Sites

I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?
--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On Wed, 19 Jul 2017 07:42:59 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:
I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

What do you mean?

I don't see anything annoying. But I do have my adblocker turned on by
default, so may be that's the reason.

Martin Edwards wrote:

I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

"the Guardian" isn't a URL.
A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

"Infuriating". Yep, that was sure specific, uh huh. When you take your
car into the shop, do you tell them "it makes a noise" and that's it?
All cars make noise.

Just WHAT were *we* supposed to be looking for that infuriates you?

On 07/19/2017 01:42 AM, Martin Edwards wrote:
I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

In what way is it infuriating? Annoying popups wanting you to subscribe
to something (when you're in the middle of READING)? I didn't see any.

On 7/19/2017 11:26 AM, JJ wrote:
On Wed, 19 Jul 2017 07:42:59 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:
I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

What do you mean?

I don't see anything annoying. But I do have my adblocker turned on by
default, so may be that's the reason.

Good point, it may be the ads that are slowing it down.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 7/19/2017 7:08 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Martin Edwards wrote:

I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

"the Guardian" isn't a URL.
A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

"Infuriating". Yep, that was sure specific, uh huh. When you take your
car into the shop, do you tell them "it makes a noise" and that's it?
All cars make noise.

Just WHAT were *we* supposed to be looking for that infuriates you?

It is just incredibly slow.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On Thu, 20 Jul 2017 07:36:25 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 7/19/2017 7:08 PM, VanguardLH wrote:

A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

It is just incredibly slow.

A quick and dirty assessment of page design is to compare the textual
content visible to the user to the coding of the page. You can do
this by selecting all the page as displayed in your browser, copying
and pasting into notepad, and saving the result as a text file. Then
view the page source in a your browser, and do the same. Then divide
the size of the former by that of the latter. Although it's rather a
limited means of assessment, because it doesn't take pictures into
account, it's relatively quick and easy to do, whereas to take account
of pictures and other visible content would be far more complicated
and necessitate use of your browser's developer tools, which the
average bod may find challenging.

By this rough and ready yardstick, the MOST COMPLICATED page on my
site, and therefore the one with the most coding, manages to achieve
around 15%, but The Guardian's home page only manages about 2%. That's
crap page design, but unfortunately is nothing unusual, for example
the SIMPLEST page in the iPlayer section of the BBC, the A-Z index, is
about the same.

On average, page weight increases about 10%-15% every year, and nearly
all of it is bloat - tracking, adverts, etc - hardly any of it
offers anything genuinely new or useful to the viewer. It's an
increasing problem, particularly in areas with low download speeds
such as rural areas, where downloading a single page from the BBC
grinds everything else to a halt until it has finished loading.

Going back to The Guardian's home page, over 200 validation errors
probably doesn't help either:
https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=htt...rdian.com%2Fus
--
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Martin Edwards wrote:
On 7/19/2017 7:08 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Martin Edwards wrote:

I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

"the Guardian" isn't a URL.
A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

"Infuriating". Yep, that was sure specific, uh huh. When you take your
car into the shop, do you tell them "it makes a noise" and that's it?
All cars make noise.

Just WHAT were *we* supposed to be looking for that infuriates you?

It is just incredibly slow.


It's easy enough to figure out from Task Manager.

When I run this here, the page appears instantly. Shockingly fast.

https://www.theguardian.com/international

Now, I scroll down. The page has an active script running on it.
It has at least two Adchoice panes, and a script is managing them.

I was seeing at least 30% CPU on my dual core here at one point.

The web browser "busy cursor" shows a level of busy, even though
the page is loaded and I can read the content. One of the adchoices
right now, is using an animated GIF to show me a "shoe advert",
because the script detects I'm using Flash Block.

It doesn't take much for a dynamic webpage of this nature, to
become "unbalanced". For example, a majority of sites will
make a reference to "Google Syndicate" website, which records
that you've seen an advert. The script used to do that, is
typically set up to block, leading to all manner of web page
malfunctions. Some web designers have "tamed" the file, using
various back-off mechanisms, where the script stops sucking
cycles... if you wait about two minutes or so. Great.

It's not the basic content on the page which sucks in this case.
It's the continuing advert presentation and management which
uses machine resources. If any one of the advertising websites
addresses doesn't resolve, a "looping" behavior may exist on
your machine, which we don't see on our machines.

Now, my browser which lacks modern advertising tracking
capabilities (it has cookies, but not the right "flavor"
of cookies), when I run your site in that, not only
does it render quickly (but incorrectly), the advertising
script stops running too. So unlike many sites, they
choose not to "loop my machine to death", when the tracking
capabilities of the browser don't meet their needs.

Sites which should continue to give you trouble, no matter
what, would be things like Yahoo News. That's a site that
used to implement an "infinitely long" web page. If you
attempt to scroll to the bottom, it simply barfs up older
content and tacks it to the bottom of the web page. And
that's guaranteed to drive the browser nuts (RAM usage 1GB
for a single page). If you noticed a performance problem
there, it wouldn't really matter how "big" a machine you
were running, the "user experience" is guaranteed to suck.
Now, who do you think needs to fix that ? The web developer.
This would be a case where "design concept (the infinite page)",
overrules common sense about computers.

