Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Final question... would you object to my giving your email address to the people at Apple looking at the ticket? Doing so would make it public.

Not at all ... you have it from the email I sent, right?

Correct, I'll include you on the ticket.

I'm trying to turn on notifications. I can turn on the global setting and save it fine, but when I tick any of the subordinate options and click Save Changes, the page reloads and the options are all unticked.

Tried on Mac Safari and Chrome.

In safari on ios16 my cursor auto-jumps to the page number form on every page I visit, bringing up the keyboard. It’s a bit annoying - is there any way to stop this behaviour?

In safari on ios16 my cursor auto-jumps to the page number form on every page

There's already a bug report for that https://www.lfgss.com/comments/16683064/incontext et seq

Oop sorry!

Do you have any extensions installed?

Adblock Plus

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/335956/?offset=500

Having some problems displaying this page on Chrome on Android - it says it can't load it

Too much memory is going to be my guess.

It's a very picture heavy thread, with attachments that allow large file sizes and those files then inlined.

It is a 58MB web page due to those photos!

It worked on a Pixel 6 Pro... but yeah, that was slower loading than usual.

So it won't ever load?!?!
Do I just wait for a new page so I can skip it?

If that's the case fair dos, don't want to sound arsey

So it won't ever load?!?!

Upgrade your phone?!

But yes... on your current device, it won't load. Wait until the next page.

It's a relatively new (under 12 months old) Moto GYP running the latest Android, but it's a budget phone I guess.

It could also be that Chrome has lots of tabs open, or that you have multiple apps running in the background.

Fundamentally it's a RAM issue... large compressed images expand to very large uncompressed images to be rendered, and that page has a lot of large images.

So it's hitting an out of memory exception, effectively killing the tab.

I always knew there was an edge case here, that by allowing large attachments and allowing multiple attachments... that mobile devices could be impacted.

This is that edge case.

My hope was that the exponential increase in performance of computing devices and network connections would outpace the issue and so we'd not encounter it.... but a thread in which almost every post is max number attachments and large attachments... that's exactly the worst case scenario.

It's not going to happen often... and is viewable on desktops and tablets.

So unfortunately the honest assessment is: That page won't work for some devices that have limited RAM and storage (virtual RAM).

Ha it didn't even occur to me that I could just open it on my laptop!

Thanks for putting the time in to explain.

is viewable on desktops and tablets.

Depends on the tablet, that page crashes Firefox/Android on my entry-level Samsung (Galaxy Tab A7 3GB RAM+2GB virtual RAM, Firefox 104.2.0, Android 12) even after killing every other background app.

Enable 4GB virtual RAM, reboot, kill background tasks, try again. Still kills it.

Could the preview thumbnails not be a low res or scaled down version of the uncompressed image? Or at least make that the case after say... 10mb is exceeded in attachments uploaded?

It loads up OK on my 5 year old Oneplus 3T (that has 6GB of RAM which I guess makes the difference?).

Could the preview thumbnails not be a low res or scaled down version of the uncompressed image?

Would help in most cases.

But wouldn't help on that page as still too many far too large images were inlined.

What would help is a "only load images in view". But as you scrolled it would still blow the memory. Additionally this would break jumping to specific comments, as the height of comments above the one you jumped to isn't known and the act of jumping would start loading the images (and scroll the effective jumped to comment downwards as large things load above it).

There's no real solution that produces no edge cases, because it's always possible to inline a third party hosted image that is a 500MB jpg... there would be no way I could know, it would still blow things up.

If I tried to think about measures for things uploaded, then the best I would have is:

1. Do not display thumbnails at all, just links to images.
   
2. Reduce maximum file upload size from 30MB back down to 10MB.
   
3. Detect on a per post basis the number of attachments inlined, and limit it to 1 (because there are 25 posts per page, so that still allows 25 images).
   
4. Do not actually inline images... instead just put placeholders. Have JS on the page look at the sum of all placeholders and decide whether to load things (based on assumption of file size).
   
   

These things are all a bit crappy.

They prevent native mobile phone uploading of images (bike tag of bike would need post-processing to reduce image size).

They would prevent classifieds from just showing all of the images inline (lots more clicking to see what you're buying).

They would require JS for every page rather than supporting older devices (albeit with more RAM). Arguably login already does this, but I want to undo that and all JS-less browsing to function.

And it is an edge case... we have tens of thousands of classifieds threads with photos inlined, we have bike tag of bike, we have project threads... and this is the first time it has arisen.

That it's so rare an edge case and is going to be solved by time... the upgrade of devices with less RAM, the emergence of SOC CPUs with better RAM capabilities, etc... has me not feeling any urgency or priority to solve it.

It's a single page... it's viewable on desktops (assuming your computer is from the last 20 years)... and the impact to people browsing is very limited. Edge cases happen, but the only question is whether it's acceptable... for me it is, it's an edge case.

In the last 5 years the number of times that has been reported across almost 2B page views is once... that one page. That's well within my bounds of acceptable.

Yeah all the solutions add fluff and I hate those attachment link lists you get on some forums, just noise. 👍

Reduce maximum file upload size from 30MB back down to 10MB

Could you do this selectively for file types which render on load? There's no problem with a 30MB PDF or MP4, but hundreds of 5MB JPGs having to download and render every time you visit a page is a PITA even on devices which can handle it. Nobody needs to be attaching image files bigger than 4k resolution, they're just lazy and can't be arsed to do anything but fling camera files at your server🙂

Most files 30MB limit, images 3MB limit is more than enough.

There's no problem with a 30MB PDF or MP4

Because those are just links.

And we have photography threads, bike tag of bike... both cases where people do indeed want to take a large JPG or a flagship mobile camera image and just upload it.

It's such an edge case, this just doesn't bother me.

When it happens, if others cared, they could just reply to the thread enough to bump a new page 🤷 . It feels like a non-issue, when every action I could take is just a regression on the usability for the vast, vast majority of users and scenarios.