[HN Gopher] How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
Author : jasondavies
Score : 822 points
Date : 2024-03-16 20:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| andy99 wrote:
| Nobody cares about people with older devices. We've shifted to a
| mode where companies tell their customers what they have to do,
| and if they don't fit the mold they are dropped. It's more
| profitable that way - you scale only revenue and don't have to
| worry about accessibility or customer service or any edge cases.
| That's what big tech has gotten for us.
| dexwiz wrote:
| You're getting downvoted but I think despite the tone you are
| correct. 10 years ago corporate guidance on web dev was
| backwards compatibility going back several versions. Now it's
| hardly any concern for anything more than 6 months old.
|
| More than anything I think it's because corporate IT has had to
| modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update
| constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also
| cannot demand user use an old version of a browser that still
| supports some old plugin. And as a vendor it's not profitable
| to support people who maintain that mindset.
|
| Also "update to the latest version" is the new "turn it off and
| back on again," when it comes to basic IT help.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Part of it was that users were terrible at updating browsers.
| You needed to support Internet Explorer 6, or cut off a third
| of your customers. It sucked.
|
| Now every browser gets updates, automatically and
| aggressively. The only real outlier is Safari, but even that
| updates way quicker than older browsers used to.
|
| As a result, who needs backward compatibility?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Without all the compatibility shims, it means that you can
| drop coat bloat sooner when the JS gets replaced with a
| native browser capability.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because the people with money who are buying your products
| are all running the latest version of iOS. The ones on a 6
| year old Android version are not spending anything therefor
| it isn't worth investing money in making sure it works for
| them.
| perardi wrote:
| Who is this mythical end-user with an old browser? Because
| they don't show up in browser usage statistics.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share
|
| Chrome is evergreen, even on Android. Safari, after a bit of
| a fallow period, is updated fairly aggressively, and though
| it's still coupled with OS updates, it's no longer married to
| the annual x.0 releases.
|
| Mind you, I still believe, and practice, you should write
| semantic HTML with progressive enhancement. But at the same
| time, I absolutely do not think you should go out of your way
| to test for some ancient version of Safari running on a
| first-generation iPad Pro--use basic webdev best practices,
| and don't spend time worrying that container queries aren't
| going to work for that sliver of the market.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Exactly. The landscape has changed because those old
| browser users have been forced to update.
| skydhash wrote:
| Most people auto update their software or they don't at
| all. What they don't do is buy a brand new laptop as soon
| as it's out. And the one they have is a cheap one from HP
| or Dell. To know their pain, try to use one of these.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Browsers may be self-updating but hardware is not. You
| can't just download more RAM or a faster CPU.
| hgs3 wrote:
| I've got an iPad Air 2 running iOS 15.8. My user agent will
| surely tell you I'm only one or two major versions behind
| the "latest and greatest" but the hardware itself is a
| different story. On this device modern GitHub consistently
| crashes when displaying more than a few hundred lines of
| code. I've lost the ability to use a perfectly functioning
| device due to bloatware.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Clues that a market is not competitive...
|
| What most impresses me is that this happen on many markets that
| _should_ be competitive by any sane rationale. Like group
| buying or hotel booking. Yet, they also do that kind of shit,
| and people still have nowhere to go.
|
| The world economy became integrated and incredibly rigid.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm normally a fan of Dan Luu's posts but I felt this one missed
| the mark. The LCP/CPU table is a good one, but from there the
| article turns into a bit on armchair psychology. From some random
| comments coming from Discourse's founder, readers are asked to
| build up an idea of what attitudes software engineers supposedly
| have. Even Knuth gets dragged into the mud based on comments he
| made about single vs multi-core performance and comments about
| the Itanium (which is a long standing point of academic
| contention.)
|
| This article just felt too soft, too couched in internet fights,
| to really stand up.
| troupo wrote:
| > readers are asked to build up an idea of what attitudes
| software engineers supposedly have.
|
| But they do, don't they. Discourse's founder's words are just
| very illustrative. Have you used the web recently? I have. It's
| bloated beyond any imagination to the point that Google now
| says that 2.4 _seconds_ to Largest Contentful Paint is fast
| now: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-
| vit... (this is from 4 years ago, it's probably worse now).
|
| You don't have to go far to see either Youtube loading 2.5
| megabytes of CSS on desktop to the founder of Vercel boasting
| its super fast sites that take 20 seconds to load the moment
| you throttle it just a tiny bit:
| https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1735338533303259571
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You're making the same mistake the post did. It depends on
| the reader already having sympathy for the idea that bloat is
| bad in order to make its case. I can read nerd site comments
| all day that lament bloat. For an article to stand on its own
| on this point it has to make the case to people who _don 't_
| already believe this.
|
| Dan's articles have usually been very good at that. The
| keyboard latency one for example makes few assumptions and
| mostly relies on data to tell its story. My point is that
| this article is different. It's an elevated rant. It relies
| on an audience that already agrees to land its point, hence
| my criticism that it's too couched in internet fights.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| State your case that bloat is _good_. I currently have a
| client who will do literally anything except delete a
| single javascript library so I 'd like to understand them
| better.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Joel Spolsky on Excel bloat, 2001:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-
| letter-iv...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The latest version of Excel loads faster on my laptop
| than most websites do. I've timed this.
|
| I can load the entire MS Office suite _and_ open a Visual
| Studio 2022 project in less time then it takes to open a
| blank Jira web form.
|
| What's your point?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| My point is to reply to "State your case that bloat is
| _good_ " with a famous blog stating a case that bloat is
| good. Bloat makes the company more money by allowing them
| to develop and ship faster, bloat makes the company more
| money by being able to offer more features to more
| customers (including the advertisers and marketers and
| etc. side of things), and - well, read the article.
|
| I, too, dislike slow websites and web apps, but I don't
| think they are some mystery - natural selection isn't
| selecting for idiot developers, market selection is
| selecting for tickbox features and with first-mover-
| advantage they are selecting against "fast but not
| available for another year and has fewer features and
| cost more to develop".
| skydhash wrote:
| Due to prevalence of native apps in the macOS world, the
| difference are often stark. I use Things and Bear, and
| it's fast, then try to load gmail (dump account, so it's
| not in Mail) and it's so slow. Youtube too. Fastmail, in
| comparison, loads like it's on localhost.
|
| You block JavaScript and the amount of sites that is
| broken is ridiculous, some you would not expect
| (websites, not fullblown interactive apps).
| liveoneggs wrote:
| The web doesn't scale like desktops - not even close.
|
| Furthermore - this philosophy has made Windows worse and
| less responsive in all cases.
|
| I understand that this "pays the bills" but my charge is
| (currently) to make things faster so I am against
| slowness.
| deathanatos wrote:
| That was 2001.
|
| Core frequencies aren't going up at 2001 rates anymore.
| (And although Moore's law has continued, it is only just.
| Core freqs have all but topped out, it feels like.)
| Memory prices seem to have stalled, and even non-volatile
| storage feels like it's stalled.
|
| My computer in 1998, compared to it's predecessor,
| storage was going up in size at ~43% YoY. It was an
| amazing time to be alive; the 128 MiB thumbdrive I bought
| the next decade is laughable now, but it was an upgrade
| from a 1.44 "MB" diskette. Today, I'm not sure I'd put
| more storage in a new machine than what I put in a 2011
| build. E.g., 1 TiB seems to be ~$50; cheaper, yet. Using
| the late 90s growth rates, it should be 17 TiB... so even
| though it's about half the price, we can see we've fallen
| off the curve.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _And although Moore 's law has continued, it is only
| just._"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count has a
| table of transistor count over time. 2001 was Intel
| Pentium III with 45 million transistors and nVidia NV2A
| GPU with 60 million. 2023 has Apple M2 Ultra with 134
| billion transistors and AMD Instinct CPU with 146
| billion, and AMD Aqua Vanjaram CDNA3 GPU with 153
| billion. That's some ~3,000x more, about a doubling every
| two years.
