[HN Gopher] Browse the web like its 1999
___________________________________________________________________
Browse the web like its 1999
Author : axiomdata316
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-12-30 06:40 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldweb.today)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldweb.today)
| marban wrote:
| One thing that doesn't get mentioned enough is that you needed a
| plugin to allow for file uploads in IE3. The actual Read/Write
| Web in the making.
| 101008 wrote:
| Wow, very well done. I am one of those who grow up late 90s /
| early 2000s browsing internet, forums, blogs, fansites, presonal
| websites, and from time to time I go back to web.archive to see
| again the webpages that made me happy during my childhood / teen
| ages. This is a great complement for that.
|
| Thank you very much whoever did this - my inner self is really
| thankful.
| skilled wrote:
| Man, I'm so glad that I was able to experience the Internet/Web
| in those early stages. The _epic_ feeling is just something else
| compared to what we have today.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I browsed to my own site on IE4 and got _Invalid URL: null_ on a
| page. Whatever that 's about. The front page loads (and
| displays!) correctly (albeit without CSS).
| funstuff007 wrote:
| look great on mobile
| bryans wrote:
| This brings me so much joy. It's such a perfect emulation that it
| actually makes me homesick for the late 90s.
| kioshix wrote:
| Yeah, this reminds me of when I was young and spent hours at
| the public library, because that's where I could get on the
| internet at that time.
| d-d wrote:
| That old Windows interface and the Netscape logo are like a
| portal to another universe.
| [deleted]
| grishka wrote:
| Oh wow. I wasn't expecting it to actually load and emulate an
| entire OS _in my browser_. It 's an actual full OS too, with
| finder/explorer fully working. I thought it would be something
| like a proxy + web archive.
|
| I chose geocities as of 1996. It booted mac os 7. Then IE threw
| an error at me. Then I entered google.com to the URL bar out of
| curiosity, thinking it would load actual modern google. Only to
| be greeted with "Google Search Engine Prototype". Lol.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I love it. It should have an option for setting the modem speed,
| to give you the real experience of waiting 30s for each image to
| load.
| jankovicsandras wrote:
| Opening this without JavaScript (Noscript) gave me a blank grey
| page. Sorry, but the web had content without JS in 1999.
| glanzwulf wrote:
| There's a JS emulator to recreate the browser/windows
| experience as it was in those days. Inside that emulator you
| get the web from 1999.
| lopis wrote:
| Are you seriously complaining that this emulator of several
| operating systems and old browsers doesn't run inside a modern
| browser without javascript? I really hope you're kidding.
| kragen wrote:
| A blank grey page is not a reasonable way to handle JS being
| disabled.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Maybe not but I'm willing to bet there are more
| reasonable/impactful things for the author to fix or worry
| about instead of handling this case at all in the first
| place.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Wow. My brain filled in the crackling sound those old computers
| made when under load as I opened IE.
|
| I for one do not look back.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Why can't this run in Firefox mobile?
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I remember trying to download IE4 when it was released, and it
| kept failing after about 20mins, eventually it worked and 30mins
| later I had it :D
|
| Active Desktop is what got me into doing websites originally.
|
| Fond memories of early 90's internet.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| I thought you said Active Domain until I realized there are not
| just one AD
| gpmcadam wrote:
| "Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current
| browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox to
| use this emulator. "
|
| Wow, it really does feel like using an old browser.
|
| (Safari Version 15.2 (17612.3.6.1.6))
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Arguably, Safari is the IE of our times. Safari somehow always
| have rendering issues. I use Firefox as that's closest to
| standards, I hate bending standard code to fit a garbage
| browser's special needs.
| jmkni wrote:
| On iOS you have to use Safari if you want to use a content/ad
| blocker, which means I'm kind of stuck with it on my
| iPhone/iPad.
|
| Then you bring macOS into play, and the way Safari on mobile
| syncs with Safari on desktop is really nice. Password sharing
| in particular is great, so you end up getting sucked in to
| Safari!
| michalstanko wrote:
| I wouldn't go as far as calling it an "IE", because those of
| us who lived through that know it was a completely different
| experience.
