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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally not picky with page load times (some cookie nags are far worse), but sometimes even my patience gets tested.

The worst offender is substack combined with many comments. I tried opening a Scott Alexander blog post in mobile Chrome on my aging mid range phone:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-unce...

It's not that it's rendering slowly, it apparently doesn't finish rendering at all. At first a few paragraphs render, then everything disappears. I basically can't read articles on this blog.

This website says the above has a total blocking time of 15.7 seconds:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/astralcodexten.substack.com/3y8...

That's on more modern hardware I assume.

I also tried https://pagespeed.web.dev/ but unfortunately it timed out before it finished. Great.

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> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-unce...

This doesn't load fully in Safari on an M1 Pro either. I scroll down and the content just ends. It hijacks the scroll bar too.

Fine on M2 Pro: forced obsolescence! :P

EDIT: _not_ fine on M2 Pro: Chrome works, Safari doesn't.

As long as I'm here...so much ink has been spilled on Safari and it's a bitter debate.

I really, really, really wanted to make Safari work for a web app and had to give up after months of effort.

So many workarounds and oddities that simply aren't present in other browsers. After 15 years orbiting Apple dev...I've finally acquiesced to the viewpoint that carefully filing & maintaining a backlog of bug reports, checking for fixes, and providing a broken experience isn't worth it to me or users

> As long as I'm here...so much ink has been spilled on Safari and it's a bitter debate.

Kind of silly to debate over such things. On desktop, the built in browser's only job is to let you download a better browser.

Interestingly I don't have an issue on Firefox (on a Thinkpad), it renders the content immediately, then a second or 2 later it tells me there's a script slowing down the page, i pressed stop and it rendered all of the comments fine. Whatever that script is doing, it's not useful for actually rendering content.

I believe it may be actually rendering extremely slowly.

I use Firefox mobile, if I scroll too fast on substack I sometimes have to let it sit 10+s before the blankness renders

I wrote them an email now.

(Annoyingly, they don't show any general contract opportunity on their website. Luckily in the Google Play Store they have to supply a support email address. Got it from there.)

> it apparently doesn't finish rendering at all

What's happening here is the browser did a first paint, and then the javascript started eating up all the CPU. You can scroll because of asynchronous pan/zoom, but when you get to the edge of the rendered region, it asks to render more and it never gets rendered because the page is stuck executing javascript. Recording: https://share.firefox.dev/3C2DE9C

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