|
| Core frequencies aren't going up, but amount of work per
| clock cycle is - SIMD instructions are up, memory access
| and peripheral access bandwidth is up, cache sizes are
| up, branch predictors are better, multi-core is better.
|
| > " _E.g., 1 TiB seems to be ~$50_ "
|
| You can get a 12TB HDD from NewEgg for $99.99, Joel's
| blog said $0.0071 per megabyte and this is $0.0000083 per
| megabyte, ten thousand times cheaper in 23 years. Even
| after switching to more expensive SSDs 1TB for $50 is
| $0.00005 per megabyte, a hundred times cheaper than Joel
| mentioned - and that switch to SSDs likely reduced the
| investment in HDD tech. And as you say " _I 'm not sure
| I'd put more storage in a new machine than what I put in
| a 2011 build_" few people need more storage unless they
| are video or gaming enthusiasts, or companies.
| DinaCoder98 wrote:
| The reason we have bloat is it's easier to satisfy
| stakeholders if you don't give a damn. There's really no
| reason to discuss this at all once you realize this.
|
| But of course, ranting and reading rants is satisfying in
| its own right. What's the problem?
| troupo wrote:
| The article you diss has actual benchmarks in it. The
| article I linked has actual numbers in it.
|
| At this point you're willingly ignoring it because you
| dislike that this is additionally illustrated by quotes
| from specific people.
| bitwize wrote:
| Usually the directive "don't worry about bloat" comes from
| above, or outside, the software engineering team. I'm a
| software engineer and I would _love_ to fix performance
| problems so that everything runs Amiga smooth. But that takes
| time and effort to find, analyze, and fix performance
| issues... and once The Business sees something in more or
| less working order, implementing the next feature takes
| priority over removing bloat. "Premature optimization is the
| root of all evil" and that. I know that's not what Knuth
| meant, he meant don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish when
| you do optimize. But much like "GO TO considered harmful",
| something approaching the stupidest possible interpretation
| of the maxim has become the canonical interpretation.
|
| And that's before getting into when The Business wants that
| sweet, sweet analytics data, or those sweet, sweet ad
| dollars.
| goalieca wrote:
| > what attitudes software engineers supposedly have
|
| I don't think I've ever seen a company take performance
| seriously. No one scoffs when a simple API service for frontend
| has 500ms response time! How many engineers even know or care
| how much their cloud bill is?
| nolist_policy wrote:
| I'm sure Google invests a lot of resources in making Google
| Search load fast. AFAIK they serve a specialized version for
| each user agent out there.
| maigret wrote:
| One the best counter examples to the rule. I tried running
| Lighthouse on a few Google services that are less prominent
| and had a few good laughs.
| yawaramin wrote:
| > ...which is a long standing point of academic contention.
|
| What contention? If anything, Luu is being rather generous-
| Knuth was just whining that the decades-long free lunch program
| was being cancelled.
| moonchild wrote:
| VLIW (Itanium is a VLIW arch) is what's contentious, not
| multiprocessing.
| yawaramin wrote:
| OK I missed that. Thanks. But it looks like Itanium was
| only tangential to this discussion, in that Knuth thinks
| multicore programming may be an even worse mistake than
| Itanium.
| ksec wrote:
| I thought he summarised it pretty well. Jeff Atwood was only
| picked as example. But there are _LOTS_ of high profile, huge
| followers web developments thought leaders constantly pump out
| similar views. And a lot of their followers just blindly accept
| what they were told.
| torginus wrote:
| Knuth is kinda right imo - parallelism as we have it now is
| unused by 90% of software outside of specialist use cases and
| running the same single-threaded program on multiple data
| items.
|
| Programming languages and hardware both offer poor support for
| fine-grained parallelism and it's very hard to speed up
| classical software using parallel approaches.
| troupo wrote:
| Also related: Performance Inequality Gap 2024
| https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I only recently moved from a 6-year old LG flagship phone to a
| shiny new Galaxy, and the performance difference is staggering.
| It shouldn't be - that was a very high-end phone at release, it's
| not _that_ old, and it still works like new. I know it 's not
| just my phone, because the Galaxy S9s I use to test code have the
| same struggles.
|
| I would like to have seen Amazon in the tests. IME Amazon's
| website is among the absolute worst of the worst on mobile
| devices more than ~4 years old. Amazon was the only site I
| accessed regularly that bordered on unusable, even with
| relatively recent high-end mobile hardware.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| I have noticed with two 7 year old Snapdragon 835 devices that
| RAM and running a recent Android version makes a huge
| difference.
|
| I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS
| and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly
| adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with
| most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to
| replace the battery and disassembling phones is a pain.
|
| Meanwhile a Galaxy S8 with the same SoC, 4GB of memory and
| stock Android 9 with Samsung's modifications chugs like there's
| no tomorrow.
|
| I can understand that having two more gigabytes of memory can
| make a difference but there is a night and day difference
| between the phones. Perhaps Android 14 has way better memory
| management than Android 9? Or Samsung's slow and bloated
| software is hampering this device?
|
| Either way it's irritating to see that many companies don't
| test on old/low-end devices. Most people in the world aren't
| running modern flagships, especially if they target a world-
| wide audience.
| hinkley wrote:
| This is what I miss from the removal of serviceable
| components on MacBooks. Was a time I would buy the fastest
| processor and just okay memory and disk, then the first time
| I got a twinge of jealousy about the new machines, buy the
| most Corsair memory that they would guarantee would work, and
| a bigger faster drive. Boom, another 18 months of useful
| lifetime.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Is the total useful lifetime more than MacBooks with non
| serviceable components? I see people around me easily using
| Airs for 5+ years.
| kome wrote:
| My MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2014) is my only computer.
| I still don't feel like changing it so far...
| genewitch wrote:
| i have an Air from 2011 or 2012 that is out of storage
| with _just_ the OS installed. I can 't update or install
| any other software because the most recent update
| installed on it capped out the storage. Low-end windows
| laptops (the $150-$300 at walmart type) have this same
| issue. 32GB of storage and windows takes 80% of the
| space, and you can no longer fit a windows update on it.
|
| I still have the air with whatever the macos is, but as
| soon as i have a minute i'm going to try and get linux or
| BSD on it. I'm still sore at how little use i got out of
| that machine - and i got it "open box" "scratch and
| dent", so it was around $500 with tax. I got triple the
| usage out of a 2009ish eeePC (netbook)
| youngtaff wrote:
| You could try ChromeOS Flex on it?
| Baguette5242 wrote:
| Amateur... I am using a 2009 15' MacBook Pro Unibody,
| with a swapped SuperDrive to SSD, another main SSD and
| RAM boosted to 8Gb. OpenCore Legacy to update to a
| relatively recent version of MacOS. The only thing that
| is so annoying is the webcam that doesn't work anymore,
| and a USB port is dead also.
|
| So sad this kind of shenanigans are not possible anymore.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Pfah, showoff. My 2005 Thinkpad T42p crawls circles
| around that thing - slowly. Maxed out to 2GB, Intel 120GB
| SSD with a PATA->SATA adapter (just fits if you remove
| some useless bits from the lid) and - what keeps this
| machine around - a glorious keyboard and 1600x1200
| display. It even gets several hours on the battery so
| what more could you want?
| sockbot wrote:
| I have one of these with a MacBook Pro 6,2 that I did the
| same upgrades to. However I finally decided to retire it
| when 2nd replacement battery swelled and Chrome stopped
| supporting OSX 13.
|
| It didn't look like a good candidate for OpenCore Legacy
| because of the dual video cards, but it feels so gross
| recycling a perfectly working computer.
| walteweiss wrote:
| I run the one from 2011 (16 Gb of ram though) and it runs
| highly minimalistic Arch Linux. So far so good.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| My air isnt that old, and I'm eyeing a new one...
|
| I find that a lot of my work is "remote" at this point.
| Im doing most things on Servers, VM's, and containers on
| other boxes. The few apps that I do run locally are
| suffering (browser being the big offender).
|
| Is most of what you're doing remote? Do you have a decent
| amount of ram in that air?
