But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
How things have changed!
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate
Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate
Was your upstream via analog dialup?
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.