[HN Gopher] Test your product on a crappy laptop
___________________________________________________________________
Test your product on a crappy laptop
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 475 points
Date : 2021-12-19 02:28 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (css-tricks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (css-tricks.com)
| chronogram wrote:
| Fitting because that EOY 2021 header makes the website unbearably
| slow when I have the browser maximized on a 4K screen, I guess
| the css-tricks people should read the blogpost too.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Crappy phones, too! At one of my previous jobs there was a
| "device lab" where they had all sorts of phones and laptops for
| _anyone_ in the company to come in and use and test things on.
| They had various generations of iPhones and iPads, high end and
| low end Android phones, some Windows laptops and an old MacBook.
| The room was open to all and freely accessible by anyone. I saw
| UX, dev, QA, product managers, and even the occasional person
| from sales testing stuff the site in there.
|
| Every time I went in there and used an old, slow phone it
| reminded me to consider the person using that device for real.
| It's so easy to forget when you're working on your giant monitor
| with a super fast computer and a high end phone in your pocket.
| nicbou wrote:
| We had that too and our QA team made good use of it.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| > British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie
| helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead
| blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its
| deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe
| head injuries.
|
| > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered
| going back to the drawing board with the helmet's design.
| Fortunately, a statistician pointed out that the dramatic rise in
| hospital cases was because people were surviving injuries that
| previously would have killed them--before the introduction of
| steel the British Army used felt or leather as headwear material.
|
| I've seen this same story except with warplanes during the War.
| Story goes that an allied air force tried to improve the
| percentage of planes that would return from a bombing raid, so
| they inspected returning planes, found the places where they had
| holes in them and added extra layers of steel to those areas for
| the next bomb run; but this had no improvement on the percentage
| of planes that returned.
|
| That is until a "statistician" realized that all of the places on
| the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the
| plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then
| started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found
| no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the
| plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they
| started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes
| returning from a raid.
|
| Does anyone know the true source of these stories?
|
| Regardless, it really opened my eyes to how changing your
| perspective on the cause of the problem can help find the best
| solution, and to this day I still think of this story when
| solving a problem.
| telesilla wrote:
| We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all
| our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were
| requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users
| who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside
| of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that
| care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So
| we started campaigning to engage users we never heard from, to
| understand what problems they had that we weren't solving, to
| get them energised enough to report to us. It's been very
| successful, engagement has gone up significantly.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| What are some tactics you use to get these customers amped
| up?
| vkk8 wrote:
| This makes sense. The sort of users that leave any kind of
| feedback or even hang around long enough for you to gather
| statistics are those who think the product is pretty good,
| but there are just these small issues that they hope will get
| fixed. The users who think your product is complete crap try
| it, stop using it very early and never leave feedback or
| statistics for you to analyze.
| selestify wrote:
| Did those users actually report different issues altogether
| from the original ones, or did they just report more of the
| same kinds of issues?
| telesilla wrote:
| Yes there is a large set of venn diagrams we weren't
| connecting that it gives us pretty easy access to greater
| coverage. The harder part becomes messaging and marketing
| as we target more use cases.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Way back in the day I was a lone IT guy in a
| distributor/wholesaler, and part of that was creating line of
| business apps to do some real heavy lifting, extending
| existing ones, and creating utilities to tie other apps
| together. In a tiny company of maybe 40 people, where even an
| underpaid IT guy was still an extravagance (but was adding
| huge value).
|
| Periodically I'd ask to shadow someone for a day or two. At
| some points, even asking if I could do their task and have
| them watch me to confirm I was doing it correctly.
|
| What you would learn from this was amazing. All sorts of
| inefficiencies that people would quietly accept, because it
| was still way better than the previous state.
|
| Then a week or two later I'd roll out the update, and get
| huge thank yous from accounting, or sales, or the warehouse
| because I completely trivialized some previous common task.
| What used to take 45 seconds now takes 2 because all the work
| is done for them 99.9% of the time and they just need to
| confirm it's correct (or correct the odd edge case). The
| computer became this increasingly magical tool they loved
| more and more.
| eyegor wrote:
| The number of hacks and workarounds that users will come up
| with without complaining to the dev team is always
| astounding. One time I shadowed someone who was using one
| of our internal tools that spit out pdfs, and at some point
| along the line he realized he wanted something extra
| included on them but didn't think to contact the dev team.
| As part of his daily work flow, he was taking data from one
| of the program's temp files and editing the pdf to add it.
| He had apparently been doing this for about a year. When I
| saw this, I spent 10 minutes updating the report template
| to add it and ended up receiving thank you emails from
| people I'd never talked to.
|
| So yes, find a user and shadow them.
| mkl wrote:
| What mechanisms did you use to get users providing feedback?
| Popups asking or something?
| telesilla wrote:
| Good old email segmenting. It's become a real powerhouse
| for us. Figure out what groups of people you have, talk
| with a few to figure out what they want, build it and
| target those who match. We're not a startup however so this
| is more of a scale up strategy or if you already have
| access to a large number of users who trust you and want
| just send your emails to spam.
| mwcremer wrote:
| You are thinking of Abraham Wald:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Yes, thank you. Now I know where this came from!
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Note that the Wald story may not have actually happened:
| http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06
|
| (But yes, Abraham Wald is the statistician that the story is
| about.)
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Aaaaaactually... in the postscript he sort of walks back
| everything. But since the article has mathematical and
| educational merit on its own, I guess he maintained it.
|
| "My indignation at how the internet dealt with Wald's work
| was overblown. Stephen Stigler (son of George, and a
| statistician at the University of Chicago) called my
| attention to a note by W. Allen Wallis himself in which he
| mentions Wald's work explicitly in connection with
| survivorship bias. Wallis' original article in the Journal
| of the American Statistical Association was followed by two
| very brief comments and then by a further 'rejoinder' of a
| bit more than one page. Towards the end of it he says, "The
| military was inclined to provide protection for those parts
| that on returning planes showed the most hits. Wald
| assumed, on good evidence, that hits in combat were
| uniformly distributed over the planes. It follows that hits
| on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to be found
| on returning planes than hits on the less vulnerable parts,
| since planes receiving hits on the more vulnerable parts
| were less likely to return to provide data. From these
| premises, he devised methods for estimating vulnerability
| of various parts."
|
| Amazing article btw. Thanks. This is what makes HN so
| unique.
| [deleted]
| swyx wrote:
| yes and here's some excellent metaresearch on the "measles
| plane" https://counting.substack.com/p/its-that-ds-meme-
| plane-with-...
| treeman79 wrote:
| I always feel these stories are nonsense, they no one can be
| that stupid. Then I think about the people I've dealt with over
| past 20 years. And I fully believe these scenarios.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > That is until a "statistician" realized that all of the
| places on the plane that they found holes in were actually
| parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return.
| They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes
| they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were
| hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this
| change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of
| planes returning from a raid.
|
| This is highly likely to be grade A BS because it would be
| quite obvious to literally everyone flying an aircraft. It only
| make sense because the reader are not given a full minute to
| think about this.
| carapace wrote:
| Taking the train over the Rockies they tell a story about
| Westinghouse[1] inverting the logic on the pneumatic brakes.
| When first introduced they failed open, meaning the train could
| move. This was convenient on the flats, but if the train was
| stopped on a grade and the pressure failed... down the hill you
| go. So Westinghouse made them fail closed: no pressure, no
| rolling down the hill. IIRC it saved lives.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Westinghouse
| awinter-py wrote:
| old tech blog about improving youtube page weight -- it
| paradoxically worsened their long tail stats
|
| once they sliced it geographically, they found that the
| increase was all in places like siberia where previously the
| site was unusable
|
| https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
| [deleted]
| branko_d wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...
| fortran77 wrote:
| That plane with the red Measels spots has become a joke meme on
| twitter. Here's the Wikipedia page on it to start you off on
| your deep dive:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| jcelerier wrote:
| My personal rule of thumb for native development is to almost
| always run with -O0 and ASAN / UBSAN enabled on my dev computer.
| If the software is too slow that way it will be too slow on low-
| end machines (Pi 3) at -O3 -flto -march=native.
| can16358p wrote:
| If you don't have a crappy laptop in handy, you can test slow
| connection with Network Link Conditioner (if you have a Mac) and
| small screens with any browser's responsive design mode too.
| ahmetkun wrote:
| Chrome and Firefox (probably others too) Devtools also have
| network simulators to test slow connection.
| ngold wrote:
| Bonus stage. Develop your product on a crappy laptop.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| I test all of my apps in the oldest-still-supported iPhone
| (currently the iPhone 6s) and optimize accordingly, carries over
| to Android performance (cross-platform apps) pretty nicely as
| well.
| [deleted]
| rock_artist wrote:
| > You can run Linux from a Windows subsystem to run most
| development tooling.
|
| To be honest, this feels like the author never used "craptop".
| WSL even with quad-core hasewell laptop and 8GB is pushing it.
| It's better to RDP / develop on one machine and run on another.
|
| Having said that, It's important to test on low speced always.
| Even not for website (we test our cpp code on some 2009 machines)
| Narishma wrote:
| I think it says more about your tooling than the hardware if it
| can't run well on 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| To those who test their work on crappy laptops,
|
| Thank you.
|
| Sincerely,
|
| Craptop user
|
| All work I do is tested on crappy low-powered computer because
| that is what I use to do work. If it is not fast on these
| underpowered computers, then it is not usable (for me). That
| means on anything better than a craptop, generally, performance
| can only improve. Similar principle applies with shell scripts. I
| prefer to use the ("crappy") scripting shell as the interactive
| shell. That means scripts generally run fast under all conditions
| and I never have to worry about scripts not working due to use of
| interactive shell, e.g., Bash, features.
|
| Target the lowest common denominator. That's how I work. No
| overpowereed workstation with multiple monitors, or expensive
| "developer" laptop.
| genericacct wrote:
| Would advise testing on ios 10 devices as well; many websites
| don't work well on an old iPad 1 for no good reason
| nirui wrote:
| However, there maybe another darkside of the story.
|
| Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the
| game that they released demands such high hardware requirements.
| The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce
| & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable
| support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good
| computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game.
|
| I think it's also somewhat fitting in this case: the industry
| only focuses on making money out of the people who can or
| potentially can afford the service, and left out those who can't.
| The user-end requirement is just an implicit barrier that allows
| companies to generate rainbow farts.
