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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available - for those that don’t know, the rates are eye watering. $4 pr MB - and the onboard Wi-Fi was either completely down, or down in the low tens Kbps speed.

The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference.

With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.

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It's become pretty clear that a lot of developers never test their websites or apps in low bandwidth environments.

Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.

Nor expensive data environments.

The NPR One app used to chew through a few hundred mb of data in "caching" every time you started it. No way to restrict this function to wifi only. And no, you can't select bit rates.

Also Zoom has little ability to minimize the audio or video data usage (but I've learned you can reduce how much of others video is sent to you by reducing the window size). Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.

I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems. The fact that when you intermittently dropped out you catch up on the sped up audio always seemed neat (although I'm unsure if that was an intended feature, or just a side effect).

Pretty sure intended

> I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems.

Likely true. Zoom doesn't chew up much bandwidth. I always find it funny when people think they need to upgrade their home internet bandwidth because a family "works & studies from home". Unless you're up/downloading huge media files, several instances of Zoom and virtual desktops will consume less than a 4k Netflix stream.

> Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.

Would this be achieved by plugging in a crappy camera and only giving that to Zoom?

MS Teams is terrible at this too, I need it to only send me audio and ignore video, because a lot of times I am at sea with poor connection - these are company ships, so it's needed for a lot of folks at work...

This is very much possible in the desktop app, although apparently the position of the feature has changed at least once: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/how-do...

No idea if there’s a native way to do this in Zoom since I don’t have that problem, but if you’re concerned about your upload bitrate, you can use OBS to downsample your camera and configure Zoom to use OBS’s virtual camera instead.

In India on TVs, (where people use 4g to watch content) Google added a data saver mode in Android TV. They just shape the trafic down (to 500kBps iirc?). I guess that was easier than trying to convince app developers to reduce their data usage on a system flag. That's stupid for a lot of reasons, but I guess in your case that would work.

Firefox and Chrome dev tools make this super easy, but I think people just aren't thinking about it.

I strongly disagree that this is in the hands of the developers.

People used to say the same about accessibility until the ADA lawsuits started coming in forcing businesses to take it seriously.

There needs to be a business incentive to spend developer time on low bandwidth. Progressive web apps that cache stuff are about all you're gonna get for now.

  > Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.

And this is actually easy to do, as Google Chrome Devtools can simulate this environment with a click.

Because the higherups who OK these decisions and designs and demand every user sees a shiny animation or popover that drives their next promotion have an idealistic vision in their mind of a user who is 'always connected', always online, using a perfectly calibrated high resolution screen, and the latest modern high power device purchased with a quarter million dollar yearly salary just like them.

I was surprised that many of the "professional" web de s don't test, don't even occur to them to install other browsers, like, for example, Firefox...

Which is a shame, since FF dev Tools have a quite comfy tool for testing the we page in low bandwidth environments:

* https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/networ...

(I haven't done web de for a good ten years now, yet, even I somehow know about these)

But the fast and small alternative is skipping the web, e.g. set IMAP to a native app

Exactly, a workaround exists and is already installed on your device.

Using an IMAP client is not an option on many devices, especially when it is a public or borrowed device.

It is incredibly inconvenient to log in on such device, especially if your primary one isn't available. I ended up writing down backup authenticator codes in my diary. Of course it kinda defeats the purpose and of course it's hard for users to figure out.

One of my employers disabled IMAP on gmail, siting security concerns… ended up pretty much not using email because of that (relying on slack mostly)

What's the security disadvantage of IMAP?

I suspect OP employer didn't secure its IMAP configuration (no TLS) and simply relied on HTTPS in front of the webmail ?

Apparently gmail’s IMAP implementation was considered “insecure” by the security experts… Forgot the details tbh

If you can even do that, since they [e-mail hosts] go out of their way to make it difficult - even impossible, in some cases - to push people to use their own app.

Yeah... if only that worked with GMail. You cannot do proper authentication with GMail anymore. You need an elaborate dance, which will depend on how old your GMail account is (they became bolder with time and started to require more personal data from users), you will need to procure a special permit for your IMAP program to connect to GMail, and the way to do that changed over time. Also, newer GMail accounts cannot be registered without MFA, so you'll have to figure out how to deal with that.

Having a very old GMail account, I still hold on to it, because I can still use IMAP in Gnus. But, should I lose that, or should Google finally curb my tiny freedoms... I'll have to look for alternatives too.

Not an extreme case. There are times when I can barely get above 100kbps in spotty areas in some buildings. Loading the gmail web page is painful. HTML button appears immediately at the bottom while the website is struggling to load and clicking it will load emails. Very helpful if you ask me.

The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference.

A well designed Single Page App should be downloading a small-as-possible initial bundle with the page HTML and CSS, and then only downloading the data necessary for any given page. In theory that results in less bandwidth used if you're looking at a reasonably large number of pages compared to downloading a server rendered HTML page for each page because you only download the HTML once in the SPA version compared to every page you load with the SSR version. This is literally the reason why SPAs became popular in the first place.

In badly built apps this isn't the case - the data is bloated, the bundle isn't optimized, etc. I imagine in the case of Gmail this is the case though - you probably only need to read a couple of dozen moderately large emails before the JS version starts to win out. This is something you'd need to test rather than making an assumption though.

That said, a native app will win over both because it's already on your device so the bandwidth used is only the email data.

With continuous deployment, that cached SPA may frequently be replaced though. Depending on the team, but I've seen people deploying to production several times a week. That means a lot more JS and asset downloads as well.

