[dmitrygr]

How well does their example work over satellite internet with 1.2sec latency? How about my cell connection when T-mobile throttles me to 64Kbps for going over my data allowance? How about my sister's cell connection, as she is on an MVNO and deprioritized sometimes to 128Kbps, sometimes to 6Mbps, and sometimes it varies within a minute between those two?

FFS, people, learn to write proper software that does everything locally!

[simonw]

All of the environments you describe there sound to me like they would benefit from web apps that become responsive after an initial page load of less than 100KB, followed by ~10KB round trips to the server to fetch additional data.

As opposed to the >2MB initial page loads that have become so common with heavy React SPAs in exchange for the theoretical benefits of avoiding more page loads for further interactions.

[dmitrygr]

They benefit from a .exe (or a .tar.gz or a .apk) downloaded when convenient and run locally

[camdenreslink]

Any app with dynamic data would still need to make some sort of HTTP request before rendering some view with that new data. I don’t really get your point.

[hem777]

If the data is also local, which it can be and in many cases should be, there’s no network request round trip.

[flangola7]

My mentor always taught "Program as if it has to run on the far side of Mars."

Software that doesn't need the internet for its function shouldn't connect to the internet. Software that does need the internet should be able to operate under adverse network conditions.

The Voyager probes are 160 AU away, far past Pluto, with a roundtrip latency of 37 hours. The radio transmitter onboard is only about 10x more powerful than a cell phone. The hardware has been in the cold vacuum and hard radiation of space for four and half decades. In spite of this, NASA maintains active two-way communication with it today, and continues to receive scientific telemety data of the outer solar system.

I don't expect web devs to design for deep space, but the core functionality of a website should still work for a rural user with a spotty satellite uplink. Don't do go loading JavaScript or other resource calls until the basics are received. I still remember the days of Facebook being fully functional on a 2G cellular connection, using little or nothing more than static HTML and CSS (and that was before the magic tricks HTML5 can do).

[kaba0]

And what kind of apps are you using? You think Amazon and whatever else doesn’t also start a rest call on basically every action, many of which are “blocking” the UX?