|
| No, I'm not criticizing those companies that actually employed
| such dark patterns. After all, everyone wants money. However,
| these kind of practice can be costly as well in the form of 1)
| bad UX for paying users, and 2) higher cost of bandwidth (for
| both the user and the company).
| urthor wrote:
| I imagine the problem with game development is that, for 99.95%
| of the game development cycle, you are creating only internal
| builds for fellow developers on workstations.
|
| And this is game development, the industry famous for over-
| scoping everything because it's a winner take all economy.
| Followed by death-marches to implement said over-scopes.
|
| Doing anything special for quartile 1 of the standard
| distribution goes out the window.
|
| Realistically I just think this pattern is true of every
| domain.
|
| 95% of software is made up of throwaway prototypes, where
| thoroughly thought out engineering isn't necessary because the
| business case _demands_ minimum viable product for very good
| reasons.
| c21h30o2 wrote:
| Kids who can't afford fancy computers grow up into rich adults
| who have no nostalgia towards your game franchise
| howdydoo wrote:
| Like exposure, nostalgia doesn't pay the bills.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there
| was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who
| will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.
| mike50 wrote:
| There were tons and tons of similar games to mine craft with
| low system requirements. Also minecraft was originally
| written in Java ao it has the same issues as above.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| The difference is that Minecraft and Roblox were
| phenomenally successful and demonstrate the addressable
| market exists. Making games for a low-spec is one thing.
| Making games that people with low-spec computers want to
| play is another.
| littlehugie wrote:
| This. My kids Play minecraft on the Amazon Kids tablets. They
| startet with a older Version with only 1.5GB of RAM and the
| game kind of worked good enough for them to enjoy it. It
| worked for many years and only had Problems with large
| Outdoor areas. Now they use the newer 3GB kids Version and it
| works really well. I am very happy to not needing to buy them
| 400EUR tablets for this game.
|
| (Btw, i developed medical dicom viewer for large CT and MRI
| data, on a 10yrs old dell Laptop. The viewer was always fast
| on customer machines. If it would not work on my machine, i
| tunded the Software until it does ;) )
| Mezzie wrote:
| There always were, there just wasn't the payment
| infrastructure to hoover up our parents' money in the 90s. I
| had to behave at computer shows and talk nicely to the adults
| about building computers before I was bought a video game (or
| make my parents drive me to a game store). Also they weren't
| full of micro-transactions.
|
| If there had been ways to buy games online + digital
| downloads, I would genuinely have feared for my parents'
| pocketbooks.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Yea, the way this worked out for me as a kid was that I needed
| all the money I got to upgrade my PC and wouldn't have any left
| over for buying games so I just pirated these games.
|
| Anyway, without numbers that's just a theory and might not
| hold. Anecdotally a lot of people are worrying about whether
| they can play games on their budget build. And they would
| rather buy games than spend a ton on a faster PC. And I believe
| consoles sell for a similar reason: they are _cheap_. It 's the
| actual games that console gamers pay decent money for.
|
| (Of course the PC game market is now extremely saturated and
| there are deep discounts & giveaways constantly somewhere)
| vkk8 wrote:
| > 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot
| afford to pay for the game.
|
| I wonder if they had any kind of proof of this. I would think
| that there are plenty of kids who could get their parents to
| pay five bucks for the game, but not 500 bucks to buy a fancy
| new computer.
| newsclues wrote:
| If you look at the flip side people who can afford an
| expensive gaming pc can probably also afford a game which
| isn't nearly as expensive
| Kye wrote:
| Willingness and ability to pay for one thing doesn't mean
| willingness to pay for other things. There are plenty of
| cheapskate rich people and people who consider themselves
| poor on six figure salaries.
| Brave-Steak wrote:
| Notably, this is one reason why WoW managed to hit such a wide
| audience and become so successful. The art design made the game
| look amazing, but the hardware requirements were so low you
| could run it on a potato. Its contemporary, Everquest 2,
| managed to look uglier while being much harder to run.
| ggfgg wrote:
| In the sector I work in it's probably better if you test your
| product on a crappy Citrix or Windows Terminal Server. They are
| always run by the lowest bidder.
|
| I had to sit on a call where they had 32 users on a 32Gb EC2 node
| with each user running ten chrome tabs open each. The CPU was
| rammed at 100%, the RAM at 100% and the disk IO (page file)
| bashing the EBS hard.
|
| The irony of this is they were RDPing into this piece of shit
| from their i7 laptops.
| etxm wrote:
| Test it?! I develop it on a crappy laptop!
| renewiltord wrote:
| I will if I want to target that kind of user. Personally I much
| prefer targeting people who have nice laptops.
|
| Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you're
| getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in
| that case you only have to please the buyer not the user.
|
| So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
| iveqy wrote:
| I know many successful and high paying individuals who just
| doesn't care or understand technology enough to have decent
| hardware. Even if you buy premium hardware, it will get old and
| slow after a decade.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd come to the realisation a while ago that, deliberate or
| otherwise, limiting website usability or accessability to
| recent / high-performance kit is quite possibly an effective
| market-segementation tool in a space in which physical location
| (e.g., an up-market high-street address) is not a viable
| differentiator.
|
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410503
|
| I'm not a fan of this, mind. Just aware that it's a
| possibility. And you're giving voice to that as a deliberate
| choice.
| bdcravens wrote:
| B2B apps whose customers may be small businesses may be
| surprised at just how low-grade some of their hardware is. For
| example, a small mail and parcel store (many of my employer's
| customers)
|
| Additionally, apps designed to be used in the field by top-tier
| customers often fail basic requirements. (Funny how many apps
| and sites fall apart on my iPhone 12 Pro in places where the
| connection drops down to LTE)
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Big businesses too. In job 2 my employer provides services to
| pharma, medical and biosciences corps and our users are
| almost invariably using terrible hardware despite being
| senior scientists heading up labs.
| everyone wrote:
| You're obviously being facetious, but probably most HN users
| _really_ do feel this way.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha, I am glad I entertained but no irony was intended. I
| understand why you believed I was being facetious, though.
| marttt wrote:
| Reminds me of game designer Jason Rohrer who developed his games
| on an old laptop that the previous owner wanted to throw away. A
| link from 2010: https://usesthis.com/interviews/jason.rohrer/
| watersb wrote:
| Oh God yes.
|
| Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web
| browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies
| to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web
| experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone,
| 9600 baud.
|
| We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley.
| On $6000 Compaq computers.
|
| When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I would try it:
| dial up and crawl, overnight, and surf around on the train to
| work the next day.
|
| I was the only person on the team to actually do this.
|
| I could understand that; after a 12-hour day of intense times at
| the office, the last thing most of us wanted was more of it, as
| soon as we got home.
|
| A year later, I was at an ad agency. Big clients, national
| brands. Everyone there used the very latest Macintosh machines.
| Those could be like $8000 each. Beautiful work in Photoshop, then
| stuffed into a web browser.
|
| They had a room with a few PCs, but nobody went in there.
| alkot89 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to
| make here either with regards to the original topic or even how
| the second part of your story relates to the first.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Devs are lazy and wont give up there luxury macs, even for
| testing.
| alkot89 wrote:
| That's like 10% of the comment - I feel like some point was
| trying to be made with the dialup caching product but it
| went over my head.
|
| Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are
| today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard
| in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly
| better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be
| a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple
| dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still
| had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was
| rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-
| equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX
| (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with
| Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs
| a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Thats the same point. When everyone professional is using
| 8000$ Macs or PC workstations but you customers are on
| C64s and Amigas, you would like to run some tests on
| those machines as well.
| [deleted]
| pmontra wrote:
| 1999. I had 10 Mb/s at work and 56 kB/s at home which is about
| 200 times slower, same difference between a 1 GB/s fiber and a
| 5.6 Mb/s ADSL.
|
| I used the same laptop and had very different experiences.
| Sites like the current HN worked much better at home. Large
| images didn't load fast there. Of course developers didn't
| create very large JPEGs or 10 MB JavaScript files back then but
| we had the same kind of problems, scaled down to smaller sizes.
| lowwave wrote:
| Most people in large cities in US and European countries are not
| aware that many people don't connect to the internet regularly
| nor do they use fast laptops. Always make software that works
| without internet or fast process. That way if it works on crapy
| laptop and slow connection or no connection, to me those are only
| software I'll use or buy.
| kazen44 wrote:
| an old colleague of mine work on a project bringing internet to
| rural communities in east Africa.
|
| his reasoning about network usability were always useful,
| especially considering jitter and latency.
|
| also, it is surprising how usuable some internet connectivity
| is compared to none at all. having a shitty ADSL based setup is
| far better then no internet at all.
| avereveard wrote:
| Or, do not endorse people's bad buying patterns.
|
| I do care about crappy network and load times. But there's some
| laptop that have worse performances than three years old tablets,
| and there seems to be no end to what scummy companies sell at low
| end.
|
| At some point down the crappy pit, there's a line where it's no
| longer my problem.
| aww_dang wrote:
| "If it isn't broken, don't fix it"
|
| There's an argument for rampant consumption as a toxic buying
| pattern. If we are upgrading our systems just to use bloated
| webpages - webpages that offer nothing of substance over
| webpages circa 20 years ago, then it is worth asking what we
| are really gaining.
|
| In any transaction it is important to distinguish between what
| is being sold, what is actually delivered and the utility
| provided.
| grishka wrote:
| It's not that hard to write optimized software if you know what
| you're doing. Problem is, developers these days routinely
| prioritize their own experience over their user's. They would
| add a huge library just to use one function from it. They would
| put multiple abstraction layers they don't understand on top of
| their platform just so their code is "beautiful". They would
| use their platform in a suboptimal way (for example, moving a
| DOM element using position instead of transform). And so on.
|
| I mean, I know a guy who recently got into frontend development
| with react. I did the backend for an app he was building. I had
| to explain him what an XMLHttpRequest is so he could send me
| one. It just blows my mind that there are people who legit
| write code with some framework but don't know the basics of the
| language they're writing in and/or the platform the whole thing
| runs on.
| avereveard wrote:
| What condescending bullshit.
| grishka wrote:
| What do you even mean? A website has no business to have
| minimum system requirements. It's a hypertext document with
| some optional macros here and there.
| avereveard wrote:
| Absolutely trivial to demonstrate to be false.
