load in portions of the content first and use JS to load in extra chunks as requested, but load in the entirety of available content if JS is disabled, slowing down initial pageload enormously.
I can't think of a single website I know that uses JS to intelligently load thing via connection-speed sniffing. It's a nice thought, but it doesn't happen. There used to be JS fills for responsive imagery -- it was never connection-speed based, but viewport based -- but this is all browser-native these days. Some things might provide simpler assets via CDN-based UA sniffing.
Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?
High paying customers are going to have high speed connections. No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. If you are on a slow connection, they don't want your kind on their site. If you try, they will mock you for not knowing your place.
No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination.
This will make a few segments of people cringe because much like the topic of racism, there's a school of thought that it only counts when things are exhibited in severe forms like water cannons, attack dogs or restrictive housing covenants or otherwise people being directly being told 'no' because of superficial topics like race, gender or sexual orientation.
But as a tech guy who's slowly pivoting towards law, I've long held the belief that technology will become the next battle ground for civil rights-and has the potential to even change (in the sense of expanding the definition of) how we talk about civil rights. Think along the lines of people being left behind when it comes to accessing information they need to request public resources as more and more cities move towards online only forms, or even utilization of "entitlement programs" to pay for internet access (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/fcc-expands-o...).
Now it may not be active discrimination in the sense that one will be outright told 'no', but disparate impact deserves to be at the table of discussing this sort of thing.
It seems more plausible to me that they just don't want to take the trouble to support low-bandwidth connections than that they're actively pumping up the space to keep out poor people.
> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?
The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds
Yes and the average page size has sky-rocketed, despite there being no more actual content (i.e. text). Instead we have animations of images or text fading in as we scroll down a page and lots of Javascript to do things I do not know.
Kind of makes me miss the old plain HTML days - much less CPU intensive too.
It's really not about a privileged youngster, it's about business priorities. Most of the time the cost benefit ratio doesn't justify the effort to optimise for high latency high packet-loss connections. Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider.
At work we did something similar a few years ago with our Android app. We dropped support for Android 2.3 users because we only had a couple hundred of them and it didn't justify the developer cost to maintain it. WhatsApp only dropped support a month ago. I don't think that was because they were somehow less privileged than us.
The casual ageism in your comment is unbecoming. You could reconsider it.
> Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider.
Your making it usable for that 1%, but you're making it better for the other 99%.
But your optimizing things people are using frequently, not adding things they probably aren't. Adding features is usually diminishing returns as well.
I could, but I've worked with too many examples that only care about writing new code in whatever is the latest hotness and moving on. They[0] don't want to fix their bugs. They don't care about anything but "works on my machine." They certainly don't care about using bandwidth.
Bring it up! They're newer to development then you are, they're newer to life. They're far more likely to have always have had high speed internet growing up, and not have had that visceral experience. The initial reaction will probably be negative, but initial negative reactions to perceived increases in scope/work is basically a universal human trait, it's surmountable.
I've heard about ageism (like racism, but for people of different ages) since around 2000-2001. Really around the time baby boomers started getting close to retirement age and some companies decided it was a better deal to fire them or lay them off than pay the pensions they had earned, and also with the DotCom boom where startups would only hire 20-somethings. It's not really a new term.
Loading that in a simulated 2G connection takes about 80 seconds and at least 30 seconds of that is waiting to display anything you care about. Looking at the content breakdown shows why: ~200KB of webfonts, 1.2MB of JavaScript, 275KB of HTML, etc.
I live in a major city, have an iPhone 6S with good LTE coverage according to benchmarks, etc. and still routinely have AMP take 15+ seconds to render after the HTML has been received. I don't know if that's Mobile Safari applying strict cache limits or an issue in Google's side but the sales pitch isn't delivering.
Note that I did not say it always happens — when everything is cached, it performs as well as any other mobile-optimized site — or that it's specific to my device/carrier – it also happens on WiFi, Android, etc.
The problem is simply a brittle design which depends on a ton of render-blocking resources. The assumption is that those will be cached but my experience is simply that fairly regularly I'll click on a link, see the page title load (indicating the HTML response has started), and then have to wait a long time for the content to display. Many news sites also load a ton of stuff but since fewer of them block content display waiting for JavaScript, the experience under real-world wireless conditions is better in the worst case and no worse in average conditions.
