At 43yo I probably belong to the older folks on HN, but those modern devices all of us carry in our pockets to me seem just absolutely incredible and magical. They probably can run around machines that took up whole rooms just a few decades ago.
At the risk of sounding like an old fart (I probably do), I fail to understand this frustration of normal mobile users with the so-called slowness of their mobile experience. To quote CK Lewis: "Give it a second! It’s going to space! Can you give it a second to get back from space!??"
The issue is that the slowness is unnecessary. No, I cannot give it a second when it should only take 100ms. There is such a thing as pride in craft that seems sorely lacking today. I could not live with myself if I had build a quarter of the websites I deal with daily. I don't know all of the causes, but I certainly understand the frustration.
To be fair, though, this applies to most types of products.
If you buy a cheap plastic hammer from a dollar store, you shouldn't expect it to break rocks like a bespoke carbon steel ball-peen.
But if you buy a cheap website from a bottom-barrel contractor, you're allowed to be baffled at why people don't like using it. It's just a website, for crying out loud.
The basic stuff loads lightning fast. And then the Javascript ad garbage starts loading. 20 seconds later and 15 domain lookups later, your page finally becomes responsive.
So, what is happening is that AMP is removing everything except Google served ads and that makes everything nice and fast.
It's true of client side rendering in general. If you're targeting mobile and get most of your traffic from search results then you should be looking at aggressively lightweight sites.
* Top bar with a damn small company logo and navigation links. Top bar does not follow the user down the page. Your logo isn't that cool and nobody is using your navigation links half way though an article.
* No fancy or dynamic layouts. No scrolling effects. No bars that follow them down the page. No floating buttons. No animations. No 'expandable' content. No hamburger menus (they're lazy design anyway).
* Minimal CSS. Sane font settings focusing on readability. No web fonts. Use the system default sans serif for the article content.
* Email solicitation exists as an in-band static form at the end of the page (or the beginning if you really can't help yourself).
* Use text placeholders for images and use JS to load them at the request of the user. Or more generally, only use JS to reduce the traffic over the wire.
* (If you must) Use a tracking pixel rather than something like GA or Piwik.
Honestly, one Piwik/GA/whatever is not going to make the page super heavy. The problem happens when a website is managed by an organization where every department adds their own fucking analytics code and the site ends up with like ten fucking trackers.
Whether or not we want people to "slow down", that's not how people actually are. The data is overwhelming that even slight (i.e. 100 ms) reductions in speed result in significant losses and bounce rates: https://blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-late...
Nitpick but your request is most likely not going to space. You're going to a cell tower that's at most a mile away from you, and that tower is probably linked with fiber and copper to all the routers on the net. Even if for some reason you go through a satellite link it's in earth orbit and not technically 'outer space'. It's still pretty magical but at the end of the day it's just a fancier wireless telegraph.
The person you're replying to just used the space quote as an example of saying "hey, this is frickin' amazing and you're complaining because it takes a second to load‽" And the space part is amazing when it's space and the non-space internet stuff in your pocket is amazing too, and let's not forget it.
> "hey, this is frickin' amazing and you're complaining because it takes a second to load‽
If it takes a second to load it's not amazing now is it.
Also, that "be happy with what you've got" attitude is not helpful. If everyone thought like that we'd still be living in caves. Don't focus on the good stuff, focus on what sucks, that's the stuff that needs fixing. The good stuff doesn't need our attention, it's already good.
On the contrary, we NEED to focus on BOTH the good and bad. If you don't focus on the bad, you won't fix it. If you don't focus on the good, you won't work to protect and preserve it!
Mobiles might have fast CPUs but if you're on a slow mobile connection there's plenty of ways you can write web pages that will stall for many seconds before anything gets rendered.
Especially if you're on the move, having to wait around while a page loads some information you need now is frustrating. There's lots of statistics about how users will abandon websites that don't load quick enough.
It's a resource problem. The average website is in megabytes(that's expensive in emerging markets), loads lots of JavaScript on small devices draining battery.
Even if we take Louis CK's standard, a lot of sites would take more than 10 seconds on 3g. From a webdev point of view this is unacceptable.
At the risk of sounding like an old fart (I probably do), I fail to understand this frustration of normal mobile users with the so-called slowness of their mobile experience. To quote CK Lewis: "Give it a second! It’s going to space! Can you give it a second to get back from space!??"