DEV Community

Discussion on: How to survive to Chrome for Android disabling JavaScript for 2G or slower connections?

Collapse
 
mangel0111 profile image
miguel-penaloza • Edited

Is a good point of view, but the thing's that this's not something that wont affect the latest iPhone (assuming that an iPhone user will use Chrome instead of Safari), the real thing is that you can have the most powerfull machine but a slower connection will block a user from content.

If I have an Alcatel 1X, and the most of the websites are displaying this site is too slow and it doesn't work is not a problem with the internet itself or the website is a problem with my cellphone and my provider.

This looks like a deprecating marketing strategy to make people pay for faster internet providers, maybe pay an extra fee to unlock some websites, and to force they to buy new phones that can use internet well (Or how these companies thinks that the internet should be used), with the new regulations about Net Neutrality a provider can set limits for certain sites and make it unavailable for all the Android Users. How can this affect a business? When his only mistake was build his site in React or Angular, even PHP, Java, .NET sometimes use JavaScript to validate forms and others stuffs.

Obviously, a web developer never should think that all his users will have 100 Mbps, that's wjhhy I mention Progressive Enhancement because is a good way to deal with this scenarios, also you can create a phantom layouts where you can split your web site loading in phases to avoid deliver all your resources in the first GET and reduce the network stress(I will write a post about this soon.) but scares me the idea of blocking everything even before start.

Collapse
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

Is a good point of view, but the thing's that this's not something that wont affect the latest iPhone (assuming that an iPhone user will use Chrome instead of Safari), the real thing is that you can have the most powerfull machine but a slower connection will block a user from content.

The feature is enabled only on Android so it won't affect iPhone users.

If you read the article you linked at the beginning the answer is there:

This is huge news for developing countries where mobile data packets may cost a lot and are not be affordable to all. Enabling NoScript by default will make sure that users don’t burn through their data without knowledge

The point is duplicitous: save people's data (because we send them too much JS) and force web developers to think about graceful degradation.

If I have an Alcatel 1X, and the most of the websites are displaying this site is too slow and it doesn't work is not a problem with the internet itself or the website is a problem with my cellphone and my provider.

It won't be "most websites", it will be only those that are JS only.
If I disable JS and go to nytimes.com I can still see the website and read the news. I lose a lot of functionality, but not the essential one: reading the articles and seeing the pictures.

You're still not thinking about the fact that there's a immense chunk of people on the planet that can do mostly 2G or 3G. And how different the speeds of 2G and basic 3G are comparing to 4G:

mobile speeds

We're talking about 0.1MBit/s against 15Mbit/s. 150 times faster! I have 4G on my phone, I just ran a speed test and it's faster than my own ADSL.

My 4G goes to 13.5 MBit/s, my ADSL doesn't go past 8Mbit. We're miles away from the average experience of those in basic 3G or 2G.

I had 3G and 2G years and years ago and websites were not that slow, because we didn't throw SPAs at every problem ;-)

This looks like a deprecating marketing strategy to make people pay for faster internet providers, maybe pay an extra fee to unlock some websites, and to force they to buy new phones that can use internet well (Or how these companies thinks that the internet should be used), with the new regulations about Net Neutrality a provider can set limits for certain sites and make it unavailable for all the Android Users.

Aside from the fact that "net neutrality" is mostly an American problem (as far as I remember it is still illegal in Europe where I live), I don't think this is the case. If you live in rural USA or rural Poland or rural Zimbabwe where your phone connection is 2G at best, you're not going to get a faster connection anyway, until your ISP physically installs the necessary hardware. The issues with net neutrality are a different beast, and yes there they can make you pay to access this or that website but we're talking about a different thing: a browser that defaults to HTML only if the connection is too slow.

How can this affect a business? When his only mistake was build his site in React or Angular, even PHP, Java, .NET sometimes use JavaScript to validate forms and others stuffs.

That's the thing: it's not "only just a mistake". It's years and years of frienzed madness in which we convinced ourselves (I'm part of the problem here) that the world would be a better place if we were to send them megabytes of JavaScript, when in fact most frameworks are born to simplify the life of the programmer, not of the user (which totally doesn't care about which technology you used to make the website).

Frameworks are cool and neat but take a step back: do you really think that if your button is rendered by JavaScript or by HTML the user is going to care :-) ?

I mention Progressive Enhancement because is a good way to deal with this scenarios

Yeah but progressive enhancement used to mean: you have your website in HTML and CSS and then you add functionality with JS, if JS is turned off, you still have your website. Now most Vue/React/Angular websites with JS turned off are blank pages.

Keep in mind that you can't control what the user does on the client side.

A good read on the subject: Dear Developer, The Web Isn't About You.

Again, we need to do better.