Letting developers to know how much RAM they can waste is a bad incentive

[baybal]

Web pages should be written to accommodate the lowest common denominator. 100mb webpages should be discouraged. 4k video adds should not be added to web pages.

Such pages must crash to prevent people who insert 4k ultra hd videos into random ads from doing so

Letting the people who add 4k ultra HD ads to know how many gigabytes of RAM they can waste will destroy the web

[tunetheweb]

Web pages should be written to accommodate the lowest common denominator.

Agree that assumptions should not be made. The whole concept of progressive enhancement is to design for the lowest common denominator, and then optionally enhance where more can be supported. And the opposite (graceful degradation) is about setting a base level that is not the "lowest common denominator" but degrading down when we see that base level is not being met.

To do either or both of these we need to provide signals as to when more can be supported. And that is what the intent of this API is — to allow capabilities to be checked and understood rather than make assumptions.

The "lowest common denominator" does not mean that we should only design for 640pixel black and white terminal screens. The web is rich, powerful, medium that should be able to use it's full power. With a responsive attitude of course!

4k video adds should not be added to web pages.
Such pages must crash to prevent people who insert 4k ultra hd videos into random ads from doing so
Letting the people who add 4k ultra HD ads how many gigabytes of RAM they can waste will destroy the web

While I don't disagree that there is a lot of bad content out there, I'm not sure such actors (e.g. those that cause crashes) are going to to use signals like this to shove more on there! But if developers can shove less when they know a device is more constrained then thats a win for all.

[baybal]

The "lowest common denominator" does not mean that we should only design for 640pixel black and white terminal screens.

There is absolutely no chance of OOM, nor a need for enormous RAM usage on a webpage with whatever visual design.

An average web designer has to actually try really hard to OOM. And if the web browser itself is designed in a way that it manages to OOM with modern multi-gigabyte RAM smartphones while displaying an average web page, then the problem is that browser, and not the lack of RAM.

The web page being usable even on 1gb RAM smartphones is not in any way an impediment to designing visually appealing, feature rich web pages.

[pmeenan]

The web page being usable even on 1gb RAM smartphones is not in any way an impediment to designing visually appealing, feature rich web pages.

The web platform is capable of building things that are much more than "web pages". Photoshop web which is an in-browser Wasm-based version of the full native app is just one example but so are all of the three.js one-shot AI games that people are sharing on social media these days or some of the experiments with running multi-gigabyte LLM's on WebGPU within a browser.

There are some classes of applications that just aren't suitable to run on machines that don't meet a minimum requirement of some kind. Not every marketing website, mind you, but some richer applications do absolutely care.

You might not personally care about these capabilities or classes of applications but there are a large number of people that do (developers and consumers) and the web platform provides a much safer place for people to use them than a fully-native app.

[baybal]

The web platform is capable of building things that are much more than "web pages". Photoshop web which is an in-browser Wasm-based version of the full native app is just one example but so are all of the three.js one-shot AI games that people are sharing on social media these days or some of the experiments with running multi-gigabyte LLM's on WebGPU within a browser.

I agree that you cannot stuff a 3D videogame with a lot of textures in under 1G of RAM with, or without compression, and I am glad that you agree on that too.

1G RAM smartphones can't run videogames, and the only use from this hint will be to show the user "You don't have enough RAM" message, and it will be the sole benefit there. Please explain, if there is any other benefit in this scenario.

[tunetheweb]

1G RAM smartphones can't run videogames, and the only use from this hint will be to show the user "You don't have enough RAM" message, and it will be the sole benefit there. Please explain, if there is any other benefit in this scenario.

There are indeed some sites that may not run on low-memory devices, and such a message could be frustrating to the user. However, I'd argue a helpful message explaining this can be better than attempting to run something, burning up CPU an d memory when it's not going to work anyway, and potentially making the device and other apps unstable.

And there's many stops in between. Perhaps the game can run in black and white with a reduce frame rate rather than not at all? And only offer the full screen, 120Hz, high-definition, high colour gamut to those with really high-end devices. This is the very ethos of progressive enhancement. Of course Device Memory is just one signal (and there may be better ones for that particular example such as pixel count), but the point stands.

[anniesullie]

I agree that you cannot stuff a 3D videogame with a lot of textures in under 1G of RAM with, or without compression, and I am glad that you agree on that too.

1G RAM smartphones can't run videogames, and the only use from this hint will be to show the user "You don't have enough RAM" message, and it will be the sole benefit there. Please explain, if there is any other benefit in this scenario.

Here are a few lite version websites as examples. It's not always documented by sites when they're switching to these kinds of lite modes on low end devices, so there's lots more we don't hear about:

• Facebook mbasic.facebook.com
• CNN lite.cnn.com
• NPR text.npr.org
• techdirt www.techdirt.com/?_format=lite
• DuckDuckGo: https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

Maybe the disconnect here is that the proposal doesn't fully explain what a device class is? It says, "we can get most of the benefit by exposing a couple of specific signals device memory and device CPU cores. In particular device memory is a reasonable proxy for device class." So this isn't just about OOM, it's saying these 3 bits are a really good proxy for a whole bucketload of metrics that would allow developers to understand that a device might not be very capable.