|
| But yes, Safari is slow in implementing new features a bit
| and it does get annoying from time to time. But it's nowhere
| near the IE hell from ~2000 - 2008.
| MatmaRex wrote:
| It totally is. I used to write custom CSS for IE to make
| drop shadows work (it didn't support the standard syntax).
| Now I write custom CSS for Safari to make drop shadows work
| (there's a bug where if you remove the node, its shadow
| sometimes stays behind).
| shukantpal wrote:
| And? Single data point.
| conductr wrote:
| Everyone else in the world writing CSS has to jump
| through the same hoops they are referring to... does that
| really fall under "single data point"?
| kreeben wrote:
| Oldweb saved from incursion by the shear fact js is not
| backwards compatible ;)
| twsted wrote:
| Absurd.
|
| Most of the time I think it is just dev laziness.
|
| Can anyone tell us which web feature is blocking the
| compatibility with Safari?
| defanor wrote:
| Same message in FF 78, but works after reloading the page and
| choosing Ruffle (Flash).
| chilling wrote:
| Those times were full of patience. I don't miss that but
| definitely the people across different forums and pseudo online-
| dating chats.
| pault wrote:
| A/S/L?
| brentm wrote:
| The Netscape Navigator 3 loading screen gave me major flash backs
| to junior high.
| sh4un wrote:
| Oh man, I remember having to install trumpet Winsock or something
| like that to get the net working on Windows 3.1
|
| I think at that time we just used it to browse wais.
| aksss wrote:
| Jeez, the error message in safari was below the scroll line. I
| got annoyed with the spinning circle loading the page for
| navigator 3 and thought, "oh I get it.. haha it's being slow like
| back in the day".
|
| After thinking, "no, it wasn't _this_ slow back in the day," I
| scroll down to see..
|
| Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current
| browser.
|
| Maybe hide the spinny circle thingy if you're smart enough to
| know you're not going to load anyway.
| [deleted]
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Did anybody here ever use the ISDN data ports in payphones in
| Japan? I remember seeing them here and there in 1998 (IIRC). At
| the time I wondered about popping over to one and getting on the
| web just to see how it would work. ISDN was serious biz to my
| mind at that time, compared to rural USA dialup.
| fatnoah wrote:
| In 1997 or so, I was an intern in the remote connectivity group
| at Sun. My job was primarily to help maintain connectivity for
| the people at home rocking their 128k dual-channel ISDN lines.
| I helped maintain local modem banks and remotely manage end
| user hardware and software. I remember drooling at the prospect
| of such a fat internet pipe.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I remember a friend having ISDN installed at his house - no
| matter how much I tried I couldn't convince my parents to pay
| that much for the internet.
|
| I remember reading about T1 lines and being blown away at how
| fast that was
| laumars wrote:
| I worked at a publishing company who had T1 for hosting their
| online content.
|
| What amazed me was how quickly that went from state of the
| art to pretty mediocre.
| [deleted]
| shp0ngle wrote:
| This just makes me angry.
|
| Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can _emulate whole
| OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to
| browse_.
|
| So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish?
|
| GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever
| to load.
|
| I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements
| randomly jump around the page (seriously, _why does pages do
| that_? Why do elements randomly jump around for the first 2
| minutes? what is the problem there?)
|
| I don't want to just blindly blame JS. Look at this page! JS can
| be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and
| optimized). But why does the average experience suck so much?
| pacifika wrote:
| Lack of care and attention. By developers who are pressured to
| keep sprint velocity up. By product owners who follow the ideal
| path. By designers who want sites to work like their mock-ups.
| By testers who don't have enough time to test under specified
| features. By clients who are focused on reporting upwards and
| tracking business goals.
|
| And by prioritising new learning experiences over boring
| reliable solutions.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| What's wrong with wanting a site to look like a mockup?
| pacifika wrote:
| Typically results in custom controls and working against
| the browser provided affordances
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Of course, but I pride myself in able to create custom
| code and not just rely on some built-in stuff.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Why do you consider it a good thing to not use standard
| controls?
