[Nottingham] How ISP shenanigans hampers your browsing experience.

[Mike Cardwell]

* on the Wed, Jan 07, 2015 at 09:53:52AM +0000, Jason Irwin wrote:

>> Heck, most sites seem to have no problem with pulling in 50 images
>> for a single page load, and content from 15 different domains to get social
>> buttons and tracking scripts added to their sites, with no thought to the
>> dismal performance that will lead to. 
> 
> This does my head in as the browser draws about 25% of the page then has
> to sit and wait as MyFaceDiscqussBookTwit takes its sweet time to load
> an image. And script. And... Luckily my router consigns a lot of that to
> the bin, so I only really notice it off-site.

CSS and non-async scripts are the worse. The entire fetch/render process stops
when it reaches one, until it finishes retrieving it. So if you have this in
your html:

<script src="/foo"></script>
<script src="/bar"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/wibble">
<img src="/img">

Then your browser doesn't load them all at the same time. It does them one
after the other. So if "/foo" is an off-site resource which is currently
offline, or just slow, then it wont even start to fetch "/bar" or the
other resources  until that one times out first. And anything else, e.g
text that is below those tags doesn't get displayed until afterwards too.

HTTPv2 wont help much here. Well, if you are sending multiple blocking
resources from the same domain, you could use the HTTPv2 push stuff. But
that wouldn't help the people who don't know about these issues so wont
implement push. And it wouldn't help at all for fetching resources from
other domains.

>> I think that would be a very risky thing for any ISP to do in the UK.
> 
> For now, yes. If the USA chooses a two-tier Internet (Slow lane and
> Slower lane) you can be sure the UK will adopt it in time, just have to
> wait for more consolidation in the ISP arena.
> 
>> They would have to build a massive whitelist too
> 
> This is perfectly doable. Heck, charging people to be on the whitelist
> could be a nice earner.
> Oh wait, that's the two-tier Internet.
> 
> Yes, I am that cynical.

I'm not quite that cynical :)

-- 
Mike Cardwell  https://grepular.com https://emailprivacytester.com
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