I was expecting the author to open the profiler tab instead of just staring at network. But its yet another "heavy JavaScript bad" rant.
You really consider 1 MB of JS too heavy for an application with hundreds of features? How exactly are developers supposed to fit an entire web app into that? Why does this minimalism suddenly apply only to JavaScript? Should every desktop app be under 1 MB too? Is Windows Calculator 30 MB binary also an offense to your principles?
What year is it, 2002? Even low-band 5G gives you 30–250 Mbps down. At those speeds, 20 MB of JS downloads in well under a second. So whats the math beihnd the 5–10 second figure? What about the cache? Is it turned off for you and you redownload the whole nextcloud from scratch every time?
Nextcloud is undeniably slow, but the real reasons show up in the profiler, not the network tab.
> Even low-band 5G gives you 30–250 Mbps down.
On paper. In practice, it can be worse than that.
I've spent the past year using a network called O2 here in the UK. Their 5G SA coverage depends a lot on low band (n28/700MHz) and had issues in places where you'd expect it to work well (London, for example). I've experienced sub 1Mbps speeds and even data failing outdoors more than once. I have a good phone, I'm in a city, and using what until a recent merger was the largest network in the country.
I know it's not like this everywhere or all the time, but for those working on sites, apps, etc, please don't assume good speeds are available.
That's really quite odd. There is even no 5G in my area, yet I get 100 Mbps stable download speed on 4G LTE, outdoors and indoors, any time of the day. Is 5G a downgrade? Is it considered normal service in the UK, when latest generation of cellular network provides a connection speed compared to 3G launched in 2001? How is this even acceptable in the year 2025. Would anyone in the UK start complaining if they downgrade it to 100Kbps? Or should we design the apps for that case?
5G is better, but like any G, networks need to deploy capacity for it to be fast.
I sometimes see +1Gbps with 100MHz of n78 (3500MHz), a frequency that wasn't used for any of the previous Gs, but as you are aware, 5G can also be deployed on low band and while more efficient, it can't do miracles. For example, networks here use 700MHz. A 10MHz slice of 700MHz seems to provide around 75Mbps on 4G and around 80Mbps on 5G under good conditions. It's better, but not a huge improvement.
The problem in my case is a lack of capacity. Not all sites have been upgraded to have faster backhaul or to broadcast the higher, faster frequencies they use for 5G, so I may end up using low band from a site further away... Low frequencies = less capacity to carry data. Have too many users using something with limited capacity and sometimes it will be too slow or not work at all. It's usually the network's fault as they're not upgrading/expanding/investing enough or fast enough... sometimes it's the local authority being difficult and blocking upgrades/new sites (and we also have the "5G = deadly waves" crowd here).
It shouldn't happen, but it does happen[0], and that's we shouldn't assume that a user - even in a developed country - will have signal or good speeds everywhere. Every network has weak spots, coverage inside buildings depends a lot on the materials used, large events can cause networks to slow down, etc. Other than trying to pick a better network, there's not much a user can do.
The less data we use to do something, the better it is for users.
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[0] Here's a 2022 article from BBC's technology editor complaining about her speeds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63798292
> low-band 5G gives you 30–250
First and foremost, I agree with the meat of your comment.
But I wanted to point about your comment, that it DOES very much matter that apps meant to be transmitted over a remote connection are, indeed, as slim as possible.
You must be thinking about 5G on a city with good infrastructure, right?
I'm right now having a coffee on a road trip, with a 4G connection, and just loading this HN page took like 8~10 seconds. Imagine a bulky and bloated web app if I needed to quickly check a copy of my ID stored in NextCloud.
It's time we normalize testing network-bounded apps through low-bandwidth, high-latency network simulators.
Such underrated comment. You can really have 500MB of dependencies for your app because you're on MacOS and it's still gonna be fast because memory use have nothing to do with performance.
Pretty much the same with JavaScript - modern engines are amazingly fast or at least they really not depend on amount of raw javascript feed to them.
> You really consider 1 MB of JS too heavy for an application with hundreds of features? How exactly are developers supposed to fit an entire web app into that? Why does this minimalism suddenly apply only to JavaScript? Should every desktop app be under 1 MB too? Is Windows Calculator 30 MB binary also an offense to your principles?
Yes, I don't know, because it runs in the browser, yes, yes.