| usrbin wrote:
| The operative piece of the above post (to me) is "working
| _against_ the browser", not the existence of custom code
| per se. IME lots of problems with UI development have
| come (partly) from shoehorning tech to do something it's
| not meant to do, at the expense of speed, accessibility,
| and general usability. If the built-in thing doesn't do
| what you need, by all means build something that does,
| but it's worth keeping in mind that often the useful
| thing that end users actually need/want is the built-in
| thing.
| pjerem wrote:
| Nothing when mockups are iterable and editable by the team
| and when the designer is part of the team.
|
| A hell of useless code/new APIs/authorization issues just
| for no customer value but only discutable esthetics
| considerations when mockups are designed up front by some
| never available designer like they are some inviolable part
| of the specifications thus are enforced to the team.
| kragen wrote:
| Dan Luu reports that Google penalizes his pages in search
| rankings because they don't include enough CSS and JS. It's not
| really half of the websites; it's the half you're being guided
| to.
| greggturkington wrote:
| Can you link to this please? Intuitively it seems every Core
| Web Vital would be improved by less code.
|
| I found this post [1] but it seems a but outdated and
| references AMP, which Core Web Vital metrics are supposed to
| replace (right?).
|
| https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
| mikestew wrote:
| There's a dead comment asking if you have a source, and the
| commenter appears to have attempted finding it themselves.
|
| As an aside, I vouched for the comment (which still shows as
| [dead]), because a quick glance at posting history shows just
| the singular comment as dead, with no indications of twattery
| to justify it. It's like a commenter with not-interesting
| post history just got a single comment randomly killed.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I suppose most devs don't use tree-shaking when importing
| modules. The frameworks themselves don't add much bloat
| usually. I do believe however single page apps are a fad and we
| are going to return to SSG/SSR which is already apparent in new
| JS frameworks like NextJS.
| runako wrote:
| I broadly agree, but you lost me at Figma being fast. Granted I
| am using an older MacBook Pro (2015), but using Figma in a
| browser usually requires that I close other apps to let Figma
| do its thing. Figma and Miro are the only sites I have
| encountered that incur this level of performance hit.
|
| Incidentally, mightyapp.com was founded to make browsing less
| resource-intensive by doing the rendering in the cloud. They
| highlight Figma and Miro (among others) prominently, so it
| seems others have similar experiences with Figma.
| crawl_soever wrote:
| According to web professionals Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner in
| the podcast: The Handmade Network Podcast: The Web's Problems &
| Future, w/ Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner
| https://handmade.network/podcast/ep/532a3573-490a-45e8-975d-...
|
| The web has grown from something to display documents to a
| platform for applications. Focus has been placed heavily on
| optimization of JS jit compilation, but currently browser DOM
| and CSS layout engines have not cought up leaving a disparity
| in performance on major browsers.
| michalstanko wrote:
| The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All
| of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) +
| unoptimized/excessive static assets.
|
| I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more
| as a rhetorical question.
|
| As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty
| fast, considering all the features it has.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load
| and display?
|
| I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't
| make internet sometimes literally unusable?
|
| "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as
| "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even
| back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM
| too... but... there was always the push of speed
|
| So where is the bloat from, really.
|
| Javascript can be _really fast_. It 's just, nobody really
| cares? I guess?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Best answer that I can give you is: Because many of the ad
| companies are run by sales people.
|
| Seriously, we struggled with an ad/retargeting company,
| they ran EVERYTHING of a single EC2 instance and they
| didn't understand the internet. If/when their service went
| down the checkout pages of all their clients would timeout.
| The word async meant nothing to them, but hey better to
| crash than not track users. They would continuesly lie
| about their implementation, because they failed to under
| basic terminology. "This is a HA setup, right?", "Yes, it's
| a cloud solution in AWS". That just meant: Why would AWS go
| down?