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| The main thing that convinced me to get on the ARM macs
| is the heat and battery life(which kind of go together).
| It's never uncomfortable on the lap.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I've been a Mac user since 2003 or so and I can
| confidently say my machines last 6-7 years as daily
| drivers then sunset over 2-3 years when I get a new
| computer. I always go tower, laptop, tower, laptop. They
| have a nice overlap for a few years that serves me well.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes, but that's the slow-boiled frog syndrome. I use my
| computers for years as well, and whenever I get a new one
| I think "wow, why didn't I switch sooner, this is so much
| snappier".
| ghaff wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I have a 2015 MacBook, a 2015 iMac,
| and a recent Apple Silicon MacBook. Of course I do
| Photoshop, Lightroom, Generative AI, etc. on the Apple
| Silicon system. But I basically don't care which system I
| browse the web with and, in fact, the iMac is my usual
| for video calls and a great deal of my web document
| creation and the like.
|
| I suspect that people who have somewhat older Macs
| (obviously there's some limit) who find their web
| browsing intolerably slow probably have something else
| going on with either their install or their network.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >I do Generative AI,
|
| This makes me call into question literally everything
| else in your post.
|
| You might be able to do CPU based for a few trials for
| fun, but you arent running LLMs on CPU on a daily basis.
| ghaff wrote:
| I do some local image generation now and then (mostly
| using Photoshop). Are you happy now? My only point was
| that any CPU/GPU-intensive applications I run (and really
| most local applications) I do on my newish computer. But
| most stuff I run is in a browser.
|
| The relatively little LLM use I do is in a browser and it
| doesn't matter which computer I'm doing it on.
| dijit wrote:
| Controversial counterpoint: Having standardised hardware
| causes optimisation.
|
| What do I mean?
|
| In game development, people often argue that game consoles
| hold back PC games. This is true to a point, because more
| time is spent optimising at the cost of features, but also
| optimising for consoles means PC players are reaping the
| benefits of a baseline decent performance even on low end
| hardware.
|
| Right now I am developing a game for PC and my dev team are
| happy to set system requirements at an 11th generation i7
| and a 40-series (4070 or higher) graphics card. Obviously
| that makes our target demographic very narrow but from
| their perspective the game runs: so why would I be upset?
|
| For over a decade memory was so cheap that most people
| ended up maxing out their systems, the result is that every
| program is electron.
|
| For the _last_ 10 years memory started to be constrained
| and suddenly a lot of electron became less shitty (its
| still shitty) and memory requirements were something that
| you could tell at least some companies started working to
| reduce (or at least not increase).
|
| Now we get faster CPUs, the constraint is gone, and since
| the M-series chips came out I am certain that software that
| used to be useful on intel macs is becoming slower and
| slower. Especially the electron stuff which seems to
| especially perform well on M-chips
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I don't think the RAM is the difference-maker. The old LG
| phone in question is a V35, which has 6GB and a Snapdragon
| 845.
| dleink wrote:
| I want to research this route more but the camera is an
| important component to me. I suspect their is a model of
| phone from 5-10 years ago that has a an under-the-radar
| stellar camera and I would find "perfectly adequate".
| ("perfectly adequate" is my favored state for most tech
| solutions.)
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| Interesting that you have such problems with Amazon. I'm using
| an iPhone XR (5,5 years old) and don't have any problems using
| Amazon in the browser (Safari). And I'm on the latest iOS
| (17.4).
| ryukoposting wrote:
| OS version may have an impact. The Galaxy S9s both run
| Android 9. That LG phone is stuck on Android 8 because AT&T
| sucks and never got around to updating their shitware-riddled
| Android fork. If they had, I wouldn't have needed to spend
| spend $800 on a new phone. I'm not bitter about it at all,
| though.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The iPhone XR was 4x as fast as the Galaxy S9 in web browsing
| https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph13912/95169.png
| callalex wrote:
| iPhone browser performance has run circles around android
| browser performance on equivalent hardware for like the last
| 10 years or so. It's really the secret sauce of iOS.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Yeah, by the way browsing on iPhone 6S Plus is quite okay,
| compared to even MacBook Pro (2011, but that's a laptop!),
| I would say.
| ww520 wrote:
| iPhone has exceptional long lasting performance. I have a 5
| year old iPhone and it still runs smooth like silk.
| seam_carver wrote:
| I have no issues with Amazon on my iPhone 8 running latest iOS
| 16
| Accacin wrote:
| Did you try disabling JavaScript on Amazon? It actually doesn't
| function too badly. I know, I know, you shouldn't need to do it
| and I agree.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I fiddled with NoScript but I must have done something wrong
| because I broke the site entirely.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I recently visited Brazil and had my shiny new phone snatched
| from my hand ... now with my spare 4 years old phone, frankly
| dont see any difference. But I use Firefox with all the ad
| blockers, maybe that helps.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I run Firefox with uBO and NoScript. Based on the other
| replies, OS version may play a role.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I have a Palm Phone. I generally consider web browsing to be
| almost impossible no it at this point lol
| ericra wrote:
| As someone with recent experience using a relatively slow Android
| phone, it can be absolutely brutal to load some web pages, even
| ones that only appear to be serving text and images (and a load
| of trackers/ads presumably). The network is never the bottleneck
| here.
|
| This problem is compounded by several factors. One is that
| older/slower phones cannot always use fully-featured browsers
| such as Firefox for mobile. The app is takes too many resources
| on its own before even opening up a website. That means turning
| to a pared-down browser like Firefox Focus, which is ok except
| for not being able to have extensions. That means no ublock
| origin, which of course makes the web an even worse experience.
|
| Another issue is that some sites will complain if you are not
| using a "standard" browser and the site will become unusable for
| that reason alone.
|
| In these situations, companies frequently try to force an app
| down your throat instead. And who knows how much space that will
| take up on a space-limited device or how poorly it will run.
|
| Many companies/sites used to have simplified versions to account
| for slower devices/connections, but in my experience these are
| becoming phased out and harder to find. I imagine it's much
| harder to serve ads and operate a full tracking network to/from
| every social media company without all the javascript bloat.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > That means no ublock origin
|
| Talk about a catch-22 situation. The modern web is useless
| without adblocking. Especially when you get forever scrolling
| pages with random ads stuffed in there.
| squarefoot wrote:
| As a web developing illiterate, I wonder how hard would be
| writing a browser extension that loads a page, does infinite
| scroll in memory and in background, then while it is still
| loading the infinite stuff, splits the content in pages and
| shows them instead, so that the user can go back and forth to
| page numbers. This wouldn't reduce the network and system
| load, however navigating the results would be much more
| friendly.
| wolpoli wrote:
| It'll give a nicer experience and will eliminate situation
| where an element changes location just as you try to tap on
| it.
|
| The extension just needs to handle GDPR notice and Email
| subscription overlays.