*******

You're using Adblock, FlashBlock, Ghostery, or some other thing
which is interfering with page design. When you "accept" all
the advertising crap and abuse they're willing to hand out,
the page will load and operate "a tiny bit faster". Which
doesn't give much incentive to "bend over" for them.

I wish the browser had visual indicators for background
activity, so you could know "how many scripts", level of
looping and so on. To take some of the mystery out
of this stuff. Some browsers have "developer tools" and
a waterfall display, but that's not really all that useful
an info display for end users. Nobody cares about end users.

Paul

Martin Edwards wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

Martin Edwards wrote:

I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

"the Guardian" isn't a URL.
A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

"Infuriating". Yep, that was sure specific, uh huh. When you take your
car into the shop, do you tell them "it makes a noise" and that's it?
All cars make noise.

Just WHAT were *we* supposed to be looking for that infuriates you?

It is just incredibly slow.

Edge is in Windows 10, not Windows 7 where you posted. No mention of
what other web browser(s) you used and then found Edge to be equally
slow.

I tried Google Chrome 59.0.3701.115 on theguardian.com (just their home
page since no pages were mentioned) and the site loaded okay. However,
I use both uMatrix (configured to allow everything except off-domain
scripts which I prefer to NoScript) and uBlock Origin (using the Fanboy
Ultimate blacklist and malware domains blacklists). The home page
loaded fast and I could scroll without hesitation. I even temporarily
allowed the guim.co.uk off-domain scripts since these appear to be for
and from that site. The page was still very responsive.

I tried Firefox 54.0 also with uMatrix and uBlock Origin configured the
same way. Both guim.co.uk and guardianapp.co.uk script sources were
temporarily allowed. Their home page was responsive.

I didn't click on anything in their home page because you didn't mention
actually using their page, just slowness in viewing it.

I then exited both web browsers (which are configured to purge
EVERYTHING on their exit), used CCleaner just to be sure, loaded the web
site, and disabled uMatrix and uBlock Origin, and refreshed their home
page. In Chrome, the web page seemed the same as before regarding
responsiveness. In Firefox, there was a lag as I continued to see a
status bar appear showing "loading" or "transferring" messages. That
page has a lot of external resources. So, in Firefox, the page was a
little bit slower to scroll until all the resources had been retrieved
but thereafter the page was just as responsive as before.

Do you employ any adblocker or script blocker extensions in whatever web
browsers you use? You can't use them in Edge but you can in other web
browsers. All that external material takes time to retrieve. Not only
does it add to the bandwidth to display a web page but if any of those
external sources are slow then it makes the site appear slow.

You rarely get a direct connection to a web site. There are hops (nodes
or hosts) in the path between you and the target site. If any of those
nodes are slow then so is getting anything from the target site. Do a
traceroute to see if any nodes look really slow to respond.

tracert www.theguardian.com

If the target site is across the ocean from you, there will be a jump
(increased slowness) in response when the traffic has to traverse over
the oceanic cable or jump across a satellite. That added delay will
appear in every node thereafter because of having that jump but it
should remain consistent. Other than that type of jump, you're looking
for a node in the route that you get that is slow by itself.

You could also try rebooting Windows into its safe mode. That will
eliminate any startup programs from possibly interferring with
retrieving the web page. For example, maybe your anti-virus is
interrogating the HTTPS traffic and causing a slowdown. I use Avast
Free and it has an HTTPS scanner so it can inspect secured web pages
looking for malicious or suspicious content. It can do that with HTTP
but HTTPS requires a MITM (man-in-the-middle) scheme to intercept the
encrypted web traffic so the anti-virus can inspect it. When Avast
first came out with their HTTPS scanner, it slowed down HTTPS traffic.
They've gotten better so now I leave it enabled. Safe mode for Windows
should not load the anti-virus program. Or you could see if disabling
the HTTPS scanner in your anti-virus software removes the slowdown.

It's been a day and a half since you reported the problem. Is the site
still slow for you?

On 7/20/2017 11:25 AM, Java Jive wrote:
On Thu, 20 Jul 2017 07:36:25 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 7/19/2017 7:08 PM, VanguardLH wrote:

A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

It is just incredibly slow.

A quick and dirty assessment of page design is to compare the textual
content visible to the user to the coding of the page. You can do
this by selecting all the page as displayed in your browser, copying
and pasting into notepad, and saving the result as a text file. Then
view the page source in a your browser, and do the same. Then divide
the size of the former by that of the latter. Although it's rather a
limited means of assessment, because it doesn't take pictures into
account, it's relatively quick and easy to do, whereas to take account
of pictures and other visible content would be far more complicated
and necessitate use of your browser's developer tools, which the
average bod may find challenging.

By this rough and ready yardstick, the MOST COMPLICATED page on my
site, and therefore the one with the most coding, manages to achieve
around 15%, but The Guardian's home page only manages about 2%. That's
crap page design, but unfortunately is nothing unusual, for example
the SIMPLEST page in the iPlayer section of the BBC, the A-Z index, is
about the same.

