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Comment by ClearAndPresent | Hacker News Reader

The article goes on to explain that they are optimising for extremely low spec devices used by financially and socially disadvantaged users. The majority of their users load pages in less than 1s (likely due to caching and connection). Some users take 25s or more to load a page. It is for these edge cases they were testing.

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If they're concerned about financially and socially disadvantaged users perhaps the place to start helping those people would be on the universal credit login page which currently delivers 100+ kb of javascript for a couple of form fields.

They're testing against a hypothetical user on a 2G cellular connection. I can't see many situations where that would happen. Being poor doesn't mean you can't afford 3G because every data plan in the UK includes 4G as a mimimum. Often 5G is included too. You have to be extremely rural to drop down to 2G and rural people are often better off. Poorer people tend to be in urban areas that have better digital infrastructure.

I think it is a great mindset to try to be as inclusive as possible. It might actually improves everyone’s experience.

You're conflating having a 5G connection with a 5G connection running fast. Now, I live in the US, so maybe the UK has much better infrastructure, but cell phone internet service can be slow anywhere. I've had that 5G link with full bars in the middle of a city and could barely pull anything. The difference with me having money to spend is I can easily do any number of things about it, such has have a different internet service at home, or pay to stay get something in an internet cafe while 'working from home'.

Sounds like you live in a big city? In the rest of the UK, there are many many places, even in large towns of 100k+ people, where the mobile signal is absolutely terrible. Whether it's 4G or not doesn't matter if the signal is too weak to sustain a reasonable speed.

They're testing against actual RUM data collected from the site and linked in the article.

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