|
| I can use websites to videoconferencing. Streaming
| considered video and audio comes with non trivial loads.
|
| I can use websites to compress images, to compute
| tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control
| devices or play games.
|
| This isn't 1995 and we're way past indulging user lazy
| choices which have us a decade of internet explorer
| nightmares. Web is much more than that, and one need to
| know where to draw the line where their products minimum
| requirement lies.
| grishka wrote:
| > I can use websites to videoconferencing.
|
| > I can use websites to compress images, to compute
| tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control
| devices or play games.
|
| You sure can, but you probably shouldn't. These use cases
| are much better served by native apps. Shoehorning
| _hypertext documents with macros_ into being applications
| will never come close to writing proper applications, in
| terms of both UX and performance.
|
| I really wish we would undo many of the "advancements" of
| the web technology. This scope creep needs to stop,
| yesterday.
|
| I wish there to be an answer to a simple question: when
| is a web browser finished?
| avereveard wrote:
| What you talking about? App delivery trough browser is
| what enabled the low cost zero friction startup world you
| see today, and we're all better for it.
| grishka wrote:
| I don't want "low cost zero friction startup world", I
| want completed products that actually work, ffs.
| wffurr wrote:
| >> Powerful devices can become circumstantially slowed by
| multiple factors
|
| The slowest device we test with is actually a very expensive
| Chromebook with severe thermal throttling issues. Using our WebGL
| app that runs fine on a low-end Chromebook tablet will bring this
| expensive Chromebook to its knees within minutes. It throttles
| down to like 600 MHz or something.
|
| The worst part is that every tech reviewer seems to have one of
| these things in a drawer somewhere that they pull out for
| testing. The usual duty pattern of Chromebooks is very bursty,
| e.g. page loads, but sustained GPU usage just crushes this
| particular device.
| nunez wrote:
| Absolutely agree with this, doubly so if your target market is
| international
| 0xy wrote:
| Gmail has nearly 50mb of JavaScript that thrashes I/O so hard
| that clicking the search bar and typing too soon will cause it to
| skip letters (because the search bar is probably some Angular-
| powered abomination).
|
| It is and was a regression from the previous design which was
| fast even on 3G connections.
|
| It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9
| MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried not being
| poor?
| bdcravens wrote:
| They do still support the basic HTML version:
|
| https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
| quelltext wrote:
| Is that really the previous design, though? I remember being
| presented with this button before and ended up on an
| extremely bare bones version of Gmail (like something built
| for 2G feature phone browsers) that didn't have support for
| changing mail settings, etc.
| Narishma wrote:
| They seem to have disabled the option to make that the
| default view. Or rather, the option is still there but it
| doesn't do anything, always opening the bloated interface.
| angularbot77 wrote:
| Hey now you can make plenty fast Angular apps, there should
| never be a case where you skip letters, it's all about how you
| use the tools available. There are dozens of barebones websites
| that recursively SELECT 1 row at a time from a remote database
| and that is just as painful.
| cable2600 wrote:
| I use Cheap Acers for $150 they seem to run Windows 10 slow
| enough to be a craptop. They also run Linux just fine because
| Linux has less of an overhead. In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a
| huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the
| main OS.
| hu3 wrote:
| I understand you started with "cheap" but don't generalize
| brands like this:
|
| > In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working
| because it struggles to keep up with the main OS.
|
| My coleague has an Acer laptop with i9 processor, RTX 3080 and
| 64GB RAM running on Raid NVMEs. It's screamingly fast.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I would substitute the term 'Netbook'. Several brands make
| them along with Acer
| grouphugs wrote:
| don't be a part of shitty corporations that produce garbage and
| unsustainability
| phreeza wrote:
| On the Google campus there are at least two wifi networks
| available, one regular one that provides good connectivity, and
| one that provides degraded connectivity simulating a 2G cellphone
| connection. Of course one can simulate this easily with a little
| effort but I found it a nice touch to make this available to
| everyone at the push of a button.
| scblock wrote:
| "It's also no secret that the average size of a website is huge,
| and it's only going to get larger."
|
| This attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be
| fat and get fatter. That's a lie.
|
| Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in
| your hands, you just need to use it.
|
| No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that
| bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking
| libraries. No, you don't need a "Read More" button hiding most of
| the content. No, you don't need dynamically loaded clickbait at
| the bottom of the page. No, you don't need an autoplaying video.
| No, you don't need load a script to inject text into a copy
| operation. No, you don't need 87 cookies. No you don't need to
| load random unvetted code from a third party advertiser. No, you
| don't need the page text to fade in on scroll. No, you don't need
| any of that.
|
| In case you forgot,
| https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
| jahewson wrote:
| But... marketing put the 8MB hero image there using their CMS.
| The other marketing people put the 37 trackers there using
| Google Tag Manager.
|
| There's also mystery JS that slows down everything and breaks
| random parts of our app - that's your Chrome extensions :)
| ronsor wrote:
| You don't need those 37 tracking libraries, but management
| does.
| scblock wrote:
| They don't need them either. Doesn't matter what they think,
| the truly do not need them. It's time to stop this.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Good luck explaining them that.
| kisamoto wrote:
| More often than not I feel these decisions are out of the
| developers hands.
|
| As a dev, I want to use tree shaking to make my bundles small
| and optimize to make my website lighthouse score 100 across the
| board.
|
| What happens? Marketing needs tag manager installed and then
| proceeds to async load 50 tracking scripts in the background.
|
| Design wants the large hero images because on the high Res
| devices they use it looks slightly pixelated and when you push
| back, a quick screenshot to the PM will guarantee the ticket is
| added to the backlog.
|
| Point being I'm not sure claiming that Devs hold the power is
| particularly constructive as there is a large portion on non-
| techies who have their own priorities to push.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed...
|
| No?
| thundermuffin wrote:
| I've had the exact situation kisamoto is talking about
| happen to me countless times, and I can probably count on
| one hand the amount of times I've won the battle over
| images. Sadly, the folks calling the shots on what images
| to use and exactly how they need to look do not care that
| I'm using responsive imagery to serve images to our users
| with appropriate file sizes, reasonable resolutions, and
| ensure crops have editor selected focal points.
|
| When I say these folks get upset over slight pixelization,
| I'm not even talking about pixelization where everyone can
| tell it's a low quality image. I'm talking about situations
| where people are upset they can't read an iPhone screen
| someone is holding in the background when they are viewing
| it on their 4K display (note: that particular phone isn't
| the focal point of the shot, nor does it have anything to
| add to it; it's just someone staged back there to make the
| shot feel more alive, mind you!).
|
| It's disheartening because I do want to deliver the best
| experience possible and try to do everything in my power to
| accomplish it, but sometimes I lose out and folks force
| their megabyte imagery.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We need to figure out a better way to manage images that have
| multiple qualities. Something that can take connection into
| account.
| atoav wrote:
| Cool bonus: if you skip a lot of that stuff you also wont need
| a cookie banner, your page will load faster and feel better
| nine_k wrote:
| The technical worker who codes up the web site and its backend
| does have a say, but not a lot of it. Product and sales people
| have a stronger say, because they optimize for the money the
| web site produces.
|
| Explaining them how much worse the bloat makes the site's
| experience for the user, showing how many pages are left
| partially loaded because the user did not have the patience and
| navigated away, how the competitor's site loads faster, may
| help convince them to keep the experience reasonably slim.
| bitwize wrote:
| This.
|
| Asking for web sites that don't have 27 trackers, enormous
| hero images, a full copy of framework of the week, etc. is
| like asking for native games under Linux: the money isn't
| there to justify the added hassle and support costs.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| The whole point of the article is that poor optimisation
| make you loose a big part of your audience. The money is
| there, you just don't notice it.
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| And as a dev, I make none of those decisions.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Also as a dev, I don't really care. It's not my money on the
| line, it's the companies. If the site sucks and users don't
| like it, the company loses profits and they will be forced to
| change.
|
| The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is
| actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not
| my problem.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Dangerously based response, Gigachad.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Trouble is that your users are generally in a similar
| situation, not getting to choose what tools they use. By
| producing bad software, you're making their life harder
| personally.
| rovr138 wrote:
| As a dev, I don't produce bad software.
|
| Users of the features we develop are the ones that
| produce bad websites.
| zerocount wrote:
| I agree. The few times I've cared fell on deaf ears.
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| > Wealthy individuals can, and do, use lower-power technology.
|
| Surprisingly true. I've seen quite a few fairly wealthy people
| use some janky Android phones. Their reasons to use them can be
| best summarized as personal preferences, but the fact remains.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I my experience, those who don't care about performance almost
| always happen to be bad developers. Interviewed with plenty of
| those.
|
| I've worked with machines so underpowered you can notice
| execution time difference between minified and non-minified code.
| And where CSS animations are considerably slower than GIFs. Oh
| yeah.
|
| Right now I am with people who are pretty good at architecture
| but kind of suck at the pieces that power their designs. It's an
| ego problem. Big one at that
| eatonphil wrote:
| Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop?
| $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more
| representative of today.
| icelancer wrote:
| Yeah a T-series Thinkpad. We use them at work for dumb
| terminals for forms, COVID compliance nonsense, and random data
| entry points. They are surprisingly durable and still pretty
| solid.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Not just for that. I use a T460 with an old i5 as my daily
| driver. Runs like a charm. Helps that it runs Linux but it
| was OK with Windows 10 too.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| T500/W500, 4GB of RAM.
|
| It's something like 13 years old, and ~$60.
|
| It can run almost every website that hasn't been web-dev'ed
| into oblivion.
|
| It balks at anything with memory leaks and inefficient CPU/GPU
| load.
|
| It can run YouTube/Facebook/Twitter (surprisingly, for the
| last).
|
| It can't run https://github.com/
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _It can 't run https://github.com/_
|
| It... what? I don't know about Facebook, but GitHub is a good
| deal lighter than YouTube and Twitter. GitHub is one of the
| _extremely_ few websites developed by a large number of
| people that _aren't_ atrociously resource-heavy and
| JavaScript-dependent.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| I meant the very front-page/the landing page/i.e.
| https://github.com/
|
| It cannot run it at all, because of all the graphics
| nonsense going on.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Fairly impressed that it runs Facebook. Out of all the
| websites I use, I find Facebook to be the most slow
| (presumably due to its heavy use of JS). This is despite most
| other websites I use preforming fine on my personal 2017-era
| X1 Carbon and work 2017-era MacBook. I'd have thought it
| would fall off the rails on a 13 year old machine!