Well, it would have to be downloaded once. It'd stay cached after that though so it's not really a concern. They use version numbers for cache busting.
On mobile cache sizes are very limited, and with the size of modern web pages it has to get reclaimed regularly. You can't rely on caching to solve poor performance.
I was in rural China with an EDGE connection on Google Fi last month.
Hacker News was pretty much the only site I visit that could reliably load quickly. m.facebook.com had a slight wait but was still bearable. I had to leave my phone for 10 or 15 minutes to get Google News.
WeChat and email worked well.
Everything else was horrible, especially ad networks that would ping pong several requests or load large images.
Opera has a compression proxy mode that helped a bit when it worked but it was still painful.
For search results, Stack Overflow, and YouTube, it was easier to easier to ssh into an AWS node and use elinks/youtube-dl.
Using SSH as a socks proxy/compression was insanely slow due to something with with the great firewall.
> PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.
I don't think this has changed, at least not in general. The included roaming package is still free international 2G roaming everywhere except Mexico and Canada (which get free 4G), with "high-speed data pass" upgrades available for a daily or weekly fee if you want faster. They did have a promotion for the 2nd half of 2016 (initially for the summer, then extended through the end of the year), where international 3G, and in a few areas 4G/LTE, was free without buying the upgrade passes for most of Europe and South America [1]. But that's now over, and I believe it's back to free 2G internationally now.
I use T-Mobile as my ISP because the only landline choice in my apartment building is AT&T and I absolutely refuse to do business with them. I regularly hit the monthly bandwidth cap on my plan and get booted down to 2G.
I live in California -- this is not just something people internationally are dealing with.
Annoyingly, T-Mobile's own website doesn't work properly when you're throttled to 2G speed. Found that out the hard way when I ran out of minutes on Thanksgiving and couldn't talk to my family, and couldn't load their website to add more minutes.
My 35Mbit cable got shaped down to 0.25 Mbit/s yesterday because we went over our download limit. It was like having no connection. I just gave up using it.
I hate the all-or-nothing approach to shaping. At least give me 5Mbit or something!
5mbps is a perfectly fine connection, they might as well not throttle you at all then. If they want to give you barely-usable internet, about 500kbps might be reasonable. 250kbps is quite slow indeed.
I wouldn't call 5mbps "perfectly fine", but I could do basic web browsing and email etc. And that's my point. I don't want to be shaped down to a barely-usable connection. Why do they need to shape at all? The only argument is congestion. And if there's congestion, they should shape us down to a reasonable level like 5mbps. No reason it should be all or nothing, 35Mbit or zero.
I just looked up EDGE. It's crazy to think that the first iPhone topped out at double the speed of a 56k modem. And that I actually used my iPhone on that network sometimes, when 3G wasn't available.
I had a blackberry a bit before the first iPhone. I remember getting an update wirelessly that was something like 3MB and just thought "Good, it should only be about 10 minutes this time."
FYI, I had the same connection and I'm pretty sure T-Mobile simulates 2G by switching 3G on and off to get the correct speed on average. Breaks a lot of stuff. Almost unusable!
It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices.
Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better solutions and thereby make your services better. The west and the tech centers in particular is really rather blinded by the glutinous bandwidth that keeps eating up greater and greater amounts of data with only marginal improvements in outcome or user experience.
I say this so much that I should probably just copy/paste it in the future but...
I used to work at a place that had a <1mbps modem, and a ~7 year old destkop. If their software didn't work on that, it needed to be optimized. I wish more places would test this way. Your sight may work fine in downtown SF, but that doesn't mean it's going to work well anywhere else.
T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem.
While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exceed a few megabytes. I even had a few website block me because of my "ad blocker" because the adverts didn't load timely enough.
Makes me feel for people in like rural India or other places still only at 2G or similar speeds. It is great for some things, not really useable for general purpose web browsing any longer.
PS - T-Mobile now offers 3G speeds internationally; this was just the freebie at the time.