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Comment by samuell | Hacker News Reader

I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all.

This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps.

I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

[1] https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-a...

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In Ethiopia's case, it's not so much the connection speed in Addis. There's a great deal of interference from the national Deep Packet Inspection filters that leads to timed-out requests, reset TCP connections, etc.

JS-heavy apps make a lot of requests to background servers and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang. It's quite frustrating and I would often load pages with the console open to see which requests have failed so I'm not left wondering what happened.

That's good to know, Thanks!

There can be whole lot of reason for this and it kind of make sense. What doesn't make sense is that for such a big company, such a big product thats the best Google/gmail can do. I can understand if scaling the gmail backend can be tough. I can appreciate gmails feature set of spam filtering, tagging but on the UI feature-set I don't see anything that revolutionary that makes it (according the chrome task manager) the heaviest tab in my browser ~500MB. I think thats to the point of shameful.

I think the standard of whats considered slow, bloated, complex has become absurd. I think if the processor companies today release processors that say improves the single thread performance 10 times in two years gmails and facebooks of the world will eat all that up with marginal improvement in functionality. I'm talking about the client side, in the server side yeah they may make 10 times more complex analysis though most likely 80% will go to feeding us more accurate ad.

That's why fastmail is such a breath of fresh air. It has lots of features and is wicked fast.

Agreed. I'm actually really impressed at how fast and responsive the UI is. As a user, it's probably one of the most responsive and functional UX's I've used in years.

>and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang

That also happens on 'good' connections, when some crappy isp router drops the packet without any icmp. The request fails only after a tcp timeout, which is large enough to be noticed. I cannot understand why asynchronous js requests do not involve smart adaptive human-oriented timeouts and why this problem is still not solved in general. TCP timeouts are simply insane nowadays.

I may get flamed for pointing this out either by people who are offended by the viewpoint, or by those who find it so bleeding obvious as to not be worth stating, but those page hangs (and I know exactly what you mean) are really down to poorly architected and implemented front-ends rather than an inherent flaw with JavaScript-heavy apps and pages.

Any time you do an XHR you can supply both a success and a failure callback and, if you care at all about your users, the failure callback can come in handy for error recovery, handing off to a retry mechanism, etc.

Modern web apps can be a lot more like fat client apps, just running in a browser. Even there, there's no inherent need for them to be unusable, even over relatively slow connections. A lot of it comes down to latency, and the number of requests going back and forth between client and server, often caused by the sheer quantity of assets many sites load (I'm looking at YOU, almost every media site on the Internet).

I seem to spend my life citing this paper, from 1996, but "It's the latency, stupid" is still relevant today: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html.

Nothing controversial here, it's common sense. Most web stuff is built by total amateurs figuring things out as they go.

I'd like to complement: most _stuff_ is built by total amateurs winging it.

Nonsense, email is an impressively well designed and logical protocol ;)

From

GMail has a HTML-only version that is much more lightweight and usable on slow / flaky connections.

It's worth it to memorize or bookmark the address, in case you ever need it:

http://mail.google.com/mail/h/

(on mobile browsers you need to "request desktop version" and then paste the address again, before you can see it)

Thank you for sharing this link. Here is a related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513388

My problem with accessing the low-bandwidth Google tools with archaic browsers (http://dplus-browser.sourceforge.net/, etc.) is that Google still requires the high-bandwith login.

Are you aware of any alternative login URLs or authentication mechanisms?

I just tried the two-year old 3.4-dev copy of NetSurf I had buried on this computer, and was able to login to Gmail's Basic HTML.

It's not only about connection speed but also about infrastructure. If you look at this map https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ you'll see that your packets have a looong way to reach their data center. AWS is no better than Google on this point. Guess it's not bankable

That only adds about 200-300ms RTT I'd guess. I live in India and use many websites which are hosted in the US, and they work fine.

(Hello from Kenya)

There are usually CDN nodes in India. Cloudfront has edge nodes there, google's cdn does.

There's also a Mumbai AWS datacentre.

When you get far away from the common edges, it gets real noticeable.

~$ ping imgur.com

PING imgur.com (151.101.40.193) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 151.101.40.193 (151.101.40.193): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=342 ms

imgur.com works fine

~$ ping python.org

PING python.org (23.253.135.79) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 23.253.135.79 (23.253.135.79): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=267 ms

python.org works fine

news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com also works fine even though I'm logged in (there's about a 300ms, 700ms delay in the Network tab of Chrome's devtools for news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com)

PING imgur.com (151.101.12.193): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=499.633 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=65 ttl=51 time=330.021 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=66 ttl=51 time=557.491 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=67 ttl=51 time=478.380 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=68 ttl=51 time=400.365 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 69

PING python.org (23.253.135.79): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 23.253.135.79: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=615.871 ms 64 bytes from 23.253.135.79: icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=539.681 ms

I'm on an island lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But ping weren't that different (50 ms more or less) on the continent (I went to RSA and Namibia)

Gmail worked surprisingly well from Antarctica

> I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

How much disposable income will they have though? Most web products like those you describe are produced by businesses looking to make money.

You may be surprised. Certainly the number of people with disposable income will be less than in many other places but those that have disposable income often pay more.

Tax on cars is upward of 200% and traffic is becoming a major issue. When it comes to services, another major challenge is that there are no widely accepted payment mechanisms besides cash and checks. Debit cards only work with ATMs and some very select retailers.

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