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by Telaneo 7 days ago
I'm curious how many web issues can be solved by having the people responsible for the relevant sites only be allowed to use them on a Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM using Firefox with the network throttled to 3G speeds.

Assuming the processor isn't horrible, I can still browse plenty of sites with those specs without much issue, and on the sites that do require more, it's very rarely because the sites actually needs it (i.e. I'm not running Windows XP in a VM in the browser or something). It could just be normal HTML and CSS and normal forms, sprinkled with some light JS to help out a bit. But the amount of sites made with that level of care and attention are sadly rare, since the people responsible rarely feel the pain or have the empathy to fix the problem.

2 comments

> Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM using Firefox with the network throttled to 3G speeds

And their mobile device should be the cheapest Android phone from a monthly cell provider you've never heard of. This is what the real world is for a lot of people, and a huge number of developers simply don't know or care.

And with a small screen.

The number of websites that are almost useless on the iPhone SE is getting pretty insane. Many site have a massive header, maybe a footer and a sticky ad. That frequently leaves less than half (~4.5cm) the screen usable.

I don't even think Apple cares about smaller screens anymore, because iOS UI elements also overlaps in some places.

+1 to the idea. Developers should have a powerful machine to develop, but a minimal machine to run and test.