Your average JS engineer needs to have all the browsers stripped from their machine. They need to be given the following VM's: 1. tool bar riddled version of windows that only has 8 gigs of ram and at lest one unreliable key. 2. A chrome book, but with all the filters of the nearst school system. 3. Chrome, on linux, 512mb of ram.
And they get what ever the low end Samsung J series its a phone that makes calls as their cell (cause no cheating).
I give that about 3 months till the web is fast again.
They should also give all designers the tiniest still supported mobile phone screen, while enlarging the fonts by at least 20% and making the screen black and white.
I wouldn't go as far as making the language German but.....well actually.....yes put the phone in German as well!
I talk about this so much at my workplace and every time I mention slower phones I get laughed at by my boss. It's idiotic.
"Just get an iPhone"
Like... my dude, you rolled out of uni and started your own business and started out making at least double every month than normal people and you buy a new phone every 2 years. This is not normal.
Our target customer is very literally the "average consumer", so this is the dumbest take I've ever seen.
I try to minimize garbage collection and optimize React rendering but React is honestly quite difficult to get right when it comes to details in performance, even after a few years of experience :(. It doesn't help that I explicitly don't get time to focus on these kinds of details.
I'm using a motorola android i bought three years ago for around $200 and it's absolutely fine for browsing the web and messaging. I could justify buying an iPhone (after all it comes down to a dollar a day over two/three years), but I don't feel like I have to.
i have lived in germany. germans should suffer their slow internet until they get fed up and demand better.
so no, adapting my website so that it works on a german train is not an important goal. i would even argue that if germany is my audience it is counterproductive. demand better internet.
i am living in such a country now. and if those countries are my target audience i will certainly build for that. heck, i might even hire a dev in germany and send him traveling on trains as a test case ;-)
but if my target audience is germany, i will probably not focus on the tiny fraction of german train travelers.
OP was saying about devs needing to build their product/applications/websites on underpowered hardware, presumably as a way to have the same experience as most people. That's reasonable, provided that this is the context where people will use your product/application/website. The context you are giving (slow phones on spotty connections) is so specific that becomes irrelevant for any project manager that could be interested in evaluating the merits of the claim.
So, yeah, I don't know why you seem so upset about my question, but if you detach yourself from the case, you'd see that your response to "are slow phones really an issue?" does not make a strong argument.
Most people don't live in the first world countries, don't have cheap access to high-end devices like a half a decade old android flagship (and 8.4% of people live on less than $2.15 a day), and any website relying on JavaScript for basic features literally won't be able to LOAD for them.
> Most people don't live in the first world countries, [...] any website relying on JavaScript for basic features literally won't be able to LOAD for them.
even low end smartphones work ok with basic javascript. the people who live on $2 a day mostly have a feature phone that is barely internet capable (remember WAP?) or they have no phone at all. i don't know about modern feature phones, but i expect they can handle javascript just fine, because it doesn't make sense to build a new phone today that doesn't. (i just did a search on some african online sites and found that smartphones can be had from $30, but most importantly that new web capable feature phones are not any cheaper (should those even be called feature phones?))
where internet is available it is usually not that slow either because it doesn't make sense to build a slow internet. i mean, it may be slow compared to what we are used to but even 1Mbps is enough to load at least text oriented websites, even with javascript. those companies do need to offer a service quality that people are willing to pay for. slow internet is a problem of old infrastructure, but developing countries tend not to have old infrastructure to begin with.
Then comes one after another manager, PO, PM, designer. They want: privacy consent dialog, social media integration, newsletter and subscription prompt dialog, put all photos into a clickable gallery, floating auto playing video, and AI chat somewhere right there in the corner.
Someone brought up the topic of JS and screenreaders upthread.
Screenreaders can work fine with JS. The pain points are:
1. Use of JS to reimplement standard HTML widgets. This has broken my screenreader more times than I care to remember.
2. All of this user-irrelevant garbage, like the dialogs, the social media buttons, and so forth.
I remember a few years back trying to pay my electric bill. Yes, I was
using a JS-capable browser. I couldn't actually pay my bill, but there
were plenty of "follow us on Facebook" and similar.
Like seriously, folks, I just wanna send you money.
Really, this should even be something I could do without JS.
Another example: we do online shopping at https://www.fredmeyer.com.
Their website is absolutely terrible, with all of the busyness, some of it user hostile.
Seriously folks, I just want to give you money for product, not follow
you on facebook.
Some sites get it really, really right. I play chess on lichess.org.
That site requires JavaScript. And I don't see any way that it could
possibly be avoided. But it works beautifully with my screenreader.
It's snappy too, even under Firefox on a Raspberry Pi.
I used to be a hard core "screw JS" guy. I've softened my stance, because
I know it can be used correctly and to great effect.
Your average JS engineer needs to have all the browsers stripped from their machine. They need to be given the following VM's: 1. tool bar riddled version of windows that only has 8 gigs of ram and at lest one unreliable key. 2. A chrome book, but with all the filters of the nearst school system. 3. Chrome, on linux, 512mb of ram.
And they get what ever the low end Samsung J series its a phone that makes calls as their cell (cause no cheating).
I give that about 3 months till the web is fast again.