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loose-cannon

I wonder how quickly you can load some of the modern, popular, websites on a dial up connection.

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We have a whole generation of programmers that will justify 12MB of JavaScript bundles to output "Hello world".

Easy to see for yourself using the throttling option in the developer tools of popular browsers.

This orange site is fine but I wouldn’t hold my breath on any others

Something low-resource demand (like my blog) would probably be okay, save for a few large pics on some pages. Most people who run in the smolweb circles also like vintage computing, so creating webspaces using only HTML & CSS is common practice, which should do fine over a 56k connection.

Google homepage: two or three minutes

A Google SERP with rich content: about 20 minutes

A typical Facebook post: ten minutes

CNN home page: half an hour

YouTube: forget it

RealMedia: buffering

>CNN home page: half an hour

This should be much faster, it was created for people with limited network access.

https://lite.cnn.com/

Why would anyone want the non-lite version?

Wow! That's a great option for browsing CNN!

I’d bet a lot of them are using old computers too, with who knows what browser and OS. It’s probably hard to tell loading issues from rendering issues

You can save many hours by installing uBlock Origin.

Page loading times would probably be measurable with a sundial or calendar.

No need to wonder, just end up in an old building with thick brick walls that are only penetrated by a weak 2G signal and try to load something on your phone.

Not possible anymore is many areas, where 2G and 3G networks have been shutdown to re-use spectrum for newer standards. The last time I was in a rural area with minimal signal strength, my phone was alternating between satellite-only messaging or 5G with 5-10 MB/s. I was actually able to download a movie in a quite reasonable amount of time, presumably because there wasn't anyone else doing much with the cell tower I was barely in range of.

Out in rural Michigan, there are plenty of spots where an LTE signal technically exists but you can't do much beyond calls and texts (and even those fail sometimes), and it's interesting to see what apps still work. For instance, YouTube will still load and play videos, albeit at an abysmal pace that's really not worth it (and it's interesting to see how the app prioritizes the video itself over its metadata, to the point that you could watch an entire video in 144p before the channel name and description load), while my bank's app just fails entirely despite ostensibly requiring less bandwidth than video playback.

You can test it yourself in the comfort of your gigabit connection. I wanted to test my barrage of very small images using lazy loading on a crappy connection. I learned that Chrome can easily pretend to suck. On Safari you somehow need to download a special tool but it works just as well.

Or as worse I guess.

Do you know if Firefox or edge has a similar feature and if so what its called?

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

I think chrome dev tools has a button to simulate different internet speeds.

But im pretty sure the answer is really damn slow.

I know Firefox has it, since I used it to test my own website. Once you go past text and really small images, it starts taking minutes to load.

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