| reaperducer wrote:
| Just see what's on offer at your local thrift shop.
|
| I don't recommend garage sales, however. People tend to
| overvalue their electronics. I tried to buy a radio that was
| worth maybe $20 from some guy. He wouldn't part with it for
| less than $150 because it reminded him of his father. That's
| nice, but I'm not paying $130 for your memories.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Could it be that he was forced to sell it?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Maybe. His wife was standing right there. But I'm still not
| going to pay $130 for sentimentality that I cannot share.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Try the shittiest laptop at Walmart. Like an HP stream.
|
| Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.
| mch82 wrote:
| Trying small displays is essential!
|
| My software engineer teammates get specially approved 4K
| displays and "engineering" laptops. People who use the apps
| are often restricted to "business" laptops. Conference rooms
| still use old projectors that are even lower resolution. We
| have no control over the displays our customers use.
|
| I've been teaching my engineers to use the responsive design
| tools in their browsers. For UI components that render
| differently based on @media queries, it's been helpful to add
| stories for those breakpoints to our Storybook component
| library.
| mch82 wrote:
| When preparing to present to a remote audience, check how
| the slides will look for people connecting with a phone.
|
| When recording a demo video, try to record at a lower
| resolution like 720p to save bandwidth and make it easier
| for people with small screens to watch.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Even a low-end modern system only takes you so far back in
| time.
|
| Keep in mind that hardware improves _roughly_ on line with
| Moore 's Law. The gradation from low-end to mid-market might
| only be a few years of development.
|
| The 10-year-old system is probably going to be much worse
| than a current low-end buy.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Try it first.
|
| Moore's law hasn't been kind to x86 laptops, and the tricks
| used to speed things up are missing from low end celeron
| processors and binned SSDs. The cheap hardware and poor
| touchpads add to the charm.
|
| I would bet that the 10 year old Lenovo would be
| surprisingly better than the shitty 2021 device.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| CPU clock speeds haven't increased.
|
| There's been SSDs, increased cache, increased memory
| speed, and more cores.
|
| You might want to go back a bit more than 10 years, but
| yes, even a reasonably high-grade older system in my
| experience really dogs out on the current Web.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.
|
| The _low_... um. One of us is in a bubble. I 'm typing this
| on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine.
| Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on
| this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it
| might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade
| old)
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's low res relatively as it is roughy the lowest
| resolution still in use. Mid range laptops these days come
| with 1080p displays and high end is somewhere at or under
| 4K
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Ah, you're right; if I look on Best Buy and Newegg I
| _can_ buy new machines below 1080p but they 're the
| _very, very_ bottom of the barrel ($100 Chromebooks and
| those weird "technically a laptop" off-brand Android...
| things). Well, here's to a crisper future:) (That
| apparently arrived while I was distracted)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I don't know if bubble is the right term here. WXGA
| (1366x768) is more common _and_ more fubar, as the
| horizontal may vary between 1360 and 1372.
|
| The point is to feel the pain. By any modern sensibility
| both resolutions are pretty awful, and experiencing it on a
| $200 consumer laptop is icing On the cake. Although I have
| clients who routinely test applications on ancient 800x600
| displays due to legacy constraints.
| bluedino wrote:
| The old target was a 2008-2010 MacBook Pro, one with a Core 2
| Duo CPU
| nine_k wrote:
| Buy a 5-years old laptop off eBay, yes. In a good working
| order, but with a slow CPU, little RAM, and a mediocre screen
| (not even FHD). A thinkpad is a fine choice because they are
| usually made to last, so it won't keep breaking at you.
| kome wrote:
| 5 years is not that old, i believe
| tux wrote:
| Yeah I agree, I use 10 year old desktop and still don't
| concider it to be old.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'd go older. There's no shortage of 5-10 year old machines
| out in the wild. Plenty of very cheap t420 and x220s
| available for less than $100 on eBay.
| londons_explore wrote:
| While this is good for testing during development, A crappy
| laptop with a fresh install of windows, will be far less bad
| than a crappy laptop with a 6 year old full-of-crap windows.
|
| I suggest doing the final test of your your site on:
|
| * A friends old laptop, on their wifi, still logged in as them,
| and with them clicking the buttons with you watching over their
| shoulder.
|
| * The same, but a friends old android phone, preferably with
| 'samsung browser'.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Just go to Walmart or Best Buy or your local equivalent and buy
| a cheap laptop, something that's $600 tops and feels like the
| plastic is just barely held together.
| vanviegen wrote:
| That would get you a reasonably fast processor and probably
| at least 8GB of RAM. That's not as low-end as many of your
| customers may be using.
| zerocount wrote:
| $600 would be a prime dev laptop for me. I use the cheapest,
| non-chromebook, I can find then throw FreeBSD or Linux on it.
| I prefer desktops and spend much more money when I build one
| of those.
| mrich wrote:
| Also use https://pagespeed.web.dev/
| tjr225 wrote:
| There's a similar sentiment in the music/audio mastering world;
| test your mix on crappy speakers.
| bullen wrote:
| I go one step further, all software I make is developed on
| Raspberry 2 (2W, JavaSE server) and 4 (7W, C/OpenGL client).
|
| That way I don't have to worry about missing any performance
| beat!
|
| Since energy prices are guaranteed to increase forever, I'm
| surprised this is not default behaviour.
| mehdix wrote:
| I do it sometimes on a Pinebook Pro. It's like raspberry pi but
| with a solid aluminium body, a good keyboard and a good enough
| screen.
| nicbou wrote:
| The article omitted an important aspect: craptops have crappy
| screens with terrible contrast. It makes some elements really
| hard to discern, even though they look fantastic on your
| development machine.
|
| The screen size can also have an impact. Developers rarely use
| 1366x768 monitors, or even low DPI displays.
|
| There's also internet speed. Wired internet is fast, but people
| use your website on crappy hotel wifi, or in the underground.
| Ekaros wrote:
| This also applies to desktops. Where contrast and brightness
| can be anywhere and they might even be placed in direct
| sunlight...
| simonw wrote:
| It's not just performance here: colour grading is really
| important too.
|
| Many years ago I had a fascinating incident with a client. We
| were building a custom skin for our product for them, and they
| had quite a striking brand identity that we tried to match. When
| we showed them what we had built they complained that it was
| illegible.
|
| Eventually, after visiting their office, we found that they were
| all working on cheap Windows laptops attached to horribly
| configured monitors - and our site really was illegible. We had
| done our design work on an iMac!
| kingcharles wrote:
| Indeed. Buy a crappy 15 year old LCD TV with HDMI and hook it
| up. Most of the really cheap Chinese models have terrible gamma
| that means half the colors look the same.
| namibj wrote:
| I highly recommend setting (non-HDR) screens to sRGB color
| mode or at least gamma, to have at least _decent_ color
| reproduction.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Yes, do this if you want to actually use the screen
| properly. But do not do this if you want to test how awful
| your content looks on other people's setups.
| watersb wrote:
| There are lots of good options for sub-$200 laptops at Wal Mart
| right now. ChromeBooks or little Windows machines.
|
| Every web dev should use one.
|
| I am fascinated by the low end options, you learn a lot about a
| system when it's pushed to its limits. Or maybe you learn even
| more about your pain threshold...
|
| I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car
| than it is to make a $1,000,000 car. I don't recall the source,
| via Horace Dedieu maybe.
|
| My first job out of college was at a spaceship company. One of
| the most senior engineers told me of the footrest he had designed
| for early 747 airliners. First Class. He considered it his
| greatest work.
|
| That foot stool was quite literally more difficult than rocket
| science.
| LeonM wrote:
| > I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000
| car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car.
|
| It is, but probably for a different reason than you'd think. In
| automotive, the difficulty is not designing the car, but the
| facility to mass produce them. Elon found out the hard way. In
| his words: "it's trivial to design the machine, but it's hard
| to design the machine, that builds the machine". He is
| currently facing the same challenge with the production of the
| raptor engines for starship.
|
| A million dollar low volume "hand made" car can be build by a
| small team, with relatively few resources. Operating a factory
| that produces thousands of affordable cars per day takes tens
| of thousands of people through the entire supply chain.
| kazen44 wrote:
| producing something in a very high volume consistently is
| difficult. my SO's father works in plastics manufacturing.
| they make tiny plastic housings used in cable connectors and
| tiny plastic balls for machine bearing seals.
|
| both of these products have surprisingly high specification,
| and producing hundreds of thousands of them each day is a
| serious challenge.
| jeabays wrote:
| Elon (and other shareholder) didn't do shit, he just owns the
| facilities and the rights to reap the profits.
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| I have been fascinated by this question ever since seeing an
| all apple school employ macbooks as a minimum bar. using
| Samsung dex, and now budget arm chromebooks I have found most
| websites do work on even mediatek and qualcomm chips, and
| design my own experiences to work there accordingly. The lenovo
| Duet is an incredible device, its sad how poorly optimized some
| of the heavier websites are and you can't do anything about it.
|
| I find the bias towards powerful desktops as the only place any
| apps are written and tested ridiculous and something we can
| work to correct long term with progressive web.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I work in Education and I have to admit things are just
| easier in the Apple ecosystem. Things like AirPlay and
| AirDrop etc are lifesavers for many of the less tech-inclined
| staff in schools who can actually manage to use these (and
| other) tools. It's not just about websites and apps--there
| are accessible QOL features macOS offers that simply aren't
| present or are packaged up in a non-obvious way in ChromeOS
| or Windows.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Often the trade off on those sub $200 laptops is a really poor
| screen and speakers and other things that make for a crappy
| experience.
| veermanhas wrote:
| > https://twitter.com/davatron5000/status/1429866381831544836?...
|
| As a business having to create ideal scenarios is difficult.
| Mostly, I would focus on my major target audience which pays me
| the most and add the optimization to roadmap when I want to
| experiment and test the said market for my product/service.
| Running a business is complicated as is.