| Volker_W wrote:
| > They would continuesly lie about their implementation
|
| Really? Could you give more examples?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Sure, we wanted to use Google Tag Manager, to load their
| javascript, because they already lied about it being
| async. So we'd use GTM to avoid them blocking our order
| confirmation page, when they had issues. So we asked if
| that would be an issue. It would not, their product
| worked well with Google products. It did not work, it
| completely failed to pick up the correct dom elements, it
| had never been tested with gtm. Again they also promised
| that they'd more to a real HA setup, but the never did.
|
| Oh I forgot. They claimed that their solution was custom
| made, tailored to the need of their business and the
| business of their customers. When we asked for a few
| tweaks, to make implementation easier it turned out to
| not be true. It was in fact an off the shelf solution and
| they had no influence on the development. We only found
| out because some of the Javascript revealed the real
| authors.
| p_l wrote:
| Consider typical Medium blog post.
|
| If by chance you block certain actions, you'll see it spin
| ridiculous amount of CPU, trying to sent tracking data all
| the time over graphql.
|
| Some tracking systems injected (often without developer
| involvement, using so-called tag managers) will send your
| mouse position and clicks.
|
| Through tag managers, you can easily end up loading 50
| different scripts, often compiled with attendant framework
| code, usually in chains of tag manager loading tag manager
| (classic example - using Google Tag Manager to load
| Facebook manager and Google Ads, which then issue multiple
| calls to load JavaScript ads and trackers, which might
| involve further script loads).
|
| And the tag managers are often managed by marketing in
| complete separation from any development or QA, so what was
| reasonably good website loading fast even under limited
| network conditions, suddenly turns into huge freeze-fest as
| 3 autoplaying videos get preloaded, 2MB JS/CSS animated
| overlay ad loads in, 3 ad boxes are filled in dynamically ,
| and don't forget 15 trackers, 4 of them from ad services, 8
| of them added by marketing team with possible duplicates,
| and 3 of them part of malware loaded by the ads.
| hidden-spyder wrote:
| Any way to stop all those requests?
| p_l wrote:
| Well, uBlock Origin and uMatrix worked pretty well for
| that, but with new Manifest v3 the feature will be lost
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I guess.
|
| The fact is, modern javascript is FAST. And with http3,
| and compression, you can make things load really REALLY
| fast. Much faster than in 1994!
|
| And you have things like tree shaking where you can make
| the js tiny. Not speaking about wasm, that's even faster,
| or putting things to web workers. Modern CSS is so easy
| to use. And of course CDNs are nowadays all around the
| globe. Chrome debugging tools are pretty good to debug
| slowness.
|
| What I am saying by long way and repeating... it's easier
| than ever to make a fast website!!! I know first hand, I
| made some websites recently, with really heavy logic on
| the FE in JS.
|
| So why are all these websites so slow... ugh.
|
| The tools are there! It's not like it is inscrutable.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Round trips for ad auctions are a part of it, but my take
| is that there are redundencies, literally a dev team that
| doesn't exist anymore wanted to use one metrics tracker,
| it was never deleted and a newer team introduced a
| separate stack to check how long you gaze (sorry,
| "dwell") at each paragraph. Multiply this by 10 years.
| Medium used to be relatively snappy (cached CSS and text
| + pretty slick lazy loaded images) but nowadays its
| another lumbering dinosaur.
|
| I guess it's related to that notion "groups of people can
| never admit a mistake" - if they ever did a clean sheet
| redesign it could turn into neo-facebook/reddit (somehow
| even slower due to extremely tall dependencies) - but
| they can never go back to first principals of how the
| site used to work, it would be admitting that things have
| gotten worse with time.
| p_l wrote:
| And the core website that the developers actually see
| while working on it might be just as fast as you imagine!
|
| The developers are not in charge, usually, of what rules
| will be loaded into a tag manager by the marketing team
| (which might involve different sets based on URL or
| various other tracking data). The tag managers themselves
| and base ad auction and spyware stuff might be pretty
| performant, too - it's when you hit all those third party
| ads etc. that you might also see some shitty code.
|
| But when many of those "features" are written assuming
| all the extra budget for themselves, well, things go bad
| fast.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Some of the scripts need to be placed in the head section
| of the document which is a blocking operation.
