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Ask HN:Why do websites today refuse to work on EDGE/2G?

7 points by DenisDolya ↗ HN
I remember that back then (2017–2020), most websites loaded just fine, whether on 3G or EDGE — the only difference was the speed. As of today, even the search engine lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/ (in Google Chrome) barely works when searching on H and 3G mobile networks — not to mention EDGE. When I try to open a website on EDGE, the browser displays the message: DNS_PROBE_STARTED.

6 comments

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mirmor23
did you try text.npr.org or lite.cnn.com;

I assume you are not in the US, since most 2.5g/3g towers have been shut down;

the reason could be bloated client, heavy 3rd party tracking; probably request timeouts might have been tuned to reflect 4g/5g latency/responses to ensure efficient server resource usage.

there is not much you can do with 200kbps these days.

DenisDolya
Is there anything that can be done about this? Please tell me if there’s a way to search and/or browse websites when the internet connection is terrible. Maybe there’s something like lazy loading, or using terminal utilities in Termux for searching—it seems to me that terminal utilities are less demanding when it comes to a “perfect connection” compared to Google Chrome?
hulitu
> there is not much you can do with 200kbps these days.

You should come to Germany, for a training. But here 3G doesn't work at all.

nom
probably overwhelmed by other background services making network requests
eimrine
I can see Youtube on 2G on my mobile phone, probably your phone has too much of telemetry stucking the channel. 3G is disabled in my country this summer, so when going in forest I use to deactivate LTE to keep having an ability to listen to something. 3G worked in a forest like a charm, I miss it.

BTW I am old enough to abandon all pre-2G phones (1G internet protocol was called CSD at the times) because that protocol can not meet handshake timeout for HTTPS!