|
| For SaaS businesses focussing on tech companies wouldn't be an
| issue. Example, using Figma requires a good machine a score on
| Speedometer of 80 should suffice as we go below than that things
| aren't so great. But mostly tech companies using Figma would have
| a good machine. Yes, there would be an accessibility issue for
| new comers and college goers who cannot use Figma due to a crappy
| laptop but even small businesses in services like myself help
| them buy a new laptop for work.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| I just put the throttling on in the network tab of Firefox/chrome
| developer tools. Plenty realistic
| paxys wrote:
| That throttles the internet bandwidth, not CPU, memory, disk
| reads/writes or any other constraints that lower-priced
| hardware will have.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| It's true but as an approximation it's pretty good no?
| rovr138 wrote:
| CPU cores, cpu frequency, available memory, disk read/write
| speed all affect performance too.
|
| CPU cores and available memory can be limited via a VM. CPU
| frequency, and disk speeds can't. 5200RPM disk vs SSD/NVME
| is a HUGE difference. If it's swapping often on a 5200RPM,
| that's a significant slowdown.
| starburst wrote:
| It's not only about poor network connection but also poor CPU /
| RAM, having a website visually lag / taking multiple frames to
| render is not a great experience and having a top of the line
| desktop can make you easily not aware of those issue.
|
| There is something very pleasing about everything running
| smoothly without any hiccups.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| I actually find Chrome's developer tools quite handy for this:
| for example, emulating slow Internet connections, checking your
| Lighthouse score, simulating different geographies, being able to
| adjust between many responsive device dimensions etc. Super worth
| it to get familiar with the whole host of tools that come
| installed with your browser.
| je42 wrote:
| I like the idea of a testing tuesday, but not sure how many
| companies set this up and what it actually entails?
| rozap wrote:
| If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer.
| Orphis wrote:
| At the beginning of the pandemic, my team worked on optimizations
| as priority number 1 as we got a lot of new users with terrible
| configurations who wanted to do a lot more that what ever
| intended for that same hardware.
|
| I managed to find a crappy laptop to do some testing and work on
| optimizations, and it wasn't pretty. No development tool would
| work on it. My recommendation is thus: aim low, but not the
| lowest. You'll still be able to measure impact of your changes,
| and you'll be able to collect some data and other measurements
| about what is slow.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Dev laptop need not be your test laptop. You should still test
| on that machine even if you can't develop on it. And I have a
| feeling this test also indicates a lack of optimization in the
| dev tools as well.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| Quite interestingly while building a WebGL application I had a
| slightly reverse experience. While it worked surprisingly fine on
| some older potato laptops, the experience on Macbooks with retina
| screen was consistently problematic. That was due to the sheer
| resolution that had to be rendered per each frame. Took quite a
| bit of optimisation work to improve it.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| The same survivor bias analogy goes for usage of Firefox and
| Javascript in general. "Our users dont block JS and are 99% on
| Chrome." Because the tech savvy users just block your
| surveillance stuff.
| varajelle wrote:
| But we anyway don't care about people who block our ads
| fortran77 wrote:
| > apps like virus scanners that are resource-intensive and
| difficult to remove.
|
| My brother bought a premium Lenovo laptop. He's not very computer
| literate (he's a lawyer).
|
| I cautioned him to run "Add / Remove" programs and remove the
| McAffee trial and turn on the built-in Windows virus scanner. I
| told him I'd talk him through it. Of course he didn't.
|
| A year later when I visited him (we live on opposite ends of the
| country / world depending on the time of year) I saw that he
| simply uses his computer with giant red warning popping up all
| the time from McAffee "WARNING YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE UNPROTECTED"
| and a link to buy McAffee.
| shireboy wrote:
| Should be pointed out you can simulate slower internet speeds in
| your chrome dev tools. The others- display/ram/cpu may be easier
| on a craptop, but a VM could also simulate resource constraints.
| kazen44 wrote:
| mind you that VM constraints are not to same as physical CPU
| contention and in some cases, this could be a bad test.
| (although unlikely for web developers).
| ehsankia wrote:
| Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application
| on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and
| breakdown in bad network environments.
| LeonM wrote:
| This.
|
| 2 rules:
|
| - Always indicate that your application is performing a network
| action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while
| submitting, etc)
|
| - Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form
| of feedback to the user when something went wrong.
|
| Try letting your local development backend return a 500,
| timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your
| frontend handles this in a graceful manner. It should at least
| give some feedback to the user that the operation failed.
|
| You can emulate a slow internet connection in chrome devtools,
| though I find the experience not accurate. You can also just
| add a sleep() call somewhere in your local backend. Maybe
| inject a sleep() into your acceptance environment, and let the
| test team work through the scenarios with that sleep() call in
| place.
|
| I've seen so many frontends that don't catch errors, and just
| show the spinner indefinitely. Or worse, show nothing at all.
| This is extremely confusing to less technical people.
| usr1106 wrote:
| > Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form
| of feedback to the user when something went wrong.
|
| The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL
| most of the day because it works just fine for most I do.
| Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical
| resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't
| use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing
| but text in full screen. Then Google Meet will forever freeze
| the shared picture after a couple of minutes without anybody
| telling so. It's ridiculous that they cannot handle this
| reasonably, you don't need 30 fps to share a screen of slowly
| changing text. It's completely user hostile that there is no
| message for either the sharer or any participant that sharing
| has frozen and will never recover. This is paid usage of
| Google Meet.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Having used a range of video conferencing systems, your
| description of Meet lines up with pretty much every Meet
| session I've been involved with. I'll meet the same group
| of people on Zoom another time and it usually works much
| better on Zoom.
|
| Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc
| even on high quality fibre connections Zoom = smooth high-
| res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor
| glitches that usually sorts itself out in seconds) even on
| low quality connections
|
| The difference is like night and day, no joke...
| usr1106 wrote:
| On 4G, which gives me 20 - 40 Mbit/sec uplink I have no
| major issues with Google Meet. Sharing terminals with red
| on black font does not work well. Whether Zoom works
| better I don't know from own experience. I hardly ever
| use it because my employer has a Google subscription.
|
| Well, sharing terminals over telcos is backwards anyway.
| We did that 20 years ago over 56 kbit/s modem lines using
| VNC. And the compression was lossless, the result pixel
| perfect.
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| I've used toxiproxy [1] to imitate various network problems
| (slowness, lost packets, dropping connections, etc). It works
| pretty well, and is even amenable to running during functional
| / integration tests.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/shopify/toxiproxy
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| This looks amazing
| paxys wrote:
| It's frustrating that this is so easy to do in one click using
| the browser's in-built developer tools, and yet no dev team
| spends their time on it (or even know that it exists).
| speedgoose wrote:
| The built-in tools are a good start but they don't simulate
| most of network issues and don't do anything about existing
| websocket connections.
|
| On windows I used clumsy that was much more realistic. On
| some tablets, I used my microwave oven or my feets to walk
| away from the Wi-Fi.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I can't find a source, but I heard that Google used to
| purposely slow down their corporate network on some days to
| force all teams to dogfood test their software on slow
| networks. Or maybe they just offered an alternate slow Wi-Fi
| network to make testing easier, not forcing everyone to use a
| slow network.
|
| But forcing managers to use a slow network would be an
| effective way to get them to prioritize performance. If using a
| slow network is a choice, they wouldn't.
| bluedino wrote:
| Microsoft was famous for testing the Mac version of Office on
| base model 60MHz PowerPC machines
| cube00 wrote:
| Apparently they had whole labs full of banks of machines in
| many common configurations to test their software. However now
| the "insiders" get the privilege of doing it for them for free
| under the guise of shaping the product direction.
|
| Windows Updates are drip fed out to classes of machine so they
| can limit the damage when they hit a class that inevitably
| fails because it was never tested before rolling out to
| production on that hardware.
|
| I appreciate they can never test every configuration but based
| on what they used to do it's clear they identified a need for
| this kind of testing in the past so what's changed? Why don't
| they need to do this testing anymore? Why make your users do it
| for you, for free, no less.
| seoaeu wrote:
| > Why make your users do it for you, for free, no less.
|
| I think you answered your own question.
| Dagger2 wrote:
| They did the same for Windows 95: developers were given 386s
| with 4 MB of RAM to test on, because that was the minimum
| requirement for Windows 95.
|
| And in the end, it ran -- just about -- on those specs.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Did later editions (e.g. 95b) still run on the 386? I
| remember running 95b on a Pentium 166 MMX with 32MB of RAM
| and even that was a challenge at times!
| p_l wrote:
| OSR2 ran pretty nice on 486 DX2 with 16MB of RAM
| kazen44 wrote:
| the same with Dave cutler, the lead on windows NT, making
| sure everyone dogfooded NT as soon as possible.
| grishka wrote:
| I often test my Android apps on a nexus 5. Though its battery
| is so bad it sometimes shuts off while booting while plugged
| in, I do wonder if they're still selling batteries for this
| thing.
| mikeytown2 wrote:
| Raspberry pi works well for this
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I second this! A Raspberry Pi 400 is often my primary web
| browsing device, while my workstation is busy with other
| things. There's no reason why a website should overwhelm it.
| jimmont wrote:
| this, and old mobile phones/tables
| kuon wrote:
| I still encounter websites/UI that are laggy on my high end
| workstation, I cannot image how unusable those websites would be
| on a low end laptop.
|
| The funny thing is, most of the time those websites have no
| complex requirements, it's mostly news site with things likes a
| covid map embed, but the map has a resolution to the meter for
| country boundaries... A few KB image that open the interactive
| map on click would work just the same.
|
| And for website with heavier requirements (web app), there are
| two camps, those which are excellent (like onshape, that thing is
| amazing, or draw.io) or painfully slow to the point I had to
| ditch them (notion, clickup).
|
| I have a feeling that many of those laggy website could do some
| key optimization to make everything order of magnitude
| faster/lighter.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Try it on a low end smartphone under $50 as well. (Some are under
| $30)
|
| Most things are painful on one of those. Be the exception
| usr1106 wrote:
| The point they make is more than valid.
|
| I don't like the attitude calling them craptops. A Gigabyte of
| memory and 10 Mbit/sec are enough to meet 99.9% of the user needs
| for Web browsing. If sites were implemented in a resource-aware
| manner of course.
|
| Instead of looking down at craptops I would look down at people
| introducing 4K and using many Gigabytes of memory for personal
| computing. Even worse making masses use it. It's irresponsible
| greed and short-sighted capitalism that ruins the planet.
| nottorp wrote:
| > A Gigabyte of memory and 10 Mbit/sec a more than enough to
| meet 99.9% of the user needs for Web browsing. If sites were
| implemented in a resource-aware manner of course.
