Thread: Rant: internet gets faster, then slower

I've been so humbled-into-submission by the internet over here for the past 5 years, that anything even resembling the appearance of speed like bad ADSL is going to feel blindly fast when I return to Europe. And it's not just the sluggish speed or intermitent access. Also the unbelievable high price. But truth be told it made me hone my skills to the level of excellence on such things as configuring ad and script blockers and taught me to separate the essential from the non-essential. You'd be amazed, for instance, of how efficient and perfectly usable 360p videos are on youtube, or how much of our web browsing is completely accessory and can be entirely avoided by some alternative. For instance, like reading my news on newsbeuter and elinks without losing on anything, despite the fact I could use a more decent browser for that effect.

Have you considered using Ad Block? It can speed up webpage loading times.

Yep, I know what you mean. The ads, the bloated javascript and the unnecessary reinventing the wheel crap (I'm looking at YOU, Ajax).

BUT, adblockers take care of the ads (go uBlock), enabling click-on-play for plugins takes care of the memory-sucking page bloating garbage, making some pages mean and lean again. There's no efficient way of blocking HTML5 videos, though. For some unfathomable reason, all videos start auto-playing or auto-loading. That has to be horrible for those on small bandwidth quotas.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

What's wrong with AJAX? O_o

I'm certainly not denying that sites are now becoming bloated, over-designed and attempting to do things that JS was never meant to do but AJAX? AJAX is your friend, man. Browsers only do GET and POST. XHR lets you use PATCH. That's hecka fancy.

I mentioned some problems some time ago. Already forgotten?

Anyway, the problem is that web developers are using it incorrectly most of the time. Abusing it. Have you seen the pages that load dynamic content on the page whenever you scroll to the bottom, for example? That's an example of an abuse of AJAX and it's very common today.

To understand what's wrong with it, consider these questions:
- What happens if the request times out?
- What happens if the request takes a long to complete?
- What happens if the user reloads the page?
- What happens if the user closes and reopens the later?
- What happens if the user bookmarks the page?
- What happens if the user sends a link to a friend?
- What happens if you load too much content in a page? (Hint: Page becomes sluggish.)

There's some other stuff too:
- What happens if a user wants to access product at page X? Are they going to have to keep scrolling down until they reach products on page X?
- What happens to all the stuff you've loaded onto the page that the user has scrolled past?

This stuff is all handled by the browser if you're using HTML pages with CSS. If you start using AJAX to dynamically fill your pages, you're going to have to deal with these problems yourself, and you know what? Most devs don't realize it and don't do it at all. Which makes for a very poor user experience.

Yeah, AJAX can be used properly to create a good user experience, but you need experience to do that properly, because it's not easy.

And its even bad design most of the time. Below that automatic scroll is often the webpage footer, where some important links reside, like Contacts, About Us and Feeds. And even on my slow sleep, often I find myself racing against the automatic scroll to click those damn things. On some cases I've been forced to get those links from the page source.

I keep saying, website designers and developers should all be chained and sent towards the closest star. They belong in the B Ark.

Originally Posted by Elysia

I mentioned some problems some time ago. Already forgotten?

Apparently? A search for posts containing "AJAX" under your name returns no results.

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I'd be compelled to agree with more examples, but I just can't agree simply because Elysia asked some design questions. You can find important design questions for potentially any layout you want. It seems to me that sites like twitter (which is a site I use to crap-post) has answers for all of the questions, so it isn't like there isn't a good answer or that they're problems being ignored. That said, I don't really have the expertise to even say or debate the answers that twitter uses. I just know that you can get a direct link to a tweet, bookmark it, refresh, whatever and it's fine.

Originally Posted by Elysia

- What happens if a user wants to access product at page X? Are they going to have to keep scrolling down until they reach products on page X?
- What happens to all the stuff you've loaded onto the page that the user has scrolled past?

I'd be really interested to know what stores, selling products, use AJAX for an endless scroll, because it's not something I've seen anywhere. It would be one thing if it were endemic to the ebays, amazons, and department store websites of the world, but I just don't see the abuse that often.

The last major redesign I actually witnessed was for J-list, (NSFW) This is the old version, for comparison. The new version can be slow at times, but there isn't really a technical reason to disagree because J-list was cumbersome to use on mobile phones.

Originally Posted by Epy

Just really mad at the whole situation. Like websites used to be simple and small, and so then once the internet got faster, those pages loaded super fast.

But, it seems like the general notion with both web and desktop dev is that "oh, computers are faster now, we're free to be super wasteful with computer resources!"

Clearly what everyone is concerned about is how "nice" things look and not actual functionality/usability.

I do agree though that this is happening. Not necessarily saying that I feel the effects too often. To be honest, to me, it smacks of a first-world trivial problem, and I don't like to complain about minor inconveniences, but that's beside the point. "Glam" associated with web design creates pressure to look some definition of good. I've seen complaints for sites that just post articles to get a sleeker design, and to people's credit, I haven't seen them cave in to that pressure very often.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

I do agree though that this is happening. Not necessarily saying that I feel the effects too often. To be honest, to me, it smacks of a first-world trivial problem, and I don't like to complain about minor inconveniences, but that's beside the point.

Still I would like to grab that point, because it may be not so easily dismissed.

Elysia is talking about design, sure. But AJAX has an influence because it was created to answer certain design goals. Most notably dynamic content, which is the root of a certain "evil" that is more than a first-world problem.

In the context of web design, the word "product" takes many forms. It can be a product in a shopping website, or an article in a news website. Content Farms in particular are great adepts of AJAX, because it facilitates the setup of the type of short-lived information they live (some would say, prey) on. Most news websites today are content farmers, including otherwise respectable newspapers as soon as they move online. And content farmers' model demands that articles be made available for relative short periods of time, quickly replaced by new ones and then discarded and forever lost. For them Information is a consumable product, like staples or printing paper and the business is all on selling as many staples as possible. Storing links to news articles is becoming a thing of the past and collectively we all are loosing the ability of the web to remain an historical document of our world. Places like Wikipedia are today riddled with links to highly active news sources that nonetheless return 404 after 404 to news articles not 1 year old. And AJAX excels at facilitating this state of affairs where content is dynamically served and removed.

You may argue that this is a design choice, not an imposition of AJAX. AJAX can be used in other ways. Likewise you could do this with any other client or server-side technology. And I would have to agree to all those points. But AJAX is a great facilitator. Much like an accomplice, it helps setting the whole thing up, more than any other technology. And to someone concerned with certain design choices, or the more damaging effect it can have on the web, AJAX can easily become as criticize-able to some as ActionScript is, or Frames, Animated Gifs, auto-run videos/music, etc. Like them AJAX is conceptually benign, but easy to abuse. And abused it has been. Truth be told, it is not the only thing we have to face.

As far as I am concerned, I've been becoming increasingly less charmed by web trends. So, like you, I am not affected by most of the design choices facilitated by AJAX. On my case, simply because I don't visit much of the trending web these days. So, I'm less sympathetic to that particular problem. However, on the contrary, I do resent AJAX for how well it associates with the business model of the content farms, which I consider, after internet Ad providers, perhaps the most damaging business model to happen on the internet.