|
| Some of the ads are generated on the run based on that
| tracking data and it involves many, many http round-trips
| before it's injected via ajax. Further, comment sections
| have some sort of fb tracking integration, triggering even
| more round trips.
|
| And all that is separately loaded on a non optimized
| website layer with many externa JavaScript frameworks and
| dependencies.As well as injected video components, huge
| images which most likely aren't optimized. Lazy loading
| should be native now, no jQuery function needed, no
| intersection observer either, and it does work ok, but it's
| often not properly implemented or not at all.
|
| As for react, the stripped shadow Dom might be faster then
| the native Dom, but you still need the Dom and react is
| still a heavy load. I remember the days when people said
| don't needlessly load jQuery. Today, people use react when
| there's no real need to do so.
| xorcist wrote:
| Web sites are getting better and better of maximizing user
| interaction time, which are what they are designed for.
|
| It's been that way since the ad industry took over the web.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Javascript is one of the major reasons, but also trackers, huge
| graphics and loads of videos. Old pages still load fast so it's
| not the browser's fault. Say what you want about
| https://www.lingscars.com/, but it loads instantly, is full of
| all animations and doesn't lag down the browser.
|
| The problem is modern design, basically. We've invented server-
| rendered pages, then started rendering everything client side
| with frameworks like React, then we've started pre-rendering
| React on the server and completing content in the client, and
| now the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way around
| again to technologies like Flutter that just render an
| application in a canvas _shudder_.
|
| People want interactivity, and developers want that
| interactivity to be consistent across their website. To do so,
| they need to recreate and emulate everything the browser does.
| In the case of React and other JS frameworks, that even
| includes constructing fake DOMs. Back buttons get overridden,
| links get turned into buttons that do custom routing, you name
| it and there's a layer of Javascript you can download to avoid
| having to do the hard work.
|
| This is partially because of how demanding people have become.
| They expect any proper web page to be like Facebook. People,
| especially customers, want features, and they want them fast.
| Big companies that have their own developers are pushing their
| users towards their apps, sometimes intentionally sabotaging
| their website (looking at you, Reddit) to force people to
| download their invasive, native code.
|
| Websites have become applications, and applications are
| inherently taxing on most systems. Google tried to combat this
| in their own, misguided way with AMP. If it wasn't for their
| stupid caching architecture, I'd be a fan of AMP because of the
| speed it can provide compared to "modern" web pages.
|
| I don't think any of this will change unless we convince web
| developers to stop relying on all of these "modern"
| technologies and just write proper web pages. From the
| reactions here on HN, there are two groups of people in this
| debate: the people like us, who lament how slow the web has
| become, and the people who will never give up their fancy
| frameworks because of the productivity it allows them, and will
| never give in to the web Luddites who want to take away their
| fancy cross-platform tools that run just fine on their $2000 M1
| Macs.
|
| There are also a lot of web developers out there that are just
| shit, but we can't help those.
| FredPret wrote:
| Thank you for introducing me to the delight that is Ling's
| Cars
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > I don't think any of this will change unless we convince
| web developers to stop relying on all of these "modern"
| technologies and just write proper web pages.
|
| It's not the modern tech that is at fault. When used
| correctly it can work very well as it was intended.
|
| Problem is it's just about easy enough to be used wrongly by
| low skill developers who don't engage with anything they're
| making deep enough to even become critical of how it's
| functioning.
|
| And worse when you start pointing it out they always just
| come up with lame excuses as if it's normal that a page
| displaying 30 items takes 15+ seconds to load and have to
| spend your time lecturing them that yes links should open in
| a new window when ctrl clicked or that urls should actually
| function when you go to them directly.