|
| The devs need that just for Slack sadly.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 10Mbit/s is actually bit high in my mind... 256kbit/s should be
| reasonable.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| It's not just developers, and it's not just about speed, it's
| also designers / UX bods who need to heed this. My decently
| powered work laptop from job 1 has a fairly rubbish screen, which
| means that a lot of the subtle hover effects, 1 pixel light grey
| on lighter grey divisions and skinny fonts either aren't visible
| or are incredibly difficult to see. A good trick if you're
| working on a large, hi res screen is to have a small and crappy
| second monitor hooked up if you're doing any UI work so you can
| see what it will actually look like to a lot of your users.
| kiririn wrote:
| This is one area that really grinds my gears: the trend in UI
| design to reduce contrast because full black on full white text
| is too contrasty. Whatever minor improvement in readability on
| their quality 3000:1 contrast ratio monitor pales in comparison
| to the loss in readability on a 200:1 trash TN display. Even on
| a good display at low brightness low contrast design choices
| can be infuriating (e.g. phone at min brightness in pitch dark
| room)
| Mezzie wrote:
| I honestly don't get why we just don't have options. That's
| what we did back in the Dark Ages for things like
| resolutions. Let people set whether they want high or low
| contrast.
|
| I also feel this re: dark and light modes, as somebody whose
| astigmatism makes dark mode LESS usable than light mode. I
| get it, dark mode is awesome for most people. Please don't
| make it mandatory.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I work in web development at a major, well-known company. My
| top of mind is exactly what the article is reflecting: how will
| this product/feature perform on a craptop/low power ChromeOS
| device/cheap smartphone that isn't even sold in the U.S.? I can
| say first hand that our designers do not care about this. I
| have never heard any concerns around this even so much as
| uttered. I think part of this is due to a rigid 'design system'
| that, if adjusted to better accommodate for our craptop, etc.
| users, would require updating many other products to keep
| consistent. Thus, the problem is handwaved away with "that
| problem is only reflected on x% of DAU."
|
| There is so much design/development guidance around screen
| width, breakpoints, contrast ratio, accessibility and so forth,
| but so little around "real world" testing on low-tier devices.
| Every designer is using a 5K display with perfect color and
| definition, or an iMac with a super fast processor and tons of
| memory; our users are not.
| scns wrote:
| This is done quite often in audio production.
|
| The Auratones mimicking real world consumer equipment, ie mono,
| low bass and a rolloff at the top, had a revival because of
| that.
|
| Another company offers speakers the correlate to the ones in
| TVs, for audio engineers in the movie industry. The body is
| made from the same material as TVs are and they have no
| parallel walls.
| Mezzie wrote:
| It's because to many, aesthetics > function. This drives me
| INSANE. If you make a UX that most people can't use for reasons
| a, b, and c, who CARES how pretty it looks? This is also true
| for accessibility, especially for older people who are more
| likely to have reading issues and presbyopia. Everything is
| designed for 22 year olds with perfect vision and the best
| hardware.
|
| It's often on the marketing and exec teams. I had to be very
| firm in some of our UX decisions because yes, it does look a
| little less polished this way, but a lot of our audience is
| elderly and they need to be able to read what we're giving
| them.
|
| And this isn't even getting into how many sites break if you
| have any accessibility shortcuts or defaults set up on your
| browser. I'm slightly visually impaired and have pages set to
| load at 150% zoom (on a 4k monitor) and a minimum font size of
| 12. It's absurd how many sites that breaks.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| At least where I have worked, UX people are evaluated by
| whether the PM is happy when approving it. Even for myself as
| a dev, the part of my job people care about is the rate
| tickets move from "Selected for development" to "Done" while
| still passing tests.
|
| You will need to change the minds of PMs.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Luckily, I don't work in tech (I do tech work in a non-tech
| company/non tech team [I'm the only one with any coding or
| cs skills]), and this right here is why. I work in
| communications and own the marketing decisions for my
| department so I generally have strong decision rights when
| I do UI/UX/design work. Downside is I don't make nearly as
| much, but I definitely prefer the respect and autonomy.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Will echo this. It's astounding how bad the worst laptop
| screens are, and how many machines that you'd think have decent
| screens don't (like many Thinkpad models, which used to and
| still might by default come with some of the worst TN panels
| I've ever seen).
|
| I once had to do some photoshop work on one such machine and it
| was nigh unusable because many details weren't or were only
| barely visible. So while I wouldn't recommend making a screen
| like that one's primary screen, yes absolutely test on it
| periodically.
| kome wrote:
| I believe that most of the "web developers" have absolutely no
| idea of how to build a website using bare html+css. Actually, I
| worked with "web developers" that are basically not touching code
| much, but using all sorts of tools and framework - without fully
| understand what they are doing. And that's also why website looks
| like each other more and more. And that's the silent majority of
| the industry.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There is no way to be a modern web developer without knowing
| everything you need for raw html/css unless you are talking
| about square space or basic Wordpress work.
|
| Things like react are purely extra knowledge needed over the
| top of the basic website building blocks.
| unionpivo wrote:
| ok, html maybe, because html if anything is easier than the
| one in 90/00s (no more tables, or divs everywhere)
|
| But in my experience 80% react developers could not layout a
| page with raw css. I am not even talking anything "fancy"
| like transitions or animations. They just import libs and
| frameworks and customize a bit.
| dmalik wrote:
| Websites look like each other because of Jacobs law[1]. Not
| sure how good the web developers you work with are if they
| don't understand HTML/CSS/JS.
|
| [1]https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/
| bdcravens wrote:
| As someone who came up during the late 90s and coded many a
| page in apps that were barely more than Notepad, I often have
| the same sentiment. (I get the same feelings about the
| backend and writing SQL) However, the web then was very
| simple. I wonder if I was a 24 year old today, trying to get
| a handle on all the various front-end frameworks, all the
| security vulnerabilities, and having to target mobile screens
| and giant 4k displays at the same time, if I wouldn't
| consider the basics low-hanging fruit to abstract away.
| bdcravens wrote:
| As I suggested in my other comment, how many backend developers
| don't know SQL? I would also suggest that highly skilled
| cabinet installers aren't always master carpenters.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > As I suggested in my other comment, how many backend
| developers don't know SQL?
|
| I mean that isn't acceptable to me either.
| everyone wrote:
| HN is so full of rich silicon valley assholes, they've never even
| had to make do with a cheap laptop. They need an article like
| this to remind them how the proles live.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now if only they had decent desktop screens...
|
| I have gigabit internet and powerful desktop, with enough
| ram... But still they don't develop for my 1440p screen, but
| some crappy tablets...
| rovr138 wrote:
| Analytics provides a lot of insight into that. Not so much
| CPU/RAM/disk speeds
| habosa wrote:
| Even if your users all use high end laptops, this is still a good
| idea. Making your site fast enough on a craptop will make it
| blazing fast and delightful for everyone else. It's like how
| baseball players warm up with weighted bats.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There is a hidden feature in Chrome Devtools to apply a CPU
| slowdown...
|
| Simply head to Devtools > Performance tab > Gear icon > CPU > 6x
| slowdown.
|
| That isn't a perfect representation of an old laptop (doesn't
| throttle GPU operations or trigger low memory behaviours), but
| it's a good start. As a bonus, it makes your fans spin up wildly
| whenever loading a page!
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Not only CPU but slow networks and mobile screen sizes too.
| These are all very helpful for quick sanity checks and
| reproducing races.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Lighthouse also emulates slow-ish web on a mobile device.
| Though I would take its results with a grain of salt: it can
| show near-perfect green scores for a website that takes 3
| seconds to render
| agumonkey wrote:
| similarly i often let throttling on.. very nice way to tame
| dopamine rush :)
| omgitsabird wrote:
| Unless you mean that the menu is hidden behind the gear icon,
| calling it a hidden feature is a stretch.
|
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode/#cpu
| londons_explore wrote:
| Sufficiently deep in menus that I suspect most people here on
| HN would consider themselves familiar with devtools, yet
| wouldn't have been aware of this option.
| [deleted]
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I ve always wondered why all computers don't have a "slow down"
| setting
| phil294 wrote:
| They have, kind of, it's the energy save mode.
|
| On Linux, (besides GPU) you'd set
| /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu$i/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq to
| cpuinfo_min_freq, for all $i. I always look for minimum
| (idling) CPU frequency in devices before buying them, but this
| info is almost never available. My laptop has a min freq of 800
| MHz, but I would like to go even lower, to better test low
| performance devices and limit energy usage. In web dev, you can
| simply use chrome dev tools cpu throttling though
| exikyut wrote:
| There are two ways you can go lower: the cpu cgroup, and
| cooling_deviceN. I'm still working on memorizing the first
| approach :) but it works well just about everywhere; the
| second is simpler but employs intel-specific hardware-level
| throttling which may or may not behave usefully (it _may_
| have been the cause of a couple of mystery soft hangs on an
| old Pentium box I have here, presumably things are less
| glitchy now given how frequently laptops throttle nowadays).
|
| While the cgroup approach is (like cpufreq) doable by poking
| around in /sys/fs/cgroup (you mkdir new directories to create
| cgroups), cgroup-tools makes it a tad more straightforward by
| making the steps less verbose. (Besides cgroup-tools,
| "unshare" and "nsenter" ship with util-linux and can issue
| the syscalls necessary to start a process in a given cgroup,
| which you can't do with pure bash.)
|
| The setup is always the same - you create a new "cpu" cgroup
| (here named "cpulimit"), then configure CFS (completely fair
| scheduler, I think? I thought there were multiple
| schedulers... maybe this only applies if using CFS? I think
| CFS is the default everywhere) with a period and quota. I
| think the period is used to derive an internal tick rate. The
| quota is a fraction of the period and the ratio (yay you get
| to do the math yourself) represents how much CPU the task
| gets to eat. I _think_ the ratio applies across all the CPUs.
| I have no idea what happens if you bring PID-level CPU
| affinity into the equation. Maybe you can select which CPUs
| are enabled for the cgroup, and the math applies to whatever
| 's enabled. Haven't answered any of that yet. In any case:
| # cgcreate -g cpu:cpulimit # cgset -r
| cpu.cfs_period_us=1000000 cpulimit # cgset -r
| cpu.cfs_quota_us=100 cpulimit
|
| A fairly straightforward demonstration: in one terminal run
| # cgexec -g cpu:cpulimit yes | pv -l > /dev/null
|
| while in another terminal rerun the last `cgset` with quotas
| of 1000, 10000, etc, and watch the output rate go up and
| down. (In this case 100 is a good starting value, but
| anything more complicated than printf(); in a loop will
| probably finish launching in 2023 if started with a quota of
| 100.)