| freedomben wrote:
| Problem is, "infinite scroll" often is infinite, meaning it
| will load an ass load of data in the background and take up
| a ton of memory, and the user may never even end up looking
| at that data.
|
| I really hate the load on scroll (especially Google Drive's
| implementation which is absolute trash, and half the time
| I'll scroll too fast and it will just miss a bunch of files
| and I'll have to refresh the page and try again), but a
| better hack might be an extension that scrolls a page or
| two ahead for you and stores that in memory. If it was
| smart enough to infinitely scroll websites that are
| actually finite (like google drive) that would be amazing
| though.
| jwells89 wrote:
| In these situations what's eating up your resources
| usually isn't the data being represented but instead the
| representation.
|
| This is why native apps use recycler views for not just
| infinite scroll, but anything that can display more
| rows/columns/items/etc than can fit on screen at once.
| Recycler views only create just enough cells to fill the
| screen even if you have tens of thousands of items to
| represent, and when you scroll they reuse these cells to
| display the currently relevant segment of data. When used
| correctly by developers, these are very lightweight and
| allow 60FPS scrolling of very large lists even on very
| weak devices.
|
| These are possible to implement in JavaScript in
| browsers, but implementation quality varies a lot and
| many web devs just never bother. This is why I think HTML
| should gain a native recycler widget of its own, because
| the engineers working on Blink, Gecko, and WebKit are in
| much better positions to write high quality optimized
| implementations, plus even if web devs don't use it
| directly, many frameworks will.
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| I find this idea interesting 'These are possible in
| JavaScript in browsers, but implementation quality varies
| a lot and many web devs just never bother.'
|
| Do you have any examples that you consider good
| implementations? I ask because tables seem to be the
| biggest offenders of slow components in say Angular /
| PrimeNG. I am going to a legacy app soon that is being
| updated (Angular but not PrimeNG). Would like to see if
| we can build a feature rich table that is more performant
| than the PrimeNG one that I know looks amazing but is the
| cause of many headaches.
|
| NOTE: its not Angular or PrimeNG specifically that make
| the tables slow/hogs, but the amount of DOM elements
| inside and some of the implementation details that I
| disagree with (functions that are called withing the HTML
| being evaluated every tick). Would be great to see if
| this idea of a 'recycler widget' can help us. Cheers.
| jwells89 wrote:
| > its not Angular or PrimeNG specifically that make the
| tables slow/hogs, but the amount of DOM elements inside
|
| Yep, this happens even with nothing but a 10-line vanilla
| JS file that adds N more items every time the user
| scrolls to the bottom of the page. Performance
| degradation increases with every load due to the growing
| number of DOM elements which eventually exceeds whatever
| margin is afforded by the machine the browser is running
| on, causing chug.
|
| Web is not my specialty so I don't have specific
| recommendations, but plenty of results turn up when
| searching for e.g. "angular recycler" or "react
| recycler".
| nmjenkins wrote:
| We do this at Fastmail and, if I say so myself, our
| implementation is pretty damn good. We've had this for
| over a decade, so it was originally built for much lower
| powered devices.
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| There was a proposal for a browser-native virtual
| scroller: https://wicg.github.io/virtual-scroller/
|
| Apparently it was abandoned (for now?) in favor of
| content-visibility / CSS containment primitives:
| https://web.dev/articles/content-visibility
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Problem is, "infinite scroll" often is infinite,
| meaning it will load an ass load of data in the
| background and take up a ton of memory, and the user may
| never even end up looking at that data.
|
| It's also an infinitely worse user experience and
| prevents you from holding your place in whatever is being
| scrolled. Are there advantages? Why is infinite scroll
| used in any context?
| kmacdough wrote:
| 1 batch of content = 1 batch of add space = more money.
|
| Each _next page_ click is a moment for you to reflect and
| notice the waste of time. Simple as that.
| _flux wrote:
| Personally I prefer infinite scroll, versus the
| alternative of finding the "next page" button at the
| bottom, waiting for the content to load (preloading could
| help here) and sometimes navigating to the beginning of
| actual beginning of the content I was viewing. I even
| used a browser extension that matched "next" buttons from
| pages and loaded the next page content automatically, but
| the extension (can't recall its name) is not available
| anymore.
|
| Granted there are some downsides, such as having the
| browser keep extra-long pages in its memory, but overall
| I prefer working infinite scroll mechanisms over paged
| ones. As far as I see, the ability to remember the
| current location in the page could be easily implemented
| by modifying page anchor and parameters accordingly,
| though personally I've rarely needed it.
|
| Perhaps if there was a standard way (so in the HTML spec)
| to implement infinite scrolling, it would work correctly
| in all cases and possibly even allow user to select a
| paged variant according to their preference.
|
| Not all the paged views work correctly either. In
| particular systems that show threaded discussions can
| behave strangely when you select the next page. Worst
| offender is Slashdot.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| You don't actually need to load everything, just the
| previous, current, and next pages.
| nox101 wrote:
| I just choose not to use it. if I follow a link and there is
| an ad per paragraph and video starts playing I close the tab.
| it's rare the page I was about to look at was actually
| important
| gcanyon wrote:
| I use ublock origin, and on literally more than one occasion
| (insert doofenshmirtz nickel quote) I've found a site that I
| quite like, think it's awesome to the point I actually write
| to the people who create it with suggestions, and then for
| whatever reason happen to load it without blockers and
| discover it's halfway useless with all the ads on it.
|
| I fully support people being able to make some money off the
| useful things they build on the internet, whether it's some
| random person who built a thing, or the New York Times or
| even FB or Google, but there has to be a better local maximum
| than online advertising.
| mattl wrote:
| Can you run all your traffic through a self-hosted pihole to
| avoid such things?
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Having a decent internet experience shouldn't require going
| through your own self-hosted server.
| mattl wrote:
| Absolutely not but then I never thought I'd need a 20,000
| entry hosts file either.
| ericra wrote:
| Certainly an option for me. But not a scalable solution for
| the large number of non-tech people with older devices.
| mattl wrote:
| I'd love something like it for all my older devices where I
| can set it and forget it.
| SkyArrow wrote:
| NextDNS is pretty good for this - just change the DNS in
| your network settings.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| You'll also need to add bundles to block dns names ( free
| fyi)
| bombcar wrote:
| Wasn't there an old browser that would render the page on
| the server and just send down the result or something like
| that?
| kreddor wrote:
| The old Opera for mobile did that. I think Chrome had
| something similar at one point.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Opera!
| nottorp wrote:
| You're already too rich and too tech aware to qualify as the
| low end described in the article if you ask that question :)
| mattl wrote:
| Maybe so but I also test things in a variety of browsers
| and devices frequently to try and avoid the problems
| described in the article.
| anon373839 wrote:
| I've got an old MacBook Pro from 2013 that I still keep around
| because the keyboard is the best Apple ever made. It's not fast
| by any means, but I haven't encountered any difficulty with
| websites whatsoever. They're not as snappy as I'd expect on new
| hardware, but perfectly usable. I do use uBlock Origin,
| however.
|
| Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old,
| base-spec MacBook?
| ericra wrote:
| > Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-
| old, base-spec MacBook?
|
| Yes. Definitely. a Macbook Pro from 2013 has between 4-16GB
| of memory for one thing. The lowest spec phone in the article
| (Itel P32) has 1GB. A 2013 Macbook Pro has a 4th gen i5
| processor. This phone has a MediaTek MT6580. It's not even in
| the same ballpark.
|
| This is a bit of an extreme example, but the fact is that a
| very large number of people in many areas of the world use
| phones like these.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Additionally, weak Android devices are not necessarily
| _old_ Android devices. New underpowered Android stuff is
| sold every day. Cheap tablets are particularly bad about
| this -- I have a Lenovo tablet that I bought maybe a year
| ago which uses a SoC that benches a bit above a 2015 Apple
| A9.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| $50 android phones are still sold in developing countries
| and they usually have an MT6580 or UMS312 with 720p
| screen.
| gmokki wrote:
| I wrote code to main nokia.com site 10 years ago where it used
| few ways to detect slow loading of resources and set a flag to
| disable extra features from the site. This was done because the
| site had to work in every country and many of the slowest
| phones sold were from said company.
| dijit wrote:
| I also worked for Nokia 13 or so years ago, though not on
| Nokia.com
|
| Thanks for your work, one of the things that I really liked
| about Nokia was the passion for performance.
|
| On the flip side: I was on the Meego project and we joked
| that we had the most expensive clock application ever
| created, because it kept being completely recreated.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| I liked Meego and Maemo, I always felt that they were an
| expression of the idea that general purpose computing can
| work in the mobile form factor, which is something that
| tremendously appeals to me (I wish I still had my N900).
