Karl Auerbach

@[email protected] The website seems to demand massive HTTP references to both WaPo and third party sites - so loading it very much depends on a large number of simultaneous TCP connections, something that is not allowed by the old Chromebook.

Just now I loaded the WaPo website on a vastly more powerful Macbook that can handle gobs of simultaneous TCP connections and it still took the WaPo website layout perhaps ten seconds to fully settle down. I just turned on the browser developer tool to show the network connections and watched the display scroll connection attempts - so many that it looked like the waterfall display in a Matrix movie.

I’ve seen the WaPo website stop cold when some 3rd party trackers (or DNS lookups) become slow or non-responsive.

(On this Macbook I short-circuit everything to Google’s trackers, which greatly speeds up nearly every website, I can see that it is greatly speeding the WaPo load time as well.)

@[email protected] I ovten look at WaPo through a web browser on an ancient, very slow Chromebook. And when I say “slow” I mean “glacially slow” and with few simultaneous TCP connections.

The WaPo website is so badly larded with trackers and ads and other garbage than when I click on something to read it takes so long to load that I can go to the Guardian and read another article there while I am waiting for WaPo to load the piece I want to see.

On top of that the WaPo website is so filled with vast oceans of Javascript that it takes a long time - many tens of seconds - for things like the main page layout to settle down. If one doesn’t wait one often clicks on a article but gets a different one.

The WaPo web experience is a disgrace.

And the WaPo App on tablets like the Amazon Kindle/fire is abysmal as well, but not as bad as the website.

@dangillmor While I lean in favor of what you suggest, I fear that “interoperability” will be difficult. This is because, as we discovered over the years with IETF defined protocols, that many groups implement only the minimal core of a protocol or standard, and often do so in ways that are not particularly robust in their response to interactions with slightly different implementations or when network conditions become something less than the perfect, noiseless conditions found on developer networks.

And one need look no further than the awful state of e-mail interoperability today.

My business is building tools to allow implementers the means to test their implementations in less-than-optimal conditions. It is surprising how often even long-deployed code wobbles or fails.