Imagine loading this page in the 90s though! One new HTTP connection at a time, a full TCP handshake. Maybe if you were lucky you were using Netscape which would load up to 4 resources at once!
8MB would take all night on my 2400 baud modem.
We were hacking back then too.
pipelining:true
(Not really a hack, but a lesser known optimization)
I remember enabling this in Firefox. Why wasn't it the default?
I believe they had reports of popular transparent proxies that broke with it set, and the users involved typically weren't in a situation to not use those proxies.
This is of course why we now have QUIC now, and why it's explicitly designed to be as opaque as practically possible to middleboxes.
So... on par with any modern website (minus the 90s)?
As theandrewbailey said, it would absolutely benefit from HTTP/2 - it took about 30 seconds to complete on my fast cable connection on a laptop.
And with higher latency it’s even worse: from Australia, latency to the server was over 350ms (going the long way round, via the USA, for some reason), and it took 80 seconds to load. With HTTP/2, it could have taken as little as two seconds to load, and I’d expect it to take less than eight seconds.
This site would benefit greatly from HTTP 2.0, but it's kinda cool to see each banner load one after another.
Or even more, data: URIs.
The authentic 28.8k modem experience.
Some do fail to load for me, yet they then do load when I right click them to open them in a new tab.
Yeah, the speed at which it loaded definitely brought back that 90s feeling.
Loads as fast as modern YouTube.
I saw the slow loading of the page, and it made me confident that Hacker News will take it down soon enough.