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| > web developers out there that are just shit
|
| The technical term is webshits.
| pkulak wrote:
| > Why do elements randomly jump around for the first 2 minutes?
| what is the problem there?)
|
| Devs not bothering to put element dimensions in the markup, or
| otherwise not making the dimensions available/calculable at
| page load.
| namelosw wrote:
| > I don't want to just blindly blame JS. Look at this page! JS
| can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast
| and optimized).
|
| I agree with your point, but I have to point out that Figma is
| mostly built on C++/WASM.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| ah ok, did not know that
| nine_k wrote:
| It runs on the web, and it's fast.
|
| Also, fronted parts that operate the DOM are necessarily JS.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| I have never experience load time issues with gmail. Granted
| I'm not a front end guy so I only know "seems slow" and
| "doesn't seem slow"
| SilasX wrote:
| Yeah I agree with all the parents other points, but Gmail has
| been an island of sanity, very rarely annoying me. Now, I'm
| usually using it on a fast computer but typical sites can't
| even live up to that standard on the same machine.
| clove wrote:
| Did you try restarting your computer? If that doesn't work, try
| restarting your router.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry for the offtopicness, but I need you to see this and
| don't have another way to contact you.
|
| You have posted a great many comments that broke the HN
| guidelines egregiously. (I'm not talking about this thread.)
| Comments like this are bannable offenses on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670648
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657097
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657047
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657028
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657006
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346327
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352983
|
| I'm not going to ban you right now, partly because those
| threads are all at least a week old and partly because your
| account has years of history on HN. However, we need you to
| review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| stick to the rules from now on. If you keep breaking them
| like this, we're going to have to ban you. In particular,
| it's absolutely not acceptable to attack other users the way
| you've been doing, no matter how strongly you disagree with
| them. That goes against everything this site is supposed to
| be for.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| That message you get on YouTube when their loading fails so
| they suggest "restarting your device" always annoys me.
| p_l wrote:
| I found that I need to regularly restart Chrome due to how it
| will start behaving worse and worse in handling input
| events...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| A 5 y/o girl, watching me troubleshooting an error on a TV at
| family gathering, suggested I restart the TV. I told her
| mother the child had demonstrated sufficient knowledge to
| work in modern IT support.
| mysterydip wrote:
| developer: "should we spend some time optimizing our website?
| we probably have a lot of bloat, and--"
|
| boss: "browsers today are so fast and capable, we don't need to
| waste resources on something that doesn't give us tangible
| ROI."
| undebuggable wrote:
| The current compromise for monetization on the web is
| advertisiting. The web apps and sites are not optimized for
| snappiness, responsiveness, user experience. They are optimized
| for tracking and profiling, the market leading front-end
| frameworks enable mostly these.
| turing_complete wrote:
| Browsers aren't fast. Computer hardware is.
| acdha wrote:
| Browsers are fast, too. Think about all of the hard work
| which has gone into advanced hardware acceleration, JIT
| engines, etc. That work deserves respect even if the median
| front-end developer squanders it with bad decisions.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's basically Parkinson's law. If someone is given NASA's
| resources to move a piece of paper across the room, they will
| find a way to use a space shuttle to do it and call you
| oldfashioned for doing it by hand.
| majani wrote:
| Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art
| platformers are now above 1GB in size
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-
| souls/...
|
| When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be
| squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 48MB? That's ridiculous for an SNES cart. Even at 48M _b_
| that 's the size of the largest SNES cart IIRC.
| majani wrote:
| Yes, only a few super ambitious games hit the 48MB max
| allowed. Most SNES games were under 10MB
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's a bit unfair because modern pixel art games are
| literally nothing like old pixel art games.
|
| For one, the resolution has gone from 400x300 to ~3000x1500
| and more, and the number of color went from 8 to millions.
| All those pixels in high-res pixel art have to still be
| stored somewhere.
|
| Even though I still agree that some games do not deserve to
| be as fat as they are.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Not to mention the other liberties taken with modern
| pixel games, like non-pixelated particles and effects,
| character portraits, etc. These modern games don't look
| retro so much as they look simplified
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| At the same time, we're talking about bitmaps here, not
| 4K textures.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| 4K textures are bitmaps aren't they?
| jcelerier wrote:
| The entire Chrono Trigger SNES rom fits in a 1024x1024
| PNG image though
| dmitriid wrote:
| It was also 256x224 resolution, 8 bpp colors, max 128
| sprites at max 64x64 resolution. And 8-bit music with 8
| voices.
