Fustrating web surfing

[Ole Anderson]

Now that I have a 75 mbps connection speed, one would hope that web surfing would be an enjoyable experience with pages loading so fast you don't know it is even happening. NOT!!! Ok, my laptop is 7 years old and I imagine it is causing a lot of problems. But most of it seems to be content servers not being able to keep up with the demand. Especially those enticing little popups , you know the ones that want you to click to view the top ten whatever for the day? I have run across some sites (particularly from tech companies that know the value of an impressive response time) that do load consistently extremely fast, so I know it can be done. Usually simple forums are ok as the content isn't very data (image) heavy.

End of rant.

[Steve Peterson]

I know what you mean. I am on 6Mb/s DSL and some web sites take forever just to show one page of text because of all the adds. I don't even bother going to page 2. I just close the window and move on. The next worst thing for me is videos for news feeds. I can skim a couple of paragraphs in about 5 seconds. There is no way I will sit through a 4 minute video to get the same information.

Edited to add a comment that Sawmill Creek does everything right. Their pages load quickly and painlessly. I used to be a member of a few other woodworking sites. They have all become useless to me because of all the adds taking forever to load. SMC is my favorite by a long shot.

Steve

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

Use an adblocker, and you're experience will greatly improve. I use Adblock Edge for Firefox, and haven't seen an ad in years.

[Chuck Wintle]

Now that I have a 75 mbps connection speed, one would hope that web surfing would be an enjoyable experience with pages loading so fast you don't know it is even happening. NOT!!! Ok, my laptop is 7 years old and I imagine it is causing a lot of problems. But most of it seems to be content servers not being able to keep up with the demand. Especially those enticing little popups , you know the ones that want you to click to view the top ten whatever for the day? I have run across some sites (particularly from tech companies that know the value of an impressive response time) that do load consistently extremely fast, so I know it can be done. Usually simple forums are ok as the content isn't very data (image) heavy.

End of rant.

which browser are youu using? Have you checked for excess temporary files? what is the actual speed of the connection? Try one of the speed checker sites.

[Robert Engel]

It probably does have a lot to do with your computer. When I recently bought a new one, the Internet was twice as fast.
I've head clearing out the cache can help and other of things affect speed such as antivirus programs, ads loading.

But connection speed varies depending on demand. For example, sometimes I watch a movie with no problem and other times it has to buffer every 10 minutes.

Remember too, the advertised bandwidth is like the cfms in a duct collector: usually over rated.
I think it depends on demand, too. I know it used to depend on how far you were from the hub with DSL.

I've heard some of the providers periodically choke down the bandwidth for certain websites like Netflix.
Probably for $$, like some sort of cyber extortion.

[Brian Elfert]

There is so much crap like Flash on websites now that you need a pretty decent computer to run things faster. In 2011 I got a new laptop with i5 processor, 64 bit Windows 7, SSD, and 8GB RAM. I saw a huge improvement in web browsing speeds with the same Internet connection. I'm not really sure what speed Internet I have today. 50 Megabit maybe? Comcast has increased the speed several times so I have no real idea where I am at today.

[Ole Anderson]

which browser are youu using? Have you checked for excess temporary files? what is the actual speed of the connection? Try one of the speed checker sites.

I am using IE 11 on a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Comcast as my provider. Using Norton Security Suite which does a tune up (among other thing deletes temp files) and here is my just-run speed check:

[Chuck Wintle]

I am using IE 11 on a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Comcast as my provider. Using Norton Security Suite which does a tune up (among other thing deletes temp files) and here is my just-run speed check:

well it seems speed of the connection is not the problem. some sites are just slow to respond. Have you tried different browsers and tried disabling norton security suite? I never like norton products, they seems to cause more problems than they fix, JMO.

[Phil Thien]

It is the ads and all the attempts to track your browsing.

