[dave78]

Jeff mentioned in his video that just loading the front page of CNN would take something like an hour and a half (20+ MB).

33.6Kbps is not practical for much on the modern Internet in 2026. As mentioned in a sibling comment, Starlink (even in standby mode) would be much better. lite.cnn.com would load in about 10 seconds which is pretty good, but there's not much else like it left anymore.

What's amazing is how great the Internet in the 1990s managed to be despite these limitations. Just like with RAM and disk space, developers back then had to be very mindful of bandwidth - today's devs (and agents) have the luxury of paying much less attention to that.

[BobbyTables2]

It wasn’t all that great.

Simple weather radar image on Compuserve took about a minute to load. Billing was by the minute too!

What’s more amazing is with 10000x the communication speed and about 1000x the CPU, 1/20th the latency, things now are only about 30x faster…

Today, that damn weather page should have been fully loaded and rendered before one even realized they pressed the enter key.

[j45]

There are services which will remove all but the text when browsing and make it greatly lighter.

20+ mb is the weight of all the javascript javascripting, ultimately to arrange and display an html page.

[ssl-3]

20+ mb is also the weight of rendering the HTML inside each client, instead of at the server. It is the weight of continuous disdain for users, and of 30 years of not giving a fuck about adding yet another abstraction layer and making it someone else's problem.

[bombcar]

You can somewhat "fix" this by using your slow link to connect to a VPS somewhere that then connects to the Internet, either via links or a similar text-mode browser, or other bandwidth-saving gateway.

[geerlingguy]

In the article and my pi-isp project, I use MacProxy Classic to strip heavy stuff from web pages through a local proxy service running on the Pi. This helps a lot, but if a page has 20 MB of resources, it can only do so much (without completely disabling JS and images).

[bombcar]

There were proxies in the old day that would recompress images and do other things, but if the 20 MB is compressed javascript, there's not much you can do but hope it caches well.

[ssl-3]

That's a lot of stuff that I don't want to deal with or maintain. It's simply beyond the tolerance of my gumption, so it's not going to happen. :)

What can happen, instead: I can dream.

In this dream, the process of loading a web page identifies the viewing platform well-enough and the server delivers content that is shaped for it, so it can be downloaded quickly and displayed simply by the end-user device. It's not one-size-fits-all at all, or even one-size-fits-most: It's a pile of of simplistic HTML and maybe some minimal javascript and CSS that is meant for whatever the user is using right now.

In this way, the same layout jiggering, varnicating, and transfabulation is done as it is done today, but the work of doing so principally happens on the server instead of the client.

Also in this dream, I can hear people saying "But that's a can of worms!", and they're right. It's a damned mess -- but it's a mess either way. This just moves the mess from the client to the server.

I can also hear shouts of "But there will be hundreds or even thousands of layout paths!" And all I can think is: If there's a thousand unique device types hitting a given dynamic page, and that scales poorly with the server side doing the work, then that's a problem for the systems guys to direct instead of the web guys.

Which is fine: The web guys hacking away however they want is how we got into this mess of 20 megabyte Javascript downloads just-to-view-a-web-page to begin with. They've quite broadly proven that they're shit at this kind of work, and in my ideal world they'd be relieved of that duty.

(And yeah, to be sure: After I wake from this dream I'm still going to go outside and yell at the clouds, just as I do every day.)

[bombcar]

This dream actually existing for a hot minute back in the day! There were a number of sites that would give you much different experiences based on your capabilities - and this continued into the mobile era - until Jobs screwed it up by shipping a desktop-capable web browser on a phone.

A couple of news sites have a low-bandwidth version: https://text.npr.org

[ElFitz]

I’ve been thinking about using LLMs as a sort of proxy, for both dial-up and bad phone networks.

Theoretically, such a service could allow you to "browse" even via SMS.

I mean, it’s a bit ridiculous to have to resort to that, but the situation itself is ridiculous.