|
| Whereas just the light texture for Celeste's dynamic
| lighting is bigger than the entire Chrono Trigger ROM :)
| https://medium.com/@NoelFB/remaking-celestes-
| lighting-3478d6...
| tokai wrote:
| I don't see that as a good equivalent. Highres art assets
| takes up space, there's no beating that. Old snes games and
| modern 2d'ers are not on the same lvl regarding fidelity.
| philistine wrote:
| Your two examples are horrible examples. Celeste is truly a
| pixel game. It uses pixels as an art style, but spending
| any time with the game reveals its complexity.
|
| - The resolution of the game is detached from the pixels,
| allowing them to be squished and squashed. - While it looks
| like they're reusing assets, they really aren't that much.
| A ton of areas have unique pixel tiles. - The code is
| complicated and complex; the physics and control are
| astoundingly advanced. - It has beautiful high resolution
| drawings of characters and cutscenes. - The music and sound
| is full fidelity. - Celeste is running on Unity, which is
| probably the biggest reason for its large size.
|
| That Castlevania game has a 3D main character, with Retina
| quality textures. Since it's made for Apple Arcade, it has
| to support a 4K resolution for Apple TV, meaning all the
| game's assets have to look reasonable on a screen at that
| resolution. The main character alone must weigh a couple
| megabytes.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yep. Ticket to Ride is a board game and its video game
| version on Steam is hundreds of megabytes, yet all it has
| is 2D images with some scaling and translation effects.
| vikingerik wrote:
| It also has music. I'm not sure how much, but that could
| account for a couple hundred megabytes if it's many
| tracks at a fairly high bit rate.
| SilasX wrote:
| Good point, but it has very little of that as well. Some
| victory/loss event music and sound effects, and a few
| short musical tracks.
| vaylian wrote:
| I'd like to argue that we also have Jevon's paradox at work
| here, which was discussed recently on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29720260
|
| Basically, more resources mean that people will use more of
| these resources. And therefore any optimizations that go
| resource effectiveness (in this case browser efficiency) will
| be negated.
| Donckele wrote:
| You can also say this of software in general including
| operating systems.
|
| Sure, the hardware and network are a miracle.
|
| My 2 cents is that there is so much software to be written that
| most programmers are mediocre at what they do and/or their
| working environment makes it even more difficult to create
| efficient software systems.
|
| Similar correlations to Government.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Hardware and networks get the easy stuff, it's just moving
| lots of data around. Software is where all the messy human
| stuff happens. So naturally it's a reflection of human
| beings. Ie messy.
|
| I'd say all the software on earth is done cheap. Quality
| doesn't really matter for most projects. Where it does
| matter, if there's money it happens.
| jrnichols wrote:
| > But why does the average experience suck so much?
|
| to the current crop of web designers/developers/etc, they
| literally may not remember a time when the web was a lot
| faster.
|
| they don't remember the days of websites loading just fine (ok,
| most of the time..) over a 56k modem. they've grown up with the
| web the way it is, javascript and all.
|
| that's what I gather, anyway.
| antocv wrote:
| You did not pay for any page to load fast or to serve you what
| you are looking for. Every web-request, every click you make
| with your browser, can deliver you a response which is unknown
| to you or your browser before-hand. There is no way for you to
| see what you are buying before buying it if it was possible to
| buy page-loads.
|
| Say thanks because you are not in the EU and get the cookie and
| GDPR spam thrown at you as well. Worse than the 1999 popups.
| nine_k wrote:
| I don't even mind Gmail taking some time to operate. What I do
| mind is pegging all 4 cores of an i5, and burning through my
| battery.
|
| (Sadly, my workflow is heavily dependent on multiple labels per
| email, and no IMAP client seems to work acceptably in that
| situation.)
| greggyb wrote:
| I'm not sure what sort of workflow and mail client you
| desire, but Notmuch supports arbitrary tagging. Most coverage
| I've seen of it integrates with emacs or mutt (or similar
| text-based mail clients). That said, in searching for the
| project homepage, I also saw this project[1], which might be
| interesting if you're looking for something a bit less
| terminal. I'm sure there are more alternatives, but hopefully
| this is useful as a starting point for you.
