Just now, I had a 640kbps 4G Internet connection. This is surely sufficient for a text-based forum, or so I thought. I quite happily browse news articles with pictures in them at that speed, and everything is pretty snappy. Even Gnome Maps holds up pretty well. Time was, these sorts of speeds were the domain of state-of-the-art home broadband connections.
But, for some reason, this forum really struggled with that sort of connection speed.
- It sat at the initial “Loading” screen for long enough that I got bored and did something else while I was waiting.
- Generally navigating around was slow.
- Then, while composing my post for a thread, it said “drafts offline” and, when it realised it did actually still have an internet connection, it erroneously decided that I was no-longer editing the post in the same browser window as I had been before and would therefore need to reload the page.
- The modal dialogue message about needing to reload the page came up repeatedly and stole some of my keystrokes because I wasn’t expecting it to appear, and interpreted one of them as a keyboard shortcut to add a new bookmark, popping up a second box to let me do that!
I can reproduce the problem while on a faster connection by using Firefox’s Responsive Design mode and selecting “Good 2G” or “Regular 3G”, so it does seem to be the speed that causes the problem, as opposed to another kind of network issue.