On average, page weight increases about 10%-15% every year, and nearly
all of it is bloat - tracking, adverts, etc - hardly any of it
offers anything genuinely new or useful to the viewer. It's an
increasing problem, particularly in areas with low download speeds
such as rural areas, where downloading a single page from the BBC
grinds everything else to a halt until it has finished loading.

Going back to The Guardian's home page, over 200 validation errors
probably doesn't help either:
https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=htt...rdian.com%2Fus

Thanks for that.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 7/20/2017 3:43 PM, Paul wrote:
Martin Edwards wrote:
On 7/19/2017 7:08 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Martin Edwards wrote:

I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
experience?

"the Guardian" isn't a URL.
A guess: "the Guardian" = https://www.theguardian.com/.

"Infuriating". Yep, that was sure specific, uh huh. When you take your
car into the shop, do you tell them "it makes a noise" and that's it?
All cars make noise.

Just WHAT were *we* supposed to be looking for that infuriates you?

It is just incredibly slow.


It's easy enough to figure out from Task Manager.

When I run this here, the page appears instantly. Shockingly fast.

https://www.theguardian.com/international

Now, I scroll down. The page has an active script running on it.
It has at least two Adchoice panes, and a script is managing them.

I was seeing at least 30% CPU on my dual core here at one point.

The web browser "busy cursor" shows a level of busy, even though
the page is loaded and I can read the content. One of the adchoices
right now, is using an animated GIF to show me a "shoe advert",
because the script detects I'm using Flash Block.

It doesn't take much for a dynamic webpage of this nature, to
become "unbalanced". For example, a majority of sites will
make a reference to "Google Syndicate" website, which records
that you've seen an advert. The script used to do that, is
typically set up to block, leading to all manner of web page
malfunctions. Some web designers have "tamed" the file, using
various back-off mechanisms, where the script stops sucking
cycles... if you wait about two minutes or so. Great.

It's not the basic content on the page which sucks in this case.
It's the continuing advert presentation and management which
uses machine resources. If any one of the advertising websites
addresses doesn't resolve, a "looping" behavior may exist on
your machine, which we don't see on our machines.

Now, my browser which lacks modern advertising tracking
capabilities (it has cookies, but not the right "flavor"
of cookies), when I run your site in that, not only
does it render quickly (but incorrectly), the advertising
script stops running too. So unlike many sites, they
choose not to "loop my machine to death", when the tracking
capabilities of the browser don't meet their needs.

Sites which should continue to give you trouble, no matter
what, would be things like Yahoo News. That's a site that
used to implement an "infinitely long" web page. If you
attempt to scroll to the bottom, it simply barfs up older
content and tacks it to the bottom of the web page. And
that's guaranteed to drive the browser nuts (RAM usage 1GB
for a single page). If you noticed a performance problem
there, it wouldn't really matter how "big" a machine you
were running, the "user experience" is guaranteed to suck.
Now, who do you think needs to fix that ? The web developer.
This would be a case where "design concept (the infinite page)",
overrules common sense about computers.

*******

You're using Adblock, FlashBlock, Ghostery, or some other thing
which is interfering with page design. When you "accept" all
the advertising crap and abuse they're willing to hand out,
the page will load and operate "a tiny bit faster". Which
doesn't give much incentive to "bend over" for them.

I wish the browser had visual indicators for background
activity, so you could know "how many scripts", level of
looping and so on. To take some of the mystery out
of this stuff. Some browsers have "developer tools" and
a waterfall display, but that's not really all that useful
an info display for end users. Nobody cares about end users.

Paul

I did find that it wasn't quite as bad yesterday as the day before.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

En el artículo , Martin Edwards
escribió:

It is just incredibly slow.

Not for me, and I look at it several times a day. Pages appear
instantaneously.

But then I use an ad-blocking DNS server, an ad-blocker in the browser
and NoScript.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=) "Between two evils, I always pick
(")_(") the one I never tried before." - Mae West

"Martin Edwards" wrote

|I find the Guardian site just as infuriating with Edge, which I have
| only just started using, as with Firefox. Does anyone else have this
| experience?

An experiment you could try: Go to about:config
in Firefox, find media.autoplay.enabled and set it to False.

The site is instant for me, but I block just about
everything other than the text. If you don't want to
block script and can't be bothered to block ads,
then blocking videos might help. I downloaded the
page and got 235 MB of files!! 15 videos were most
of that.

On the other hand, if you can't be bothered to even
set up a good HOSTS file to block the majority of
junk then you can't expect other than what you're
seeing. It's not a browser problem. The major browser
makers have been working for years to improve script
parsing speed and have made great strides. Javascript
is processed far faster than it used to be. But pages
keep getting more bloated. Not long ago, a page of
100 KB was just too slow to wait for. Now a page
the size of an office suite is downloaded just to see
the day's headlines. There's only so much a browser
can do to handle that.

And that's not even getting into your connection
speed. Can you download 235 MB in a couple of seconds?
If not then the sheer size of the site might be bogging
things down.