Re: detecting connection speed

On 03/12/13 16:04, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 09:38 +0000, Puneet Mohan Sangal wrote:
>> Is there any ongoing work in detecting connection speed, as part of
>> this group?
>> See http://www.w3.org/TR/system-info-api/#network and http://www.w3.org/2012/11/performance-workshop/report.html#i4
>>
>
> The short answer is no one is working on it in the web performance
> working group at the moment. I don't quickly see any visible progress on
> the Network Information API for the past 12 months but you may want to
> ask them if there were progress or not.

Detecting connection speed in a useful way is a very difficult problem, 
not least because it's often a time varying quantity (consider a mobile 
device that might switch between wifi, 3G, 3G but with high packet loss, 
and no signal at all, all in the course of interacting with a single 
page). I think that in general trying to expose this kind of data can 
lead to worse user experiences than not exposing it (e.g. if pages 
erroneously shift into some sort of "low bandwidth" mode due to some 
temporary network congestion or whatever). Therefore I don't think this 
should be something that we expose, unless it is clear that we can do it 
in a good way that will solve actual problems.

Received on Tuesday, 3 December 2013 16:17:31 UTC