Website Fidelity
blog.jim-nielsen.com
blog.jim-nielsen.com
It had random timeouts, and streaming was impossible in all but the lowest resolutions (144p).
Other people might just feel like not paying for overpriced internet, even if they have money (boycott).
Lower fidelity would also mean to restrict tracking. Good luck with that. Internet advertising and data mining companies are not exactly renowned for their moral and ethical integrity. They would have no issue draining the data plan of a hurricane victim with ads for homeowners insurance.
It also means more work building those sites. Which is not something I see happening, given that in most projects there is little time to fix structural issues as is. Why fix bugs or optimize payloads when you can ship features?
I would also bet that if lower fidelity meant less (or no) ads, many people would use lower fidelity as a workaround for not having to see them. Which would be exactly what the world needs but is, again, entirely misaligned with most online companies’ economic interests.
Unless the incentives change, websites will continue to bloat until they break.
and
> websites will continue to bloat until they break
There's a reason that small startups can shake up an industry and become sudden leaders. Some of them dare to take the unconventional (or uncommon) approach, instead aiming to provide a better service to customers.
So many popular websites today would be infinitely better if they were stripped down to very minimal html and images. Users would probably be more likely to visit them more often. For example, have you ever tried to view cnn.com on a phone? On my relatively high performance iPhone 12 Pro, that website is laggy and full of absolute garbage stuff scattered all around the "content". It's so bad that I rarely go there. The same is true for many other media sites.
TheVerge has just done the same thing, turning what was once a fairly decent site into a clusterf*ck which I no longer visit.
Of course the real problem with many of these sites is that if you strip out the crap, leaving the focus on content, you may find that there really is no content. What's there may be so underwhelming that you leave and never come back. I suspect they know this, so that's why they stuff more and more teaser items on the page. Curiosity is hard to overcome, so viewers will probably stay longer, even if they ultimately leave unsatisfied.
Admittedly, headline authorship has been discarded in favor of clickbait, and text isn't as eye-catching as images, so the site and articles are weirdly uncompelling when compared to the main site or other news sources. Celebrity gossip and scandals just fall flat in text, making it much easier to glean the handful of factual data points from the deluge of noise.
That doesn't seem to be the default presentation I get when I browse on my phone, via Firefox or Safari. That a lite version exists is great, but if it's invisible (unless you know, and you enter the URL manually), it might as well not exist.
Tomorrow does not need to be the same as today. It is called progress. It starts with ideas like this.
> websites will continue to bloat until they break.
And this may be the economic incentive driving this progress.
Even if you threw everything away and started from scratch, as long as you could get away with earning those extra few cents per page impression, it will ultimately be done this way. Given enough time, most will follow and you’re back to square one.
It is technically superior, but in my opinion not very good for business.
As it happens, the document is not minified. With minification and with a much lighter and less needlessly-indirect implementation of the JS parts, high would be about 9.7KB on the wire, compared to about 6.6KB for medium. And I haven’t tried stripping unused styles, which is the obvious thing to do when it’s all inline and functionally non-interactive; from a quick skim, I expect approaching half of the styles to be unused.
At these levels, the difference between medium and high seems fairly silly.
Then there’s low, which shaves off about half a kilobyte more, practically only differing in removing the smidgeon of CSS and turning images into text links to the images, which is a class of functionality that genuinely bandwidth-constrained users will want to do themselves in a browser extension, since practically nobody is going to do it (least of all the heavy ones).
All up, I say it’s a philosophical statement only, not something of any practical value. The only developers that are going to produce this kind of thing are the developers whose sites won’t really benefit from doing it.
We built this natively in the browser as an on/off switch, but one can also relatively easilly build a dedicated browser extension that incrementally blocks loading of various resources depending on the users' fidelity setting. This can be more scalable approach then waiting for websites to build support for this.
I wonder if it's possible to create an extension that would hijack reader mode to keep images, and nav. Then turning on the extension would enable "text only" fidelity.
- https://kilianvalkhof.com/2022/css-html/on-better-browsers-a...
- https://kittygiraudel.com/2022/09/14/dominant-hand-respectin...
Several years ago, Shaun Inman was working on a game where you started in 16bit and as you progressed or acquired power ups the fidelity would change.
Since then I’ve wondered how that would look on a bigger scale, maybe even MMO-sized.
When I have more bandwidth I’m gonna see about updating my sites to support this website fidelity concept. I can see smaller browsers implementing this, like Arc and Beam.
What it comes down to is the distinction between apps and pages. I want a news site to be a simple page. Maybe it has a search function and some interactive visualisations if it is fancy. It should not be able to access my camera, location, run web workers, execute third party JS to profile me, and so on. Reader mode should be built in.
The best thing for the usability of the web would be IMO if the next HTML standard would be split. An ultra slim HTML6 doc mode (maybe where it is realistic that a small team could write a new browser engine from scratch), and a fully featured HTML6 app mode. I mean AMP was something like doc mode, but for the benefit of Google (restricting which ad platforms you could use) and not for the benefit of users.
As a result, you can get pages in several flavors: "light mode", which is basically just P tags, links, and text; regular HTML mode without JavaScript but all the features, with a server round-trip; and full mode, with JavaScript enhancements, such as in-place vote buttons, dialogs which are injected into the current page without navigating away, and so on.
I think the pendulum is near the top of the "complexity" side, and about to start swinging back to the "reliability and accessibility" side, and I look forward to seeing what that can accomplish.
If it's successfully adopted then surely browsers could implement it natively and there would be already support from existing websites.
Not sure about a 0-1 scale though. Seems like a confusing setting for user.
Having simply 2 things to implement will be an easier sell than any amount between 1 and a 100. There is no "medium" for SPAs, its either or.
The last lowest of the low level can simply be done client side. The user agent doesn't have to download css and images.
I think it has better chances to succeed than the do not track header, simply because the result is noticeable for the user.
If many users use the feature, then the sites that implement a reasonable low fidelity will get more users. If this wasnt true then I doubt the news sites would have them in the first place.
To jumpstart the extension hook it up with redirects for all existing low fidelity sites like old reddit.
Eg I think http://linktr.ee is kind of plays to this demand. I saw old heavy/complex sites that moved to Linktree and it makes sense at least from visual/informational point of view.
True, knowing that an (empty) linktree profile is 1MB: https://linktr.ee/hello
This is like seeing the mask slipping off of what the current industry has become. Im sure they won’t let it happen.
The web browsers at work have increasingly moved away from allowing users to control extensions and plug-ins (natch), and ad-mitigating bookmarklets are only so effective.
Devs probably aren't choosing to skip doing the right things; they're forced to.