A lot of people here are talking about how 2G connections are "almost unusable" and how this should be optimized server-side and so on. I'd just like to point out that there are browser that cater to this specific demographic (slow connections).
Ever since the days of running Java applications on my old Sony Ericsson phone, Opera Mini has been my favorite. As far as the browser is concerned, the website can be as heavy as it wishes -- it will pass through Operas proxy and be compressed according to user preferences. This could include not loading any images (nothing new), or load all images with very low quality. You can also select whether you want things like external fonts and JS to load, or if you want to block that too. When I moved to a new country my first SIM card had one of those "unlimited but incredibly slow" plans. Opera Mini was a life saver.
I guess my point is that we shouldn't get stuck in optimization paralysis if there is no sound and standardized server-side way to solve this issue (and there doesn't seem to be). It would be nice if browsers had a way to tell web servers that they're operating under low bandwidth, like the do-not-track flag, but AFAIK this does not exist.
Until that exists, and I don't mean to suggest we go back to the days of "Made for IE9" here, maybe some responsibility needs to be shifted to the client side. As long as you design your websites in a sane way, they will pass through these low bandwidth proxies with flying colors. Maybe you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of man-hours optimizing your page when you could insert a discrete indicator at the top of the screen for anyone taking longer than X seconds to load that there are many browsers available for low bandwidth connections, and that they might want to try them out?
Ever since the days of running Java applications on my old Sony Ericsson phone, Opera Mini has been my favorite. As far as the browser is concerned, the website can be as heavy as it wishes -- it will pass through Operas proxy and be compressed according to user preferences. This could include not loading any images (nothing new), or load all images with very low quality. You can also select whether you want things like external fonts and JS to load, or if you want to block that too. When I moved to a new country my first SIM card had one of those "unlimited but incredibly slow" plans. Opera Mini was a life saver.
I guess my point is that we shouldn't get stuck in optimization paralysis if there is no sound and standardized server-side way to solve this issue (and there doesn't seem to be). It would be nice if browsers had a way to tell web servers that they're operating under low bandwidth, like the do-not-track flag, but AFAIK this does not exist.
Until that exists, and I don't mean to suggest we go back to the days of "Made for IE9" here, maybe some responsibility needs to be shifted to the client side. As long as you design your websites in a sane way, they will pass through these low bandwidth proxies with flying colors. Maybe you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of man-hours optimizing your page when you could insert a discrete indicator at the top of the screen for anyone taking longer than X seconds to load that there are many browsers available for low bandwidth connections, and that they might want to try them out?