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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices (danluu.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Interesting quantitative look at web performance and how designs made for people with high-end devices can be practically unusable for people on low-end devices, which disproportionately affects poorer people and people in developing countries. Also discusses how sites game Google's performance metrics—maybe not news to the web devs among ye, but it was new to me. The arrogance of the Discourse founder was astounding.

RETVRN to static web pages.^[Although even static web pages can be fraught—see his other post on speeding up his site 50x by tearing out a bunch of unnecessary crap.]

Also, from one of the appendices:

In principle, HN should be the slowest social media site or link aggregator because it's written in a custom Lisp that isn't highly optimized and the code was originally written with brevity and cleverness in mind, which generally gives you fairly poor performance. However, that's only poor relative to what you'd get if you were writing high-performance code, which is not a relevant point of comparison here.

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago

Also when it comes to loading times your dealing with packets which have a set size. So sometimes you can have a situation where a single extra kilobyte literally doubles the time to load the site. Because if you can fit the entire site into a single packet it loads much faster, but as soon as you need 2 packets it has to wait for them all to fully load. I was reading an article about that a few months ago.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Thanks for sharing (and thanks to @[email protected] for finding the link for) that article! Really interesting stuff. I knew the basics of TCP and Ethernet frames, but I didn't know about the TCP slow start thing. I've been thinking about building my own static website, so I'll keep this in mind when I do tackle that project.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I'm on an old laptop and every browser I've used outside of chrome just chugs, which sucks because it's google, but for some reason chrome is snappier on older hardware from what I've seen.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago

Likely due to the chromium stranglehold on modern web dev. Not sure which browsers you’ve tried but it might be worth trying something like edge, brave, or ungoogled chromium all are chromium-based but not a google product technically.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

I'll have to try out chromium.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Literally this site right here is a bloated pile of crap.

None of you need active updates for all the elements on screen! Just compile a static page on the server side and send it over!

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Happily, we do have a nice (read-only) static version of Hexbear coded up by our very own @[email protected]: diethex.net! Here's the announcement post with more details; it's also linked in the sidebar on the home page. Funnily enough, in said announcement post someone links to an article which discusses the very blog post I posted here, so we've come full circle!

(also yes, kota is aware that spoilers don't currently work)

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Thank you for the wonderful and informative reply!

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I wish there was a native Linux app for Lemmy. It would be a lot of work to make though. There are Android and iOS apps though.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I'm really disappointed by how bloated the lemmy frontend has become. Like, if they just cut the hyperlink preview/embed features that nobody needs it would already be a good bit lighter. There used to be an alternate lemmy frontend that emulated being a phpbb forum that was unfortunately abandoned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

Also there is lem.el for emacs which works but it's kinda basic and rough around the edges.

Honestly, if I was in charge of lemmy it would look basically like the site linked in the OP. And I'd also think about making it accessible from gopher/gemini.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I'm pretty sure there's already a massive frontend rewrite in the works that is meant for after v1.0 of the backend is ready.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Cool article and website!

Wish they'd test out some non-Western websites. And more stuff that doesn't also have native apps that you're supposed to use instead (and what they optimize for. Why bother optimizing a website people aren't even supposed to use?).

They quote a Discourse developer who has a lot of elitism about what kinds of devices people use. And I googled Discourse (I've used it before actually) and the tagline that shows up in Google is "Discourse is the place to build civilized communities". Hmmm... "civilized"...

The article mentions good reasons to optimize websites, such as to get more users. I guess a lot of companies basically just think paying more developers to optimize their sites costs them more money than they want to spend, even though they could get more users. Companies already adopt "web technologies" partially because there is such a large pool of developers they can hire from.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I've found that a lot of the larger companies, big international corporations with layers and layers of people between any one decision, no one really cares as long as everyone plays along and says the right things. The line goes up or they do layoffs and then the line goes up. That's all it ever seems to be. They would rather people say nothing negative and do terrible work slowly than try to improve anything about the working environment.

Even productivity can't be analysed critically without everyone thinking you're trying to topple the entire company or something.

this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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