That's true but it can be mitigated by code-splitting to an extent. Making a vendor bundle out of any dependencies separately to your own code limits any app changes to a single part of the download unless you update a dependency version.

> With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.

I don't know. Internet on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ocean is a bit like complaining you don't have good wine on your camels when backpacking through the Sahara.

In any case, it absolutely is an edge case for now so there should be a minimum of preparations before the trip (setting IMAP instead of webmail for instance, if you need heavy bandwidth site content then set a proxy that only keeps the actual content and access that instead of the original source, etc.).

Same with the beach house or the cottage lost in the woods not zoom-compatible. Well...

It's weird to me how when this subject surfaces on HN a lot of people defend they are entitled to the same capabilities when they are in white spots than when they are at home.

Having slow and/or intermittent service isn't nearly so niche as blue water sailing.

You're in a cruise ship. A highly destructive and entirely unnecessary luxury and you're complaining about having to pay extra to load gmail? Jesus.

His point is, there are data limited environments.

This point stands, no matter what you think of his cruise?

Also, who can decide, what is really necessary? And I don't have hard data at hand, but I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.

Cruise ships directly introduce pollutants into the local maritime environment. These include oily bilge water, grey water, and others, not including sulfur emissions from the engines

How do you know it wasn't a green cruise vessel? One with filters, or storage tanks.

Do you know? Do you? Or is it a presumption?

(Googling now to find out if this even exists, doesn't remove the presumptive nature of things.)

If you have to search to see if the Devil’s Advocate alternative you’re trying to gotcha OP on, who is being presumptive? Maybe you could’ve searched first?

The vast majority of cruises are pretty shitty for the environment and treatment of people. Also tax avoidant. People just really don’t want to hear that so they can keep doing them and not think about the down sides.

OP was working on a survey ship, as mentioned in another thread.

You are confusing two different people:

> killjoywashere 46 minutes ago | undown | root | parent | next [–]

> I'm on an ship doing oceanographic survey work in the arctic.

and

> TrackerFF 2 hours ago | prev | next [–]

> Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available

Argh, I was. Thanks.

If you have to search to see if the Devil’s Advocate alternative you’re trying to gotcha OP on, who is being presumptive? Maybe you could’ve searched first?

My point had to do with the extreme accusatory nature of the post, without data to back it up.

My post was absolutely the reverse of presumptive, for I asked is someone was being so, not asserting that they were.

A green cruise ship is like a green aircraft or a green car: it does not really exist. Just building it is already costly, and so is operating it. Filters and tanks are just shifting the problem, as well.

But that’s beside the point anyway, as it was just raised as an ad hominem argument against the guy who wanted websites to work on poor connections, and rightly so.

> I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.

train your imagination, i'd say

My imagination is augmented by some physic education, so I know how much fuel a starting plane consumes, as well as flying around the globe with ~1000 km/h.

A ship on the other hand is very fuel efficient. But it maybe runs longer, if it is a cruise. Still, 2 flights forn1 week vacation are likely way worse, than 1 week cruise.

(And I will likely go by train towards my vacation, but this is not always possible)

> A ship on the other hand is very fuel efficient.

They also run on absolutely terrible fuel, very low quality and with lots of impurities. Pollution is not only greenhouse gases. I am not saying planes are much better, but both are really quite bad.

> His point is, there are data limited environments.

So? Why should Google care? Out of the goodness of their hearts?

Switch to an email provider that caters to your data limited environment.

They should care because customers need the feature occasionally?

So? No business implements every single feature that might occasionally be useful to a miniscule portion of its customer base.

Faster loading times are useful for everyone. And there are plenty of people with bad connection.

Good observation he/she does. What if it was forced on him/her by the family of the spouse? Or whatever.

I'm on an ship doing oceanographic survey work in the arctic. StarLink is $5000 for 5 TB. Without it, we're on iridium, which both eye-wateringly expensive and slow (1MB up and down). Low bandwidth mode would be hella appreciated right now.

Interestingly, one of the major sucks for these LEO systems does not appear to be bandwidth. It's the route. We throttled the ship down to 2 Mbps for a while (100 pax) and Google properties are actually quite snappy while everything else is dead slow to the point of timing out. Turns out Google arranged to have Starlink ground stations installed in their data centers. That takes off a lot of hops. Amazon was one of the few other things that would load.

I hate to sound like a shill for big tech, but I get the sense Google and Amazon actually give a shit about speed. When you measure your bandwidth bill in billions, you can afford to?

> When you measure your bandwidth bill in billions, you can afford to?

With the rate you are paying, you could get there quickly too.

That pricing and speed is quite different to their website - obviously service isn’t optimised for the arctic, but how does that pricing work?

There are other affordances though: the fleet can now have a legitimate chance of standardizing on a coherent software platform, reduce the network admins afloat (which cost way more), improve cybersecurity, etc.

Accessibility is all edge cases. And for every edge cases you anticipate and support, others you don't anticipate are allowed access.

How much "overhead" for the controls should a page contain beyond the content of the email itself? My instinct says several KB up to tens of KB would be reasonable, but apparently the non-basic version of Gmail uses several orders of magnitude more --- tens of MB.

Not rare, I do sometimes check my email in the airplane and can tell, although it’s usually per X time rather than the MB, but it still slow to load on the web UI. Better just to use an email client.

On a cruise ship, you're basically caught in a local monopoly for every product and service.

sdf.org is splendid and their webmail is squirrelmail. $36 for lifetime membership is pretty good, and it is a considerably more ethical and private alternative than gmail.

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