[Pat Barry]

I am using IE 11 on a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Comcast as my provider. Using Norton Security Suite which does a tune up (among other thing deletes temp files) and here is my just-run speed check:

OK. I had issues also, similar to yours maybe. OOKLA would show great numbers, when I used it, but something didn't add up. For example, sometimes I would try OOKLA and it wouldn't respond at all or took a long time to respond, then would report good numbers. After a lot of troubleshooting, I came to conclusion there was a connection issue and called Centurylink. They tested from their end and agreed there was a problem. They sent a guy out and he checked out my wiring, inside the hose, verified all the filters, etc and suggested that he could fix it by using a different phone outlet for my DSL. As it turns out that telephone line was crappy and the other line worked. Long story short - things were bad because of the old telephone wiring in my house. If you have DSL its a relatively simple thing to have Centurylink verify it remotely. For me, the service charge was $0.

[Brian Henderson]

OK. I had issues also, similar to yours maybe. OOKLA would show great numbers, when I used it, but something didn't add up. For example, sometimes I would try OOKLA and it wouldn't respond at all or took a long time to respond, then would report good numbers. After a lot of troubleshooting, I came to conclusion there was a connection issue and called Centurylink. They tested from their end and agreed there was a problem. They sent a guy out and he checked out my wiring, inside the hose, verified all the filters, etc and suggested that he could fix it by using a different phone outlet for my DSL. As it turns out that telephone line was crappy and the other line worked. Long story short - things were bad because of the old telephone wiring in my house. If you have DSL its a relatively simple thing to have Centurylink verify it remotely. For me, the service charge was $0.

Way back when I had DSL, our copper was so awful, they were out literally weekly, trying to find copper pairs that worked and they were almost out. Our cable had gotten water into it and all of the copper was corroded and we were told straight out by Verizon's techs that they weren't running any more copper, period. It was cheaper for them to pay the fines for not providing us with any phone service than it would be to put up a new line that only served us. Luckily, they installed FiOS before we ran out of working copper pairs and we were the first ones on our side of town to get it, they even had to run the fiber line to our house especially for us to do the install.

[Curt Harms]

Indeed network speed is one factor in 'perceived' speed. I've done a few things in Firefox that seem to help. As has already been mentioned, an ad blocker. Adblock plus will allow 'good' ads and can be tuned. It's possible with Firefox to set the max allowable size of the cache. A large cache is helpful with slow connections but IMO less important with faster connections. To tune cache size in firefox, click Tools (I think-Edit in Firefox linux) -> preferences -> advanced ->override automatic cache management. I set mine to use 40 MB. rather than the default 350 MB. The third thing can be a bit of a pain initially - NoScript. NoScript is an extension that blocks most javascript by default. I choose which sites to allow javascript. It takes a while to learn what to allow and what to block and once I allow the main site, there'll be more so it may take a few rounds. I was amazed when I first installed NoScript and went to a site like espn.com or CNN.com. There had to be about two dozen sites wanting to run javascript. If one of those sites was slow or unresponsive, the entire page was slow or unresponsive. Of course some scripts must be allowed to run in order for the page to be fully functional and what must be allowed is not always intuitive. Once I set which sites may run scripts, NoScript remembers the settings. NoScript can also block the installation of nasties that use javascript.

[Bert Kemp]

Using IE is your first problem dump it and try Firefox or chrome

I am using IE 11 on a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Comcast as my provider. Using Norton Security Suite which does a tune up (among other thing deletes temp files) and here is my just-run speed check:

[Dan Hintz]

But most of it seems to be content servers not being able to keep up with the demand. Especially those enticing little popups , you know the ones that want you to click to view the top ten whatever for the day?

Use an adblocker, and you're experience will greatly improve. I use Adblock Edge for Firefox, and haven't seen an ad in years.

I have found ad servers to be 95% of any typical delay I experience... on the really poor sites, you can see the ad servers contacted one by one in the lower left-hand corner. Once I started blocking ads using AdBlock+ et.al., I don't experience any such problems. The few that I do are almost exclusively tied to Java scripts that are faulty, and someone else has already mentioned what to do with those.