|
| The nice thing is that the cgroup happily sits in the
| background until explicitly deleted (and systemd leaves
| everything it didn't create alone) and you can just poke at
| its values anytime. Network cgroups can probably do
| interesting fun things to traffic as well (oh yeah, network
| namespaces = discrete iptables/nftables per namespace).
|
| Lastly, the cooling_deviceN entries are in
| /sys/class/thermal, and have cur_state and max_state. YMMV;
| setting cur_ to max_ may well take several minutes to undo
| (very much the case on older systems at least) - maybe try
| that on a throwaway-able session. :D (Think "Task Manager
| (Not Responding)"...)
| [deleted]
| iamleppert wrote:
| Don't forget to implement real user metrics like Sentry. I add in
| timing checks for critical features that log out to my analytics
| and have a regular habit of analyzing the data.
|
| Your user base greatly influences what kind of performance
| optimization you should be doing. In some cases it's worth it,
| but if your primary user has a fast machine, it's generally not
| worth it. Reminds me of the time when I had a project manager who
| insisted on optimizing page load time for a heavy mapping
| application.
|
| And if your app is a simple shopping cart or a few forms, you
| probably don't need a JavaScript frontend framework. I can't tell
| you how many times I've removed all the unnecessary React and Vue
| and increased performance by at least an order of magnitude.
| l0b0 wrote:
| There are three kinds of web developers:
|
| - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads
| within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN.
| This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen.
|
| - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care.
| They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing
| those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites which
| we all love.
|
| - Those who care about performance, but _work for people who don
| 't._ Since the developer doesn't get to decide what to work on,
| they can either get cracking on feature #357, work on performance
| on the sly at the risk of losing their job, or quit. Not much of
| a choice, really, unless you have some other-worldly lax schedule
| and minimal oversight. And don't forget, if you are allowed to
| work on performance the burden is on you to prove how much faster
| things are with your changes (which can be really hard to show
| conclusively) and that your N days is worth more than Bob working
| N days on that sexy ticket #357.
|
| Substitute "security", "UX", or anything else you want for
| "performance", it works the same way.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: Most web developers don't have a grasp of
| computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources
| are free. OTOH, obsessing about performance to the exclusion of
| usability is equally insane. Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are
| what's needed.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Unpopular opinion
|
| This is HackerNews. Hating bloated websites is a time-
| honoured tradition here.
|
| > Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science
| or assembly, and act like computing resources are free
|
| It's worth separating these two. Plenty of web developers
| have computer science degrees, but if they're paid to quickly
| churn out bloated websites, that's what they'll do.
|
| > Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.
|
| If the aim is to improve the performance of
| software/websites, what's needed is a userbase that's less
| forgiving of bloat.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Idk how CS or Assembly plays into this. I'm a webdev. Self
| taught. Your points about metrics and nuance are accurate but
| I fail to see how those are related to CS as a whole.
|
| If stuff is legitimately slow, we should make it faster.
| Doesn't need to be more complicated than that imo.
| lawn wrote:
| I don't think assembly has any relevance, and the thing
| with CS that's relevant is almost entirely with complexity
| theory. This sounds fancy, but it basically boils down to
| recognizing O(n^2) vs O(n) vs O(n log n), which in practice
| can be reduced to "use the right datastructure" and "use
| the right query".
| jablan wrote:
| Frankly, I think far more performance problems nowadays
| lie in things like insane SVG/CSS animations for every
| possible loading spinner than in developers not knowing
| their O notations.
| mouzogu wrote:
| progressive enhancement, but as you said the reality doesn't
| always allow or account for that approach.
|
| unless faang companies suddenly make it trendy again to care
| about low fidelity experience.
| [deleted]
| pacifika wrote:
| Thanks for this.
|
| In addition it's easy to forget until you learn a new
| technology that: first you learn how to solve a problem, then
| you learn all the ways to solve a problem, finally you learn
| how to best solve a problem.
|
| This means that you need a good understanding to make
| performance focused solutions, it can simply be the case that
| most teams are learning to get there.
| chefandy wrote:
| "This article is for them, and we can only hope they will
| listen."
|
| By my reckoning: everybody assumes that this article is for
| somebody else, and that's the problem. Assuming the problem is
| either developers who don't care or developers who don't have
| enough agency to act on it is easy because we can say "I care,
| and I have agency, so I'm not part of the problem."
|
| Hanlon's razor applies here, but the related incompetence stems
| from competent people doing things outside their areas of
| expertise rather than being fundamentally incompetent. The
| developer discussion focusing almost exclusively on performance
| reinforces that. We favor our strongest mental models when
| reasoning about problems-- when you're a hammer, everything
| looks like a nail.
|
| But we often contribute to or create things outside our direct
| areas of expertise, (often reluctantly because we're the last
| people to touch the code before it hits production.) We might
| not even 'realize' how far outside they are, though. In my
| experience, this testing reveals far fewer performance problems
| than interface design and front-end implementation problems--
| i.e. touch targets are nearly impossible to use on burner smart
| phones, sidebars that clobber content or top menu bars that
| wrap between break points, weird behavior on non-widescreen
| landscape orientation devices, poor keyboard (and therefore
| screen reader) navigation, etc.
|
| I believe this discussion illustrates the importance of
| thoughtful and skillfully-applied UX principles, where the data
| would ideally come from real users operating as they normally
| would... but maybe that's just the nail this particular hammer
| is hunting for! XD
| izacus wrote:
| In my personal experience, even getting an average web dev to
| touch a slower Windows machine is mission impossible. The best
| you can hope is "ewww, this sucks so much and it's ugly, why
| would anyone do this" and then arrogant walk back to their
| 3000$+ MacBook to shovel more JS libraries into the website.
| I've literally not seen a single rockstart javascripter
| actually willingly try to test things on Windows, much less
| attempt to use a low/midrange machine to see if their code
| works well.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Come to Europe, most of those designers will be using Windows
| machines issued by IT to everyone on the building anyway.
|
| And the only Apple gear will be iPhones and iPads used by
| upper management.
|
| Yes, I am also aware there are plenty of cases that aren't
| like that specially for the fortunate ones living on tier 1
| EU countries.
| yokoprime wrote:
| (Waiting for company issue M1 Pro MBP)
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| I mean can you really blame them? I frequently play tech
| support for many of my family members running Windows 10
| without an SSD and it's like pulling teeth it's so slow.
|
| Running Windows 10 with an SSD and 8+ GB of RAM is a
| different story and way better experience.
| Spivak wrote:
| Especially since IT departments see Windows as the "budget"
| option for worker drones who don't need much other than a
| web browser and Office.
|
| The other side benefit is that Macs are way harder to
| manage and so IT depts don't actually bother and you get
| admin access and told to turn on FileVault instead of the
| nightmare that is opinionated GPOs.
|
| So when it comes to my option of a MacBook Pro or the
| cheapest functional Dell Latitude bought in bulk I'm gonna
| suddenly care a whole lot about testing in Safari.
|
| Apple set themselves up really well as an escape hatch from
| overbearing IT, not surprised people with the opportunity
| take it. Devs get the treatments that was previously
| reserved only for the C suites.
| taeric wrote:
| Explain Gmail.
| zagrebian wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me why I use HTML Gmail instead.
|
| https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
| _kblcuk_ wrote:
| It surely loads faster than speed of light, but with all
| the keyboard navigation missing, it takes 20x more time to
| go through each email and archive/delete/reply to. Can't
| have everything, it seems. :/
| mmcnl wrote:
| It's actually not faster than the current modern UI for me.
| rovr138 wrote:
| What specs does your computer/device have?
| einpoklum wrote:
| 1. Please consider using a proper mail client:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
|
| 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo
| and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass
| surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting
| and for US government political policing. There are several
| other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't
| give up the web interface.
| taeric wrote:
| Back when I could use emacs for email, I was quite happy.
| Unfortunately, I have the advanced protection on in my
| Gmail account, so I haven't figured how to get that back,
| yet. App passwords aren't allowed on my account.
|
| I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't
| have enough motivation for all that entails.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > I have the advanced protection on in my Gmail account
|
| Well, Google has your email, to read and use and pass on,
| so I'm not quite sure what this "advanced protection" can
| mean.
| rtpg wrote:
| Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail
| web app (especially when it comes to search).
|
| I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still
| end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find
| something.
|
| A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail
| server I run, and I don't really believe too much in the
| idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to
| police overreach.
|
| Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has
| tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who
| desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web
| tabs to check email is annoying.
| fc_throwaway wrote:
| > A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a
| mail server I run
|
| Only if they have a good reason to target you,
| personally.
|
| But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking
| a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one
| million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million
| mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables
| and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion
| mailboxes.
|
| There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom
| mailserver with a budget of $1.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| At work I use the macOS Desktop edition of Outlook for my
| work O365 account and I've found searching to be pretty
| good and quite fast. I'm pretty sure it just searches the
| local cache hence the speed. It's pretty good at
| suggesting email addresses when I type someones name so I
| can usually quickly find emails from a certain person
| just by typing the first characters of their name and
| pressing return when it finds the correct address.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Outlook on mac uses Spotlight search internally
| interactivecode wrote:
| If you're on mac mimestream is really good:
|
| https://mimestream.com/
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail
| web app (especially when it comes to search).
|
| I would actually make the opposite statement, i.e.
| generally, webmail clients are significantly inferior to
| desktop clients in most respects: Feature set,
| responsiveness, flexibility etc. And of course, being
| potentially somewhat secure, as opposed to guaranteed no-
| security with webmail.
|
| As for search functionality - I'm not sure you're right,
| but I'll grant you that some webmail providers, like
| Google, provide speedy search.
| rini17 wrote:
| KMail (on KDE on Linux desktop) search is instant. Pity
| the Akonadi framework under it needs more love to iron
| out its bugs. I suffer web GMail only when not at my
| workstation.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| The gmail prototype was made using 20% time. I'd call that
| "no oversight" as per the third point.
|
| Moreover, when the developer in question demoed his work, the
| reaction from Brin (famously) was something akin to "there's
| 400msec delay, fix it". Which puts us clearly in the realm of
| the second scenario.
| chefandy wrote:
| Gmail is an AdTech-funded, no-charge email service operated
| by Google, a popular internet services subsidiary of Alphabet
| Inc.
| Rygian wrote:
| Group 3, clearly. With a bit of the "minimal oversight"
| thing.
| l0b0 wrote:
| I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about
| the performance of that product, since it's the fastest
| webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more
| about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or
| something else which can be configured to be faster with a
| few days' worth of effort.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I have to use Gmail for work. I've found Gmail to be pretty
| slow nowdays. From HN comments on other threads I'm not the
| only one to have noticed this. It even occasionally fails
| to load and just hangs at the loading screen requiring a
| refresh and fingers crossed that the second try succeeds in
| loading my inbox.
|
| When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the
| difference is like night and day it loads fast and 99% of
| the time it works on the first try. I also occasionally use
| Outlook's webmail for work (as I work across different
| systems with some on Google and some on O365) and even
| Outlook webmail is generally faster than Gmail despite my
| main Outlook mailbox being much larger than my less-used
| Gmail mailboxes (although it is nowhere as fast as
| FastMail).
|
| I remember the early days of Gmail -- it was a fantastic
| product in its heyday better than any other webmail client
| at the time. The quality has sadly dropped a huge amount
| especially in recent years to the point there are now
| viable alternatives. FastMail is one such alternative I
| have been very impressed with. Even Outlook's webmail is
| worth a look although the UX could do with some work.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Indeed, I have Outlook, Yandex and Gmail, and Gmail seems
| to be the worst of them all.
|
| I cannot understand all thr praise people give it, is it
| simply brand loyalty?
| danachow wrote:
| It used to be amazing - a pretty full featured mail
| application, snappy in 2005 on much less sophisticated
| browser runtimes. It's relatively a piece of shit now.
| csydas wrote:
| Second this, but to elaborate, likely it's because
| they're using chrome when it runs fast and other browsers
| when it's not. From my perspective, everything Google
| does is just an effort to get you stuck in their
| ecosystem.
|
| Everything about Gmail is very confusing to me; I have no
| love for Outlook (it's absolutely garbage) but in garbage
| rankings, Outlook is a bit more functional than Gmail is.
| Outlook has a more complete business eco-system vision I
| think than Gmail does, and there is a lot better
| integration with the other elements of Microsoft's
| ecosystem than Chrome has. For example, when I attach a
| Sharepoint/OneDrive doc to an email in Outlook, it offers
| to let me set the permissions for the recipients
| automatically. This doesn't make up for
| Sharepoint/OneDrive's awful permissions handling in
| general, but this element is convenient at least. (Again,
| I cannot stress how frustrating it is to even __see__
| what permissions someone has for a Sharepoint/OneDrive
| document as regardless of your screen resolution/browser
| size, you're confined to a few centimeter width sized
| window, never mind that sometimes saving just outright
| refuses to work, and bulk-adding persons is even worse)
|
| Gmail has awful design in many places; I don't like that
| a simple option like FWD is hidden behind the ... menu. I
| don't like that selecting an email from the list in gmail
| results in the menu buttons suddenly expanding. Even
| worse, the location of the reply button when the menu
| buttons are contracted is the same as the location of the
| "Mark as Spam" button when expanded; on browsers that
| aren't chrome, the display lag is enough that I can move
| my cursor far faster than the menu buttons expand and
| what __was__ the reply button location is now the "mark
| as spam" button location.
|
| I don't like that it takes a good 5+ seconds to load the
| basic email list on a 100 Mbit connection. I don't like
| that logging into Gmail logs me into every other Google
| platform (e.g., YouTube) and I start getting spam about
| different channels or reminders to "engage" with various
| channels/social media. I don't like that I have to
| install a .dpkg for Mac to use Gchat video when other
| apps (e.g., Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp) are just a regular
| application that I can remove with drag/drop. I really
| don't like how "foreign" the Gmail/Google theming is with
| basically everything on MacOS and even on Android, or how
| few controls over basic UI functionality I get. (I really
| struggled to find in the Playstore how to monitor the
| progress of a download...)
|
| Gmail and Google at large feels like an ecosystem that
| Google just expects everyone to buy into regardless of
| the platform/experience, and I truly cannot understand
| their intended way of handling the UI most of the time.
| The underlying methods of categorizing/indexing the
| information of course is fine, but actually interacting
| with it is frustrating for me compared to every Google
| product contemporary. As much as I dislike Outlook, I'd
| rather use it than Gmail. I'd rather use basically any
| chat program as opposed to GChat/Whatever it's called now
| (it's still really bad whatever the new product is
| called). Even Google itself I find myself fighting with
| Google's preferred results instead of what I'm actually
| wanting (without uBlock the first results are tons of ad
| spam that have nothing to do with the searches, and the
| first few results are usually some SEO'd result).
|
| There is an "okay" experience with google if you go all
| in on it, but they certainly seem to bank on the idea
| that you'll do that in order to get access to Google
| results. The rest of the ecosystem is so clunky that it's
| really undesirable to use for me.
| taeric wrote:
| I agree that they care. I don't agree that it is fast.
|
| It is comical how long it takes to load on my internet
| connection. Has gotten better, but that is on my connection
| side.
|
| My favorite crazy moment lately is just how long it takes
| to bring up the computer new window on a fresh page load.
|
| It used to be great, mind. Not sure what I'm getting with
| the additional load times.
| Narishma wrote:
| It used to be fast. Now it's so slow it has a loading
| screen.
| ghusbands wrote:
| That hasn't been true for a long time, now. Gmail used to
| be fast. Nowadays, it takes a long time to load (loading
| megabytes of JS before even displaying anything other than
| a big logo), a long time to search and a noticeable amount
| of time to even display an email after you click on it. I
| think you might relying on some older memories.
| quelltext wrote:
| What do you mean?
| bowmessage wrote:
| The search box is that way ^
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There is this maxim in that testing something is a great way to
| make your superiors care about it.
|
| Even filming your site loading on a normal-powered device or a
| mobile connection and showing them the video may be enough to
| change their opinions. But yeah, some people won't change, no
| matter what.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| I agree what testing on crappy hardware is a good thing
| BUT...........
|
| I think the industry has a problem selling underpowered
| computers in general. AFAIK it's the non-pros that need the a
| reasonably powerful computer. Maybe "powerful" is the wrong
| word but not the crappy $300 windows laptop running on a
| celeron or whatever the latest.
|
| My dad got some ~$500 HP all in one desktop and it's so
| underpowered as to be unusable. It takes 4-5 minutes to boot
| while and launching any app takes what feels like half a
| minute. Just typing you can feel the machine struggle. You
| could argue if all software (and the OS) was optimized it might
| not be underpowered but there is no world where all software is
| optimized.
|
| It see a similar problem all the time with people giving up an
| old computer. My friend had some like 2007 Mac and she was
| thinking of giving it to a friend for their kids. Maybe some
| hacker kid would find a use for it but for most non-geeks, an
| old PC won't run current software, the current OS, current
| browsers with vulnerabilities fixed or modern standards. Zoom,
| youtube, etc are probably not going to be good experiences on
| such a machine.
|
| Basically it's my opinion that non-techies should always get a
| relatively new and reasonably powered machine but sadly they
| don't have the knowledge to know that so they get led to a
| crappy underpowered machine and then have a crappy and
| frustrating experience using it.
|
| I don't have a solution. It's only an observation. In my own
| family, when they let me buy them a machine, on a scale of 1 to
| 10 I aim for ~7 in terms of power with say 8-16gig of ram and a
| reasonably powered processor, at least an i5? not an i3 or N or
| Celeron.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Even if you cut all the crap, it'd still be pretty hard to
| get away from the ground truth of which hardware is cheaper.
| hypeatei wrote:
| While I agree with the premise, I've seen this mindset get out
| of hand and stress people out. My anecdote involves a co-worker
| looking at our Azure metrics at all times of the day and having
| a mini panic attack when requests drop off or we get a an
| uptick of a few hundred milliseconds of response time. Most of
| this is due to scaling out and resolves itself in a short
| amount of time. Regardless, he's convinced something else is
| causing it and taking measures that actively make our code
| worse and less understandable all in the name of "performance".
| mmcnl wrote:
| Don't act on assumptions, verify.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Please. I beg you to buy a 2GB of transfer cell plan from a cheap
| carrier and try your sites via tethering. If you can only load
| your SPA a couple of times before your line gets disconnected,
| you've fucked up your design.
|
| I had plans with 35GB of transfer and the modern web meant I was
| having to restart my plan every single week. Some of us live in
| Internet deserts where there is no hope of getting a wired
| connection (downtown Chicago in my case).
| onion2k wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a site that would use up 2GB of
| data being loaded "a couple of times". What sort of site would
| do that?
| pacifika wrote:
| Netflix ;-)
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Crappy laptop with grandma who doesn't speak English natively,
| and with 8-year-olds.
| [deleted]
| tk90 wrote:
| One time I was working in a co-working space with terrible
| internet (<5mbps). It was OK until I had to order lunch from
| Sweetgreens - their site was so CSS/JS heavy that I couldn't even
| load the page to order my salad. Made me laugh at how ridiculous
| it was.
| normaler wrote:
| I had a similar experience building a NAS on a SoC.
|
| Suddenly things like transport or at rest encryption are no
| longer perceived to be free but really limit your performance.
|
| First time I actually had to be concious about choosing
| appropriate ciphers and hashing algos and not just using
| defaults.
| exikyut wrote:
| What config did you end up setting with, if you happen to have
| the info easily to hand? I might be able to speed up SSHing to
| some of the slower hardware I have here.
|
| Also, I'm very curious what SoC this was.
| normaler wrote:
| It is/was a RockPro64 with 4GB oft RAM.
|
| The biggest issue I had was with zfs native encryption using
| aes256-gcm per default.
|
| The SoC has AES support but with gcm the hashing function is
| not AES based, so i had to change to aes256-ccm to profit
| from the AES support.
|
| For sshd i severly limit available hmac and cipher to use
| chacha20 but i also force that in the client side.
|
| I will post the relevant lines tomorrow.
|
| Wireguard is also costing much more CPU performance then I am
| used to.
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