Slow Connections
My parents live on a farm in Northeast Iowa. Because of where they live, their choices for Internet service providers is very limited. They use a dial up service provider.
I’ve been to their place the last three weekends. When accessing the Internet, I they connect at a whopping 26.4 kbs. Boy, was that slow.
This got me thinking of something I used to say a few years ago, and I think it’s as relevant today as it was then, although I’ve changed the wording a little.
“Web designers, developers, and content providers should always test their work using a dialup connection.”
It’s not possible to provide all content at a reasonable speed over dialup, and that’s OK. However, I’ve seen many cases where the download time could be approved simply by resizing a photo. Testing over a dialup connection would help solve this issue.
I’ve looked for, but haven’t yet found an Add-on that would cause Firefox (or IE) behave like they are on dialup connections. Any suggestions of how to do this?
Brian, I haven’t found a browser add-on, but here are three tools that may be useful:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
http://uswest.optiview.com/POV/task,ov4cooltools/parse.html
http://xat.com/wo/index.html
I only just found them, so no guarantees.
Jonathan,
Thanks for the comment. I use http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ pretty extensively. This site is the tool used by the Web Developer Add-In of Firefox to “View Speed Report”. Great Add-In for Firefox.
I will check into the other two links some more.
Brian