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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.

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Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it.

It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's javascript loading, so you get no browser indication that it's actually loading), then the all the links will be wrong. That is, you get the wrong content if you click a link. It's quietly kind of amazing how they've managed to break hyperlinks, given they're a part of HTML itself and work well out of the box.

this is true, but it's because developers, designers and marketeers add loads of stuff onto it. Pages that show animated ads, CSS animations and (sometimes multiple) autoplaying videos are slow.

But there's plenty of websites out there still - including HN - that do without all of those extras. And it's up to web developers of today to resist using the fanciest technologies to build websites.

At some point there was the concept of (iirc) progressive web apps, where the basis was all HTML - fully functional, you could turn off JS and CSS and it'd still work - and then use CSS and JS to add functionality on top, but that would be purely embellishment.

hahaha just no, I remember my crappy hand me down computer was so slow it would chug and struggle to display a nice looking full screen image. You see the old web on your modern lap sized super computer. Go to the thriftstore and pickup a beige windows 95 computer setup and try navigating the web. it was slow, very very slow.

I was around back then. You don't need to tell me how it was like.

Full screen bing.com-backgrounds weren't really a thing in web design, though. Except in porn, I guess.

Can you imagine how fast those websites would be today, though, compared to modern websites?

One can easily test this. This is the performance of two semi-randomly picked websites:

- Peter Ferrie's homepage (http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1), old school: approx. 900ms

- Netflix landing page (https://www.netflix.com/de-en), modern: approx. 1.8s

Measured via Firefox "load time". Peter Ferrie is a famous security researcher.

The Netlix page is clearly 2x as slow, but the load time is far from proportional to the overall data transfer.

The HN front page, right now, takes approx. 1.7s. :)

Netflix is a bad example of modern websites, as they’ve hired really good developers to optimize the snot out of it.

I’d say, compare it to Reddit or Pinterest or something like that.

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