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Comment by vladdanilov | Hacker News Reader

The website assets are optimized in a rather strange way. The total page weight of ~20MB is huge for mobile. The images are heavily compressed using WebP lossy with quite noticeable blockiness and washed out textures and fine details, but squeezed into 1MB, yet the videos are only lightly compressed, and make up most of the page weight. Had they been compressed with libx264 at good quality, the page weight would be more than 70% smaller, and there would not be any need to ruin the image quality that much.

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The images are awful (at least in Firefox). They are compressed even worse than Google Developer Insight usually recommends. The text in screenshots is barely readable.

The dark theme is uncomfortable for my eyes (ok, maybe it's fault of my poor quality TN matrix, but anyway I don't want to see it). I doubt anyone wants to read white text on a black background.

The letters are gigantic and are optimized for hi-resolution monitors.

Also, as I understand despite new release Google still haven't solved the problem of apps and Google itself siphoning all available data from the phone.

Also I hate how Google manages updates. I had to install a Hangouts app. First, it copied the Google Account details I entered into it, into the phone and now all other apps can access them which I never wanted. Luckily I was smart enough to make a separate account for this purpose. Second, sometimes when I start it it says that it is updating Google Play Services (so I have to humbly wait until Hangouts does its important business) without even asking if I want that or not. Why does the messenger takes a work of a package manager I cannot understand. Probably, because they need to install new telemetry modules even if the user didn't activate Google Play. Very unpleasant impression.

> still haven't solved the problem of apps and Google itself siphoning all available data from the phone.

New apps are required to request privileges like contact list access and location before using them. You can deny them. What other issues do you want to solve?

> Why does the messenger takes a work of a package manager I cannot understand.

It doesn't. You want to use hangouts. In this case GPS is effectively a library hangouts uses to auth/connect to servers. Since it's the critical building block, it updates itself.

> I doubt anyone wants to read white text on a black background.

I do! Much less eye strain and easier to read for me. In fact, I read your comment in white text on a black background. My eyes are very sensitive to light in general though.

I hope you know that black color light doesn’t mean less light.

That's not how light from a screen works

* "black color light" does not exist. Light cannot be black.

* Each pixel in an LCD has 3 subpixels (red, green, blue). There is a light source behind the pixels. To display black, white, or anything in between (gray), all 3 subpixels allow an equal amount of light through. What controls the shade is the amount of light allowed through each. For black, the lowest possible amount of light is allowed through.

* On an OLED display, like the one in my phone, each pixel emits its own light and can be controlled independently. A black pixel on an OLED display emits practically 0 light and even uses less power as a result. This is why blacks look way better on OLED displays.

* See for yourself. Use your phone in a dark room and fill the screen with white only and then try again with black.

* You know how black absorbs light and white reflects light? Black does not absorb light because it is black. It's black because it absorbs light.

Actually, if you stay on the page for a while and scroll up and down, it loads the light/dark alternates for all media on the page, bringing the total weight of the page to about 41MB. Yikes.

Interesting considering one of the top comments on reddit is how smooth and quick to load this page is

Presumably videos don't need to fully load for the page to appear loaded?

It somehow loaded instantly for me on mobile.

Could be using lazy/more intelligent loading on mobile? 20MB isn't great on desktop, but it makes sense you could cope with that where you couldn't on a phone.

wow... 20MB.. I thought my 5MB app was horrible!@

It is. This is just several more steps up the atrocity ladder. Web site weight has majorly outpaced the growth of the average internet connection speed, and we also live in a world where mobile usage is up and many people have usage caps.

I pay per gigabyte with a prepaid plan for my phone, because I'm not paying $40/month for phone service when I can pay less than half that, so blindly clicking a web page and having 20MB quickly used up sucks.

I hear ya. I find the "unlimited data" plans are just far too expensive to justify paying for. My current carrier (Verizon[0]) offers 4(!) different "unlimited" plans starting at $70/mo and going up from there. My Wife and I only have 2GB/mo plans which itself is $35/mo. Our two cellphones have a higher bill than our entire household electric/gas bill and we have a modest sized house with central air/heating and lots of TVs/games/etc.

[0] https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/

Yes the site crashed my (old) Android phone running Firefox.

First time this has ever happened since I've owned the device... Which is many years!

And yet people still constantly champion WebP, VP9, AV1 or whatever Google pumps out for free.

And if one of the biggest Web company can't do web page well then I guess the rest of the Web Pages get a free pass for not well optimised.

I didn't notice these issues with images, I'm on a Pixel 3a updated to Android 10. Perhaps it's optimized only for Android 10 ;-)

Webp is web scale

They got to somehow justify the need for better hardware I guess... And it appears that the trend is to make everything more and more bloated. Take browsers for example, we used to browse the web just fine on devices that were as powerful as raspberry pi 2 for example, but nowadays we can barely launch a browser on such devices, let alone use it for real.

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