|
| [0] https://notmuchmail.org/
|
| [1] https://add0n.com/notmuch-email-client.html
| nine_k wrote:
| Thank you; likely I should finally give it a try.
| austincheney wrote:
| I can remember in the late 90s it would take about 20 minutes
| to download a 3mb MP3 file. My employer's homepage is now about
| 8mb, according to the browser dev tools.
|
| > I don't want to just blindly blame JS.
|
| JS is a tool, a language. Don't blame the tools as they have
| been refined to an astounding degree over the last 25 years. As
| a long time front end developer blame the business,
| specifically:
|
| * Developer incompetence. Do you really need the largest
| frameworks humanity has written and a million dependencies to
| put a couple lines of text on the page? Yes. Well, no, but most
| developers will claim otherwise and most businesses will refuse
| to hire those who are so capable.
|
| * Stalking. Analytics code is a silent performance killer and
| generally responsible for a lot of JS on many commercial
| websites. This wonderful stuff allows for session tracking via
| advertisements across various websites and at times serves as a
| point of malicious intent by both valid business interests and
| criminal organizations.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Most people will put up with slow-loading pages up to some
| extreme threshold.
|
| So, if you reduce your page's loading time from, say, 1 second
| to 400 millis, you won't gain any significant number of users.
|
| On the other hand, if you use those extra 600 millis to hold an
| auction for ad space on the page, you make more money
| immediately.
|
| Therefore we can expect any for-profit site to load only fast
| enough to keep users from giving up (even if they feel
| frustrated or whatever), and no faster than that.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate
| whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use
| to browse
|
| Yes they can emulate a whole OS. It's browsing at what they
| suck. Seconds wasted for TLS handshake, seconds wasted on
| downloading MB of JS, then realizing content is missing,
| another TLS handshake, another download, then some ads, some
| tracking scripts and finaly the page is displayed. Of course if
| you don't use Chrome or Google DNS you will be penalized. And
| don't forget to accept all cookies.
| coldpie wrote:
| > then some ads, some tracking scripts
|
| Well, these at least are fixable. The web is unusable without
| uBlock Origin and NoScript.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Seconded uBlock Origin, the web is unusable without it. I
| moved however from NoScript to uMatrix, which can block
| with more granularity, but needs to be either kept default
| off or "trained" because its factory settings are very
| strict and could block a lot of necessary stuff (ie, don't
| install it to non technical users).
| rakoo wrote:
| You can replicate NoScript and even uMatrix inside uBlock
| Origin now (uMatrix is even officially deprecated by
| uBlock Origin now)
|
| uBO gives a lot of flexibility and a traditional "no js"
| is absolutely possible (see
| https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-
| issues/wiki/Blocking-...). You then select which source
| is authorized to push crap at your browser
| squarefoot wrote:
| > You can replicate NoScript and even uMatrix inside
| uBlock Origin now (uMatrix is even officially deprecated
| by uBlock Origin now)
|
| I ignored this, thanks!
| coldpie wrote:
| I like NoScript's UI. I've never tried uMatrix or uBo's
| more complex modes, but every time I see screenshots like
| in the article you linked, my head spins. So I stick with
| NoScript because I understand it. Compare:
| https://noscript.net/noscript/ss0.png
|
| No knock on uBo! Just explaining why I stick with
| NoScript :)
| heurisko wrote:
| > Seconds wasted for TLS handshake
|
| The few hundred milliseconds is worth it to stop someone
| sniffing my browsing details on an open network.
|
| I can remember browsing the web using 56k. That was slow.
| xapata wrote:
| Yeah, where's browsing the web like it's 1993?
| 123pie123 wrote:
| great stuff
|
| although altavista.com site doesn't work very well
|
| I automatically used that as my first choice of website to use
| bennyp101 wrote:
| astalavista.box.sk for _ahem_ software
| mattl wrote:
| Try www.altavista.digital.com
| korla wrote:
| My reaction as well. I remember leaving for Google as a huge
| step in my childhood.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-30 23:02 UTC)