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Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly enough, both the best and the worst experiences I've had on the web lately both belonged to tools-and-hardware suppliers: McMaster.com and HomeDepot.com, respectively.

Everything about McMaster-Carr's site is built for speed and ease. I can literally have an idea, find the category, identify the specific part, and complete an order in about twenty seconds. (I've done this during a phone call. In the time it took my coworker to articulate the part he was looking for and finish his sentence, I was able to reply "It'll be here tomorrow.")

HomeDepot on the other hand sometimes takes 20 or 30 seconds to render the page to the point that I can see prices. I just checked with a page whose URL was already in my history, an unusually brisk 7 seconds. (Gag!) How do they screw it up so bad? I honestly don't understand how a web page can take so long to do anything.

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There is something _wrong_ with HomeDepot.com. It managed to send my poor laptop into swap hell/thrashing, which wasn't too surprising as that machine is always short on RAM. That it could do the same to a beefy workstation (16 cores, 64GB RAM), though... that was impressive. Whatever is wrong there, it hits memory especially hard.

I got a beefy one so I got curious to see this. And here is the response I got:

Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.homedepot.com/" on this server.

Reference #18.669a1702.1607500613.3482d63b

I lol'ed.

Same here, EU, think they block based on geo data?

They probably do. Since, I left the US on vacation, I've noticed a lot of US-only retail sites are blocked outside of the states.

For example Safeway, a popular grocery chain, is blocked.

Sometimes the block comes with a scary warning saying that the site has detected a hacking attempt, and stopped your IP at the firewall.

Interestingly, loading homedepot.com from Singapore gives me the full site and automatically sets my ordering location to their store in Guam...

I made a web proxy about 10 years ago - you can stick it on a raspberry pi or some cloud server and then use it to browse from that machine's IP. It doesn't work for everything (e.g. OAuth) but it's fast and convenient for a lot of things.

Core library: https://github.com/nfriedly/node-unblocker Example web app: https://github.com/nfriedly/nodeunblocker.com

I don't keep a copy of it online anymore because the ones I put up got a little too popular, but if you don't tell anyone else, you should be able to use it indefinitely.

Local news sites are the worst for it. It's understandable, but it sometimes makes reading HN a pain

It works for me from Belgium, but not from France.

GDPR

Are you connected to a VPN I get the same issue with Fred Meyer from a vpn.

I think that's the "easy" way to manage GDPR that lots of non-EU (particularly from the USA) site are using:

- EU IP? Blocked.

It's beyond silly.

It's not: they don't operate in the EU, they don't want to give up their tracking, and they don't want to conform to EU privacy measures. That's perfectly fine, and simply denying EU visitors is the easiest and cheapest solution.

But then, it should respond with a 451 error rather than a generic 403 :)

So "big brother" that want to track everything use a reference to 1984 to criticize a law that protect against it ? Perfect double speak in action (sadly).

The 451 code (which, by the way, is a reference to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, not Orwell's 1984) just says that a resource is "unavailable for legal reasons". These "legal reasons" may be user-hostile (e.g., censorship) or user-friendly (e.g., GDPR).

Having said that, it's just good form to specify why exactly a request was denied rather than spitting out an "access denied" response and call it a day. Be liberal in what you receive, conservative in what you send, yada yada.

Indeed, for some reasons the two books are very near in my memory and each time I think to one of them memories of the other comes.

Not doing anything special is easier and cheaper though. As long as they don't target EU customers, GDPR doesn't apply to them.

So more explicitly, since they don't operate in the EU, don't seem to be owned by a multi-national that does, they wouldn't have to worry about GDPR, someone else is worried? And that's likely whatever ad slinging network or tracking they use?

Eh, it's better than the alternative of a giant annoying useless popup.

The page loaded fairly fast in my case, but my laptop sounds like it's about to take off. An excellent example on how a web site should _not_ be built. :D

I loaded it and was surprised to find it loaded instantly, and worked and looked fine. Then I realised uMatrix was blocking JS. Explains a lot.

I have 8GB RAM and it loaded fast for me. Shrug.

Wow. I know absolutely jack shit about home improvement etc., but that McMaster.com site is just a joy to browse. A temporary relief from the "modern web".

It's like I'm querying a well set up database, but without having to type SQL.

While not horrible on mobile, it could do with some work. It would be easy to make it perfect on mobile while retaining basically the same UI and with zero performance penalty

I’ve been a mechanical engineer for some time. McMaster is an institution. Their catalog is still an iconic presence in engineering departments and you’re right, their site is incredible.

