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Comment by pryelluw | Hacker News Reader

After hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, I had to drive 15 minutes to get mobile signal. Every website except HN and Gmail (html version) was too slow to load. This experience has lead me to reconsider my opinions regarding performance.

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In my recent travel to India, I realized that "normal" broadband speed is usually 1Mbps. Almost everything on Internet comes to crawl. Vimeo and GitHub is surprisingly bad. I can't even download the releases of project > 1 GB due to timeouts and errors in Chrome. So I'd to VPN to my US computer, download it to dropbox and then wait for sync in my India machine :).

Gmail on my AMD FX-8370 at 4 GHZ with 32GB RAM (and 60 MBit connection) takes... 5 seconds to load.

Gmail (HTML)... takes 0.5 seconds. (And about the same on my Netbook with a Celeron)

Guess which one I use? It's like the entire world has forgotten what productivity is.

On the other hand, once you are in gmail, everything is literally instant, opening the next email is faster than many desktop clients. It's designed for longer use, not drive-by. How long does it take to open a new mail in gmail lite? Do you have autocomplete on contacts and keyboard shortcuts for navigation and labeling?

What about the Google front page?

(And Wikipedia?)

I did not test Wikipedia and dont use Google. Duck Duck Go was unusable.

https://duckduckgo.com/html

Or if it's really bad: https://duckduckgo.com/lite

I am somewhat surprised Duck Duck Go doesn’t detect load speed and offer the degraded lite version on slow connections (Gmail does this).

Did not know of those. Whish theyd redirect there after noticing a slow load.

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