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Comment by dm33tri | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes when I have a very limited connection on mobile, nothing helps the web and no pages would load over https, even if it's just plain HTML. And if the connection drops, then it almost certainly won't recover and full page reload is necessary.

Other protocols may work much better in such conditions, for example popular messengers can send and receive text, metadata and blurry image previews just fine. In some cases even voice calls are possible, but not a single website would load ever.

I think HN crowd won't notice the changes. I hope that the protocol would improve experience for smartphone users without reliable 4G connection.

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> for example popular messengers can send and receive text,

Your messenger isn't sending tens of megabytes for every message.

> metadata and blurry image previews just fine.

One might wonder why they don't just send the 4 MB JPEGs instead of those down scaled to hell previews if they work so well.

> . In some cases even voice calls are possible

Not only kilobytes of data, but kilobytes of data where transmission errors can be completely ignored. I have been in enough VoIP calls to notice how "well" that works in bad conditions.

Everything points to putting websites on a diet being the correct solution.

> And if the connection drops, then it almost certainly won't recover and full page reload is necessary.

I would consider that a browser bug. No idea why the connection wont just timeout and retry by itself.

> Everything points to putting websites on a diet being the correct solution.

It would help a lot but it's not a full solution. You also need to stop TCP from assuming that every lost packet is because of congestion, or it will take a slow connection and then underload it by a huge factor.

Yeah, one of the major uses of http/3 is that it can gracefully handle connection interruptions and changes, like when you switch from wifi to mobile, without having to wait for the tcp stream to timeout. That's a huge win for both humongous web apps and hackernews' idealized static webpage of text and hyperlinks.

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