Even for professionals you often don’t know what to call a part, but punch in a few words and it “gets” what you’re going for. Add tot hat pretty reliable next day shipping even when ordering at 4pm and it’s not so surprising that Amazon hasn’t eaten them, even though they launched Amazon Industrial like ~7-10y ago

Wow, the McMaster-Carr's site is downright awesome. I wish I could use it in Europe. I'd like to hug this site developers.

Yup, worked in a US lab back around 2005. Now back in the EU, I find that in most areas online stores have caught up, but on hardware nothing yet comes close to McMaster-Carr.

One thing I only realized when living in the US is that the reason that online shopping is so much more advanced in the US than in the EU is not just the more homogeneous market. Due to tax rules (state sales tax on mail orders) mail order has always had a competitive edge in the US, leading to a many companies already being set up with a deep back-catalogue and strong inventory metadata when the internet hit.

When buying electronic components, either RS or Mouser (can't remember which one right now) is super slow and fails a lot. Something like this would be awesome. (I know it's millions of references, but...)

Octopart. You're welcome. ;)

Same here. I have no tool/hardware needs at the moment but I'm having a blast navigating the site.

I think one of the reasons that it is so fast is that all the small images are monochrome PNGs. Really well thought out and to my eyes it looks rather stylish.

Yeah, it's way better than Conrad or Manomano, who both use the same shitty layout you get from every etailer : gigantic full-page promotional material and some top categories in the middle to start navigating things. And in the end you have to tinker with filters for 5 minutes before narrowing it down to probably maybe the right part.

Haven't tried Conrad, but Manomano it's a mess if you wanna look for something concrete. Once you enter in a category, it's like searching in eBay. It's so difficult to search by brand, model or specs...

It's kinda small for my liking, but I've got a big screen and didn't bother zooming in. Only niggly thing is that page clicks create a spinner; one thing they could do to improve is to pre-render everything, given that what I clicked on was just category pages.

I've had great experiences with Gatsby on Netlify in that regard, we've built a number of websites using it. With Gatsby you get the benefits of a React webapp but without the downsides, things like preloading on hover, instant rendering, service workers acting as content caches, etc.

> With Gatsby you get the benefits of a React webapp but without the downsides

Instead Gatsby just brings its own set of downsides. Gatsby does not scale very well and has horrific dev and build times when it needs to ingest a medium quantity of entries.

I work a lot with distribution/manufacturers and I always use McMaster as the de facto way to do things.

I am impressed by McMaster's search engine : every product is standardised and the search options really works. Amazon should really take note, their search engine is stuck at Stone age.

Maybe a search engine that doesn't quite work and pushes a lot of unwanted crap at you on the offchance you'll buy it on a whim benefits Amazon, if not the customer.

The customer is always part of the decision making at Amazon. /s

Just checked McMaster, I would wager that a lot of what makes it great is the information architecture, from how it's probably modeled in the DB and how it's queried, to how it's presented in terms of UX.

I think the difference is the marketing approach. HomeDepot takes a very modern approach of controlling and measuring everything the user does. This needs a ton of code and some absolutely ridiculous stuff no one here would ever build if they were told to redo the site.

The McMaster-Carr mug is an example of marketing done right. It says "we're here to do precisely what you want in exchange for money."

That's funny, I was just thinking this exact same thing the other day. HomeDepot.com has been getting seemingly worse and worse (especially this year if I'm not mistaken), but had to get some stuff from McMaster a few months back and it was refreshing to be reminded of how useable their website is.

That McMaster-Carr page is something else; they also use `fetch` very efficiently IMHO. Auto-focus on quantities as well ... that's how it's done.

I've always been curious about HD's website. Surely being so slow costs them a lot of missed sales? I would think a large successful retailer understands that. Is it just bureaucracy or do they genuinely think their website isn't important?

You should see the internal crap...

Talking about the worst: LinkedIn’s mobile web site. Horrible to the point of being unusable. One could argue it’s a good thing.

Why single out their mobile web site? The non-mobile site is just as wretched. I just tried it and it took 24 seconds to finish loading (17 seconds before it was useful). Over 300 round-trip queries, and I have all ads and trackers disabled.

They obviously know how bad their experience is because they throw up an animated splash screen while waiting for their page to load.

I'd assumed that was at least somewhat intentional, to encourage use of the app.