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > In these situations, companies frequently try to force an app
| down your throat instead. And who knows how much space that
| will take up on a space-limited device or how poorly it will
| run.
|
| And honestly, that app is going to be a browser shell with a
| (partially) offline copy of the website in it, 9 times out of
| 10...
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > that app is going to be a browser shell with a (partially)
| offline copy of the website in it, 9 times out of 10
|
| If you're lucky. The main UI may just be a website, but as a
| native app is has a greater ability to spam you, track you,
| accidentally introduce security vulnerabilities, etc.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Even if you do use a standard browser, companies will force you
| to use an app by making there website broken (on purpose?).
|
| Random recent example: Nike. Popping useless errors upon
| checkout in the webshop. Support: "oh, we're so sorry, just try
| the app, k bye".
|
| Another example of major companies with broken websites more
| often than not: (European) airline booking websites.
|
| And major companies think this is totally fine and doesn't
| damage their brand? I mean not being able to create a
| functioning website with unlimited funds in 2024 is not a bad
| look?!
| LilBytes wrote:
| Reddit is another example where they've broken the mobile
| browser experience, to send you to another app. Arguably
| broken, but in different ways.
| rapnie wrote:
| LinkedIn, leaders in deceptive design (though given recent
| HN on internal situation, a more favorable interpretation
| may be that they can't handle their own bloat and it
| shows).
| uaserussia wrote:
| Pro-tip: type in old. where the www. used to be and rebbit
| becomes usable.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| But then you get the desktop version of the site. Never
| mind that Reddit has a mobile-friendly version (whose
| design Reddit has kept on bungling too).
| RF_Savage wrote:
| The i.reddit mobile site sadly seems to have stopped
| working. At least for me.
| nebalee wrote:
| try adding .i to the end of the url.
| SilasX wrote:
| The desktop version is still much more usable on mobile
| than the "mobile-friendly" version.
| n_ary wrote:
| I can show some forgiveness to airlines, because they simply
| outsource it to some agency somewhere.
|
| But I have zero sympathy for giants, like Slack. If I do a
| "Request the Desktop Site", then it suddenly works(albeit
| with lot of scrolling) on my Firefox(iOS), but if I disable
| the "Request the Desktop Site", then it blocks everything and
| forces me to download the app from AppStore.
|
| Sadly, the downloaded app looks like an optimized mobile
| version of the site.
| MichaelMug wrote:
| Since 2000, I've observed the internet shift from free sharing of
| information to aggressive monetization of every piece of
| knowledge. So I suspect that is the culprit. If you use the
| mobile web on the latest iPhone you'll find its unusable without
| an ad-blocker.
| smokel wrote:
| Hm, not entirely true, depending on what you mean with "the
| internet shifting".
|
| The internet has _grown_ , and the free sharing is still going
| strong. Have a look at Wikipedia, Hacker News, Arxiv.org.
|
| To be honest, the stuff that was shared freely in 2000 was not
| all that great, and most of that which was, is still available.
| Remember that you had to buy a subscription to Encyclopaedia
| Britannica back then, and to all the academic journals.
|
| Granted, there are some non-free information silos, but
| generally I'm pretty happy with the procrastination advice on
| Reddit being surrounded by annoying ads that drive me away.
| Solvency wrote:
| Google "Roche Ff7 rebirth". I was curious who this character
| is. In 2000-2012 all the top links would be amazing fan sites
| and forums describing, discussing, and detailing the
| character with rich info.
|
| Now it's all AI seo spam LADEN with data mining and ad boat
| on monolithic sites like Fandom they barely work on the
| newest iphone.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| And Britannica wasn't filled with highly moderated
| propaganda.
|
| Wikipedia is a failed experiment.
| permo-w wrote:
| Wikipedia is great, it's just not as good as it could be
| ibz wrote:
| Encyclopedia Britannica was on CDs, not on the internet. I'm
| old enough to remember.
| smokel wrote:
| _> In 1994 Britannica debuted the first Internet-based
| encyclopaedia. Users paid a fee to access the information,
| which was located at http://www.eb.com_
|
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-
| En...
|
| (Be warned, there are ads on that page.)
| permo-w wrote:
| the tragedy of the commons
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps these people are better off by running a web browser on a
| remote machine and interfacing with it over VNC.
| wmf wrote:
| Who's going to pay for that server? We're talking about $50-100
| phones here.
| ericra wrote:
| This is trolling, right?
|
| Lemme just give my grandma a list of instructions for doing
| this so she can get to Facebook. I'll let you know how it works
| out.
| wmf wrote:
| Obviously you'd want to productize it (see WebTV, Mighty
| browser).
| hexo wrote:
| webdevs and their managers should use these web "apps" on bad
| machine over VNC on a slow connection for a few months. these
| javascript hellpages are basically crime against humanity and
| do contribute a lot to e-waste, pollution and carbon dioxide
| emissions
| olliej wrote:
| It's not just slow devices, it's also any time you have any kind
| of weak connectivity.
|
| I think every OS now has tools to let you simulate shitty network
| performance these days so it's inexcusable that so many sites and
| even native apps fail so badly anytime you have anything less
| than a mbit connection or greater than 50ms latency :-/
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not just weak connectivity. I know people in rural areas
| who still have less than 1 Mbps internet speed over their DSL
| landline. Using the internet there isn't a lot of fun.
| olliej wrote:
| Which is absurd when you think that the internet used to be
| usable on 14.4k modems.
|
| I remember having to plan to take up hours of time on our
| phone line to download giant files that were smaller than
| many basic webpages these days (ignoring things like photos
| where there's obviously a basic size/quality tradeoff + more
| pixels)
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, 1 Mbps was actually high-speed internet 25 years ago.
| genewitch wrote:
| When i first moved to where i live now DSL had a waitlist,
| so i tried both a verizon hotspot (myfi!) and dialup.
| Dialup with HTML gmail (for slow connections!) took minutes
| to load. IRC was completely usable, but hangouts was not.
| danluu's website would have loaded _just fine_ , as an
| example. I just remembered that after getting DSL if more
| than one person decided to watch a youtube video the pings
| went up in the 1000ms range.
| efields wrote:
| How web bloat impacts users: negatively. Better do your best to
| fix it.
|
| This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.
|
| Meanwhile watches a team build a cathedral when all they needed
| was a shack.
| ponector wrote:
| Why not to build a cathedral if someone else is paying?
|
| I've never seen companies where developers are rewarded for
| performance improvement or any kind of improvement. Did an
| improvement? Nice! Good job! And that's it.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The point is, you build a shack so you can build a
| cathedral where it's warranted. If you are stuck
| maintaining a cathedral you can't move on to bigger better
| things.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yep, you build a shack and charge the users the price of
| a starbucks latte per month because "it's just a
| starbucks latte".
|
| Then you wonder why the solo founder saas has no
| customers.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're talking about; but what I was
| trying to say is I tend to see teams get charged with
| building X (which should be a cathedral), but then build
| a cathedral of configuration parsing, and a cathedral of
| CRUD; instead of focusing on X.
| efields wrote:
| I like my job security large, ornate and full of stained
| glass.
| ugjka wrote:
| Here is how you do web: https://forum.dlang.org/ Observe the
| speed
| c2xlZXB5Cg1 wrote:
| What a refreshing experience.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Or HN. All that talk about "brutalist web design" yet most
| websites are more bloated than ever...
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| 'Brutalist web design' is a pretty small niche though, no?
| It's the kind of thing Hacker News readers will have heard
| of, but I don't think it was ever close to mainstream.
| Solvency wrote:
| Ironically the modern web, built by programmers, is scorned by
| programmers. You all collectively, persistently, shamelessly
| decided AngularReactNodeWebpackViteBloat 200mb asynchronous
| hellspawn websites needed to be made this way.
|
| When all this time, lightweight CSS and anchor links and some
| PHP was all we needed.
| RGamma wrote:
| *built by techbros
| ildjarn wrote:
| This loads faster than native apps serving local content on my
| device.
| yen223 wrote:
| For me, it took an estimated 3-5s to load on first visit.
| Fast, but not "faster than native apps"
|
| The second time round it loaded almost instantly.
|
| I'm guessing there's some caching going on.
| xyst wrote:
| How crude. I can't even post gifs. This is basically a
| glorified e-mail client, but with extra steps. No social media
| integration? What is this 2004? It's not even decentralized
| like matrix.
|
| Can't even post inline videos, bro.
|
| \s
|
| Jokes aside, I do miss this type of interaction. Especially for
| open source projects. It made finding solutions to common
| issues much easier when documentation was lacking or has not
| been updated in a long time.
|
| Now all or most projects have adopted some form of: discord
| channel, slack group, subreddit, twitter. I remember searching
| for my similar issue in a slack channel only to realize the
| chat history has been limited because the owners did not pay
| the extra amount to archive messages beyond what was given for
| free.
| mhd wrote:
| IIRC, the D forum also offers direct NNTP access. Would be
| interesting to compare web access with e.g. tin on a variety of
| devices...
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| These sites can and should be much better. Yes. Definitely.
|
| At the same time, while a 10s load time is a long time &
| unpleasant, it doesn't seem catastrophic yet.
|
| The more vital question to me is what the experience is like
| after the page is loaded. I'm sure a number of these sites have
| similarly terrible architecture & ads bogging down the
| experience. But I also expect that some of those which took a
| while to load are pretty snappy & fast after loading.
|
| Native apps probably have plenty of truly user-insulting payloads
| they too chug through as they load, and no shortage of poor
| architectural decisions. On the web it's much much easier to see
| all the bad; a view source away. And there is seemingly less
| discipline on the web, more terrible and terribly inefficient
| cases of companies with too many people throwing whatever the
| heck into Google Tag Manager or other similar offenses.
|
| The latest server-side react stuff seems like it has a lot of
| help to offer, but there's still a lot of questions about
| rehydration of the page. I'm also lament see us shift away from
| the thick-client world; so much power has been embued to the
| users from the web 9.9 times out of 10 just being some restful
| services we can hack with. In all, I think there's a deficiency
| in broad architectural patterns for how the thick client should
| manage it's data, and a really issue with ahead-of-time bundles
| versus just-in-time & load behind code loading that we have
| failed to make much headway on in the past decade, and this lack
| is where the real wins are.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah this is exactly the kind of nuance I'd love to see
| explored but as you say, auditing native apps is difficult, and
| it's really hard to compare apples to apples unless you can
| really compare equivalent web and mobile apps.
| nhggfu wrote:
| re: Wordpress - with which theme? benchmarked on default theme
| they give away free like "2024" or whatever ?
|
| obvs a good coder optimizes their own theme to get 100% score on
| lighthouse.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Every company stopped caring, especially the companies who were
| at the forefront of standards and good web design practices, like
| Google and Apple.
|
| Google recently retired their HTML Gmail version, mind you, it
| still worked on a 2008 256MO RAM Android phone with an old
| Firefox version and it was simply fast... of course the new JS
| bloated version doesn't, it just kills the browser. That's an
| extreme example, yet low budget Phones have 2GB of RAM, you
| simply cannot browser the web with these and expect reasonable
| performances anymore.
|
| Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to use
| "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to data
| collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and Google.
| lukan wrote:
| "Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to
| use "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to
| data collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and
| Google."
|
| Partly for sure, but Amazon for example? Or Decathlon? (a big
| sports/outdoor chain in europe)
|
| Their sites are just horrible on a mobile (or in Decathlons
| case also on a Desktop, that is not high end), but they also
| don't offer me their app in plain view, so I have to assume it
| is just incompetence. The devs only testing everything on their
| high end devices connected to a backbone.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > but Amazon for example? Or Decathlon? (a big sports/outdoor
| chain in europe)
|
| Pretty much every company out there employs oxygen wasters
| who need "engagement" to justify their promotions/salaries.
| They don't care whether said "engagement" translates to
| actual profit.
|
| If bloating the page or adding some annoying cookie banner
| allows them to come up with some random number that goes up
| (no matter whether the measurement is even correct) they'll
| happily take that opportunity even if would cause actual
| profits to go down.
| spintin wrote:
| Yes, on Thursday Google ended their only viable "product".
|
| RIP Google.
|
| The new Reddit is unusable, and the old is well too old.
|
| Twitch is borderline usable, with chat and video stream
| problems...
|
| The list is long...
|
| All changes are bad when you have the final formula because
| they are job security.
|
| Eventually the monkeys on this ball of dirt will realize that
| jobs and money don't exist, but then it will be to late... oh
| that is now!
|
| RIP Humans.
| subtra3t wrote:
| > the old is well too old
|
| What's wrong with the old Reddit UI?
| spintin wrote:
| It has usability problems with f.ex. collapsing a comment
| tree.
|
| I returned to it last major reskin too but then they fixed
| the new to become usable.
|
| Now they removed the middle version... they should have
| made recent.reddit.com for those that want to wait until
| new.reddit.com doesn't suck as much.
| timnetworks wrote:
| 68k.news loads fine, it's probably that the people writing your
| applications are not great at their jobs?
| legulere wrote:
| Missing text styling impacts all users. The text is hardly
| legible. You really don't need much styling (bloat) to get a good
| result, as demonstrated on http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
| anthk wrote:
| Contrast is good.
|
| https://bestmotherfucking.website/
| bensecure wrote:
| addressed in the article
| sylware wrote:
| google web engines (blink/geeko) and apple web engines with their
| SDK are sickening. They are an insult to sanity. They well
| deserve their hate.
| tredre3 wrote:
| The engines are perfectly fine.
|
| It's the websites/web developers that are the problem.
| sylware wrote:
| I don't agree, the web devs are making it worse.
| zac23or wrote:
| Nobody, nobody, nobody cares about old hardware, performance,
| users, etc. if anyone cared, React wouldn't be a success. The
| last time I tried to use the react website on an old phone, it
| was slow as hell.
|
| LetsEncrypt is stopping serving Android 7 this year. Android 7
| will be blocked from 19% of the web:
| https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration The
| option is to install Firefox.
|
| Users with old hardware are poor people. Nobody wants poor people
| around, not even using their website.
|
| "Fuck the user", that's what we heard from a PO when we tried to
| defend users, imagine if we tried to defend poor users.
| supertrope wrote:
| I think Let's Encrypt made a heroic effort. They deployed a
| hack to support Androids long abandoned by the operating system
| maintainer and manufacturer. If you want to blame LE for the
| breakage then also blame: GOOG for using the IBM PC clone
| business model without a device tree standard, QCOM for selling
| chips but very quickly cutting support, the manufacturer, and
| cellular carriers who prefer to lock you into another 24 month
| installment plan than approve an update for your existing
| handset.
| zac23or wrote:
| > If you want to blame LE for the breakage then also blame
| ...
|
| Of course they are also guilty. LE isn't the most to blame in
| reality, it's just an example that old hardware isn't
| important to decision makers.
| robocat wrote:
| > PO
|
| What's the acronym?
|
| Unfortunately acronyms are context sensitive and many users
| here are not in your context... Maybe try to avoid using
| acronyms!
| gkbrk wrote:
| Product owner?
| zac23or wrote:
| Product Owner
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The problem is that this attitude infects even government
| departments, which ought to serve all citizens, not just the
| rich ones.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| React is successful because of the tech/VC bubble, not because
| it's some miracle technology.
|
| The actual websites where React is useful can be measured in
| single-digit percentages (effectively a full-blown application
| requiring a desktop-like experience, think a trading terminal).
| It is overkill for everything else.
| mik1998 wrote:
| I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my
| usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged)
| and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my
| preference of using native software (non-electron), which
| generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more
| modern" computer.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Whenever I pull out old machines I'm a little shocked at how
| responsive they are running a modern OS (Win10 or Linux), so
| long as the modern web is avoided. Anything with a Core 2 Duo
| or better is adequate for a wide range of tasks if you can find
| non-bloated software to do them with.
|
| Even going back so far that modern OS support is absent,
| snappiness can be found. My circa 2000 500Mhz PowerBook G3
| running Mac OS 9.1 doesn't feel appreciably slower than its
| modern day counterpart for more than one might expect, and some
| things like typing latency are actually _better_.
| anthk wrote:
| A Core Duo it's perfectly fine with an ad blocker:
|
| git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters
| skydhash wrote:
| I have a mac mini 2011 and it works great with Linux Mint.
| But load youtube and you're in a world of pain.
| ogurechny wrote:
| "True UNIX way" solution to this would be getting the data
| from the Web non-interactively and redirecting it into some
| regular expressions to produce the only thing you want.
| Random example:
|
| https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli
| nicbou wrote:
| My 12" Macbook was my main computer for 2022 and part of
| 2023. It ran smoothly for my workflow, even with a 4k
| monitor.
|
| However YouTube and Gmail brought it to a crawl. I had to
| sell it because Youtube Music slowed down my work.
| amlib wrote:
| I remember going trough a similar situation when using a
| netbook. At first they were ok for doing light work and even
| accessing websites, but as time went on websites and browsers
| became more and more heavy. Youtube was a struggle, even Google
| felt laggy. Want to browse a map? You are better off getting a
| physical one! But, no worry, it was still fine for other low
| intensity things and some programming projects I worked on.
| About two years later and both KDE and GNOME would struggle to
| run on it, it was painful. Maybe I should have switched to an
| all CLI/terminal workflow but eventually I bought a used
| thinkpad X220 which was like taking a breath of fresh air after
| holding it for years. But now I do see the same pattern
| emerging, much slower mind you, but it is surely happening.
| Some websites feel sluggish, some gnome apps also feel sluggish
| and I have to avoid electron apps like the plague. But at least
| it has enough brawn (16GB of RAM and an SSD) to cut trough the
| bullshit and work ok on most things. Maybe I should have
| embraced that terminal lifestyle after all...
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'm sure there's an odd parable with netbooks, around the
| time they first started appearing as a hacky project and
| early commercial products they were lean and mean.
| Lightweight local software to do things online, compact flash
| IDE converters versus HDDs (which seems like a precursor to
| SSDs by proving a market), bare bones linux and there was a
| new wave of web standards and performance which non-IE
| browsers were leading in.
|
| Then after going mass market OEMs put full windows and client
| software on there, and the web became heavier so webmail or
| simple office/collaboration slowed down. After that
| mobile/tablets were in competition for the market, and has
| practically devoured non-professional usage for PCs outside
| of gaming.
|
| What I keep coming back to is bundling versus unbundling -
| having one tool to do everything with likely inevitable
| compromises, versus splitting into a number of precise
| specialized ones. It's difficult to convince any decent
| number of people to take something that does less.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Okta has a speed test?
| wmf wrote:
| Presumably Ookla.
| tdudhhu wrote:
| Not only the user is affected by this.
|
| The difference between a 2MB and a 150KB CSS file can be a lot of
| bandwidth.
|
| The difference between a bad and good framework can be a lot of
| CPU power and RAM.
|
| Companies pay for this. But I guess most have no clue that these
| costs can be reduced.
|
| And some companies just don't care as long as money is coming in.
| supertrope wrote:
| A lot of companies don't care about end user performance
| experience. Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-
| virus, endpoint monitoring, TLS interception, Microsoft Teams,
| etc. If there's no explicit responsiveness goal, then
| performance dies by a thousand cuts.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Companies will burden issued PCs with bloated anti-virus,
|
| Ugh, bane of my day job. I work with two companies in
| particular that have high security requirements in their
| environments and very similar total workloads with our
| software. One spends around $250k (ish) a year in self
| hosting costs, the other over a million to get the same
| throughput. The less costly one worked with us as a vendor to
| get anti-virus/endpoint exclusions on the file io intensive
| part of our application and put anti-virus scanning before
| that point, then harden those machines in other ways. The
| other customer is "policy demands we scan everything
| everywhere and the policy is iron law".
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Worst is, nowadays such bloated "security" software is
| being forced onto Linux servers too... every time I check
| why something feels slow, Microsoft Defender is hogging
| resources.
| afavour wrote:
| Eh. Cloudfront pricing starts at 8.5c per GB and goes down to
| 2c. I think you'd struggle to use that pricing as a
| justification when compared to the software engineer hours
| required to shrink down a CSS bundle. (don't get me wrong, 2MB
| is insane and ought to be a professional embarrassment. But I
| think you're going to struggle using bandwidth bills as the
| reason)
|
| I agree with you about frameworks, though. So much waste in
| creating everything as (e.g.) a React app when there's no need.
| Sadly the industry heavily prioritises developer experience
| over user experience.
| Valord wrote:
| This, although I often feel near modern web frameworks
| (React, similar) do not provide better developer experience.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's a numbers game. Mostly the difference doesn't matter at
| all to the vast majority of users. Optimizing for the bottom 1
| or 2 percent that don't have any disposable income to update
| their phones, or pay for your wonderful products or services is
| not a big priority. And not all companies have rockstar
| developers working for them. That's why things like wordpress
| are so popular.
|
| I actually pulled the plug on a wordpress site for my company
| last week. We now have a static website. It's a big performance
| improvement. But the old site was adequate even though it was a
| bit slow to load. So, nobody really noticed the improvement.
| Making it faster was never a requirement.
|
| What is worth optimizing for is good SEO. There's of course a
| correlation between responsiveness and people giving up and
| abandoning web sites. That's why big e-commerce sites tend to
| be relatively fast. Because there's a money impact when people
| leave early.
|
| What I find ironic is that the people complaining about this
| stuff are mostly relatively well off developers with disposable
| incomes and decent hardware. If they use crappy/obsolete
| hardware it's mostly by choice; not necessity. Some people are
| a bit OCD about performance issues as well. They notice minor
| stutters that nobody cares about and it ticks them off.
|
| 2MB is nothing. I'm saying this as somebody who used cassettes,
| and later floppy disks with way less capacity. But that's 35
| years ago. The only time when this matters to me is when I'm on
| a train in Germany and my phone is on a really flaky mobile
| network that barely works. Germany is a bit of a third world
| country when it comes to mobile connectivity. So, that's
| annoying. But not really a problem web developers should
| concern themselves with.
| Devasta wrote:
| If you don't have a good phone and a high speed connection, you
| don't have any money to spend on either the sites products or the
| products of their advertisers.
|
| When looked at from that angle, bloat is a feature.
|
| It's not reasonable to have an expectation of quality when it
| comes to the web.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Huh? I have a 5 year old, mid range android, and I still buy
| things online.
|
| Not everyone cares about phones.
| blauditore wrote:
| Also, there are some websites targeting users with little
| money as well.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Well that take sure goes from 0 to 60 real fast. Can you really
| be sure that only people with good phones and connections have
| money to spend? Just to poke some obvious holes: what about old
| rich people who have a distaste for modern phones but spend
| lavishly on vacations every year? Or outdoorsy rich people who
| are frequently in areas with poor cell coverage but are
| constantly purchasing expensive camping/climbing equipment? How
| about people who aren't rich, but work for companies where
| their input is part of a purchasing process with millions of
| dollars of budget? Those people are all super-lucrative
| advertising targets, I don't think advertisers are
| intentionally weeding them out.
| jhanoncomm wrote:
| I think you are close to the truth there.
|
| But I doubt companies purposely increase their hosting costs as
| some kind of firewall to only include the rich. More like they
| just don't care. Same reason for technical debt, everyone wants
| to grow and move needles.
|
| If a company could magically make their site more available and
| efficient for free I am sure they would jump at the chance. But
| spending a million on that vs. a million on ads wont seem worth
| it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ah, the modern AAA games take on MTX. Who cares about gamers,
| fish for whales.
| politelemon wrote:
| This is addressed in TFA and is not true. The bloat is a
| symptom of what I've seen referred to as the "laptop class" and
| is unrelated to any feature adjacent.
| genewitch wrote:
| Virtually all pharmaceutical advertising is targeted at
| prescribers, yet we all have to watch/view them.
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| That's mostly an American thing.
| genewitch wrote:
| As an american by accident, i apologize, you're right. More
| civilized countries have outlawed that sort of advertising.
| bluquark wrote:
| Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of
| inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but
| that should also include the middle-income countries, especially
| in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example, a user with a
| data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a
| RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good
| enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably
| be on the unpleasantly slow side. I believe it's primarily this
| category of user that accounts for Dan's observation that
| incremental improvements in CPU/RAM/disk measurably improve
| engagement.
|
| As for users with the lowest-end devices like the Itel P32, Dan's
| chart seems to prove that no amount of incremental optimization
| would benefit them. The only thing that might is a wholesale
| different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish
| to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate
| "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has
| rarely proved successful: the empathy problem returns in a
| different guise, as US-based developers often make the wrong
| decisions on which features/polish are essential to keep versus
| discarded for performance reasons.
| jhanoncomm wrote:
| If all the sites tot more efficient it may also increase
| longevity of laptops and PCs where unsavvy people might just
| "need a new computer it is getting slow".
|
| Also applies to bloatware shipped with computers. To the point
| where I was offered a $50 "tune up" to a new laptop I purchased
| recently. Imagine a new car dealer offered you that!
| genewitch wrote:
| I worked at a now-defunct electronics store (not fry's in
| this instance) in the early 2000s that offered this "tune-up"
| - it was to remove the stuff that HP and Dell got paid to
| pre-install, and to fully update windows and whatever else.
|
| Remove the mcafee nuisance popups and any browser "addons"
| that were badged/branded. and IIRC we charged more than $50
| for that service back then.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| For the performance boost it could offer the unsavy user
| stuck on a HDD, it was probably worth it to many. Gross to
| be the middleman, but it is what it is.
| genewitch wrote:
| Another computer shop i worked in charged $90 for virus
| removal, but we also eventually made it policy to just
| reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap and
| fully update the OS. Prior to that the policy was "remove
| viruses, remove crapware, update OS", but we had a few
| customers that had machines with 30,000 viruses. I forget
| what the record was, but it was way up there in count.
| Trying to clean those machines had a marginal failure
| rate, enough that it was costing the owner money to have
| us repeatedly clean them without payment.
|
| No one wants to tell a customer that they need to find
| better adult content sites, and that we won't be cleaning
| their machines without payment anymore!
| lukan wrote:
| "just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap"
|
| And that is not more work?
|
| It was usually the way I did it, too. But this requires
| checking with the owner what apps are important, saved
| preferences, where are the important files stored (they
| never know) etc.
| teamonkey wrote:
| What's the financial incentive in that? Manufacturers ideally
| want you to buy a whole new device every year, they don't
| want you repairing or extending the life.
| gxs wrote:
| Some of these sites are un-fucking-bearable on my gen old
| iPhone.
|
| And the if I'm in a place with a shitty signal, forget about
| it, this problem is 10 times worse.
|
| I'm not even talking about the cluttered UI where only a third
| of the page is visible because of frozen headers and ads, I'm
| talking about the size of the websites themselves that are
| built by people who throw shit against the wall until it looks
| like whatever design document they were given. A website that
| would have already been bloated had it been built correctly
| that then becomes unusable on a slow internet connection,
| forget slow hardware.
|
| All that is to say, I can't imagine what it must be like to use
| the internet under the circumstances in which you described.
|
| I can only hope these people use localized sites built for
| their bandwidth and devices and don't have to interact with the
| bloated crap we deal with.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I really wish all software developers had to have 10 year old
| phones and computers and a slow 3G connection as their daily
| drivers. It might at the very least give them some empathy
| about how hard it is to use their software on an underspec
| machine.
| goalieca wrote:
| > For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in
| the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a
| decade-old US flagship
|
| I'm in Canada and have a single digit plan and I just upgraded
| from an almost decade old flagship. Most websites are torture.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| in mid 00's, I had ADSL with iirc [?]300 MB included in the
| monthly payment, with an extremely predatory rate over the
| limit. I used to stretch it for 3 weeks out of a month
| browsing with images disabled (and bulk of my bandwidth spent
| on Warcraft 3).
|
| that would last for a few hours of lightweight (not
| youtube/images/etc) browsing now.
| II2II wrote:
| I'm in Canada and have a triple-digit plan, in MBs. It's for
| emergency use only. It would be nice if something as simple
| as checking on power outages didn't chew up a good portion of
| the data plan.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I had a 200MB plan for $35/month until early 2022. It was
| an old Koodo plan.
|
| I never used it. I don't do a lot. WiFi at home, drive to
| work, WiFi at work, drive to home.
|
| Travelling with the kids I've found the new plan makes life
| easier.
| II2II wrote:
| Yeah, different people need different things out of their
| phones. Yet the point remains that stingy data plans
| still exist in developed countries. Even though people
| _may_ have better devices than those mentioned in the
| article (it is easier to justify a one-time expense than
| a recurring one), there are people who are stuck with
| them for various reasons. Affordability is definitely one
| of the reasons.
|
| Even so, we should avoid pigeonholing those who have
| limited access to data as poor people. There are other
| reasons.
| prisenco wrote:
| > _an alternate "lite/basic