• Yggstyle@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    What is utterly stupid is with modern compression and rendering techniques - if it weren’t for developers shipping a whole ass library to prod for one function that is simplifying 8 lines of code… 56k would still be usable for light browsing and access. It’d be slow still… But far from literally impossible now.

    The sheer amount of “fat” on some (most) sites and applications is just depressing.

      • Yggstyle@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Seems someone said it before me… But you missed the point.

        I’ll respond to your statement generally though.

        Basic survival on 56k was doable. Shoutcast or Pandora could even be streamed with occasional buffering while browsing more light, or less heavy, sites. On the topic of video - low quality 240 would be “manageable” again, thanks to modern compression.

        Was it a good experience? Rarely. Was it passible? Certainly; and if a site optimised for load time and reduced bandwidth - it could even be near broadband “experience” with some caching tricks.

        Im not saying everyone needs to be code gods and build a 96k fps… But optimizing comes from understanding what you are writing and how it works. All this bloat is the result of laziness and a looser grasp on the fundamentals. As to why we should take a harder look at optimization?

        • Datacenter / cloud costs are rising… Smaller footprint - smaller bill.

        • Worldwide hardware costs are rising… Less people will be building fire breathing monsters. Better optimization - better user experience - more users. Recent examples (of poor optimization:) fallout and early 2077.

        • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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          4 hours ago

          I mean, the text on a website isn’t the problem for not being able to use 56k.

          It’s only images and video that take up space, the libraries used on websites are all cached at this point so that’s hardly relevant to ongoing usage of a website.