Topi Kettunen

Appreciation of Low Bandwidth Websites

As you might’ve seen in my last post, I’ve been without an internet for good some time already. Still – like I mentioned in the last post – I’ve really enjoyed my time without it. I feel that I can switch off much better after working hours, and I still have energy to partake in various other extracurricular activities that I hold dear to my heart, like hobby programming projects, music, reading, sports and much more. So really there isn’t much to complain.

Currently, my new neighbourhood does have a pretty good signal – generally speaking. My apartment just happens to be in relatively awkward spot, which means that it’s surrounded by other buildings. I happen to have a relatively big balcony in my apartment as well and even in there I have basically one bar of connectivity going on. Naturally, inside I don’t have any signal or very little. Fortunately, I’ve been able to have just enough of connectivity so in case some emergency or something along those lines, I’m able to do something with my phone. But, when it comes to “surfing the web”, that’s not much that I can currently do.

That being said, I can do just some browsing in handful of site that don’t clog the whole bandwidth for silly updates and requests and mainly just focus on sharing good content. So I wanted to write a small appreciation post for people making websites that work with practically no internet at all.

TODO: Maybe gather some great examples of lite websites to somewhere?

Of course, when writing about this sort of topic, it also brings little bit of sadness to me to see how many websites is basically unusable without a relatively good internet. Fortunately, I live in a place where even at its worst, I can access relatively “fast” internet and of course most of the places – outside my apartment – is very well connected. I don’t need to go far from my house to get basically full 5G connectivity with varying speeds (whatever your contract at the moment happens to be). In places like Finland, 1 Gbit fiber connectivity is getting more and more normal even in somewhat rural areas. Germany is not on that level yet – and by many standards, very far from it – but it’s still good nonetheless. Something like this cannot be said about the vast majority of the countries around the world.

I kind of know the reason why something like this has happened that the significant portion of popular websites are basically unaccessible by many people. I think it’s largely due to this aggressive over-engineering software engineers tend to do in their line of work. Also, I’m not innocent in that front as well, since I’ve done my fair share of over-engineering during the years working in the industry. Sometimes since I wanted, sometimes it was needed and sometimes since I was told to.

But it begs an interesting question, why something like this so normal in our industry? Sure, there are cases where added complexity to your infrastructure, codebase, etc. has actually brought some benefits. But the amount of times that has happened is greatly outweighed by the amount of times when it, well, just has brought added complexity without any benefits. But hey! At least, the engineers feel accomplished when they are able to deliver that is “complex”.

From the UX point of view, this is also quite interesting topic, since I believe that no one in this world wants to have their app/product/software/whatever to be slow for the users. But often, this added complexity automatically hinders the performance of whatever you happen to we writing. You start doing more stuff than you would need to, this can be inform of unnecessary web requests, unnecessary computations and so on. I guess there isn’t any argument about the fact that something like this hinders the whole UX. Which begs the question? Why more people don’t care about the performance more in their products? You might have an application that might have a traditionally speaking “bad UX”, meaning maybe lots of menus, you need to press a lot of stuff to access whatever you might be after, etc. But, if everything happens instantly, I’d dare to argue it’s still pretty good UX, at least for many people. If then on the other end of the spectrum, you would have a great UX, but everything is slow and has to load lots of stuff, how good of an UX it really is at that point?

But yeah, I digress, seems that lack of internet just makes me want to write about stuff. Any case, TLDR, write light websites.