Why are Web technologies trying to compress data better if internet speeds are becoming faster?
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More resources means lazier programming. In the 80’s you could buy a Sinclair Spectrum with 16k or 48k of RAM. In 16k you could play an entire game that could last hours. Now you can’t even save a Word document with no content that would fit in 16k.
With limited resources programmers came up with ingenious ways of fitting as much as possible into the small space they had. As resources grew so did the size of programs/games, now a game will run to several gigabytes to download.
Why this is relevant to the Web? You only have to look at how Web pages used to look compared to the graphic and functionality rich sites we have today. I worked for a Web company and zero optimisation was done on images unless complaints were made. It was just designed for a 56k modem, ADSL etc. As speeds increased demands also increased. Now customers want the most feature rich experience for customers (understandably) but customers won’t accept slow sites. So compressions are still actively worked on to counteract this so people on slower connections can still get a reasonable experience. Browser manufacturers also remain in competition with each other (particularly Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) to provide the best experience, often end users will put more blame on their browsers rather than their slow connections, so anything they can do to counteract slow connections helps with that perception as usually processing power at the computer end is not an issue as much as connection speed is.
There is also the issue that in many cases companies pay for their website bandwidth by metered connections per megabyte/gigabyte so the more data can be compressed the less they need to pay.
Why are Web technologies trying to compress data better if internet speeds are becoming faster?
In: 0
More resources means lazier programming. In the 80’s you could buy a Sinclair Spectrum with 16k or 48k of RAM. In 16k you could play an entire game that could last hours. Now you can’t even save a Word document with no content that would fit in 16k.
With limited resources programmers came up with ingenious ways of fitting as much as possible into the small space they had. As resources grew so did the size of programs/games, now a game will run to several gigabytes to download.
Why this is relevant to the Web? You only have to look at how Web pages used to look compared to the graphic and functionality rich sites we have today. I worked for a Web company and zero optimisation was done on images unless complaints were made. It was just designed for a 56k modem, ADSL etc. As speeds increased demands also increased. Now customers want the most feature rich experience for customers (understandably) but customers won’t accept slow sites. So compressions are still actively worked on to counteract this so people on slower connections can still get a reasonable experience. Browser manufacturers also remain in competition with each other (particularly Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) to provide the best experience, often end users will put more blame on their browsers rather than their slow connections, so anything they can do to counteract slow connections helps with that perception as usually processing power at the computer end is not an issue as much as connection speed is.
There is also the issue that in many cases companies pay for their website bandwidth by metered connections per megabyte/gigabyte so the more data can be compressed the less they need to pay.
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