Should we design for iffy internet?

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Consensus: Yes, Design for Iffy Internet

  • Many commenters say you should assume bad or variable connectivity by default; anyone with good internet just has an even better experience.
  • This is likened to designing for low‑end hardware: it improves UX for everyone, not just edge cases.

Intermittent vs Slow Connections

  • Several distinguish “slow” from “intermittent”: slow links are tolerable, dropping connections is qualitatively worse and requires different design.
  • Examples: rural DSL, overloaded LTE/5G, satellite and in‑flight Wi‑Fi where connections flap or packet loss spikes.

Mobile, Wi‑Fi, and Real-World Usage

  • Even users with gigabit at home are often on trains, planes, subways, in basements, crowded venues, or power outages with overloaded cell towers.
  • Home Wi‑Fi quality and congestion often negate fast last‑mile links; many people are on cheap/throttled data plans.

Good and Bad App/Web Behaviors

  • Praised: WhatsApp, mosh, some OpenAI API experiences, well‑built PWAs and offline‑first/local‑first apps.
  • Criticized: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Maps, NYT games, many Electron/SPA apps that hang on “technically online” but useless connections; lazy‑loaded content that never fetched before going offline.
  • Common complaints: non‑resumable downloads (e.g., large git clones), apps blocking on network before showing cached data, UIs that become irrecoverably stuck.

Technical Strategies Proposed

  • Local/offline‑first design: cache data, show it instantly, sync in background, retry transparently.
  • Server‑rendered pages or one‑round‑trip APIs; minimize serial request waterfalls and payload sizes.
  • Handle timeouts, partial downloads, and range requests; tolerate packet loss.
  • Use tools (browser throttling, tc‑netem, toxiproxy, mobile emulators) to simulate latency, loss, and flakiness.

Trade-offs, Audience, and Ethics

  • Debate over “long tail” users: some argue excluding users with weak devices/links is bad business or morally wrong; others say targeting specific segments is legitimate.
  • General agreement that gratuitous bloat, ad/analytics payloads, and “always online” assumptions are poor design unless truly required.

Infrastructure Reality

  • Many anecdotes of poor or unstable broadband in rural US, Canada, UK, Germany, and elsewhere despite optimistic maps.
  • Starlink is seen as a major improvement over legacy satellite but still has noticeable brief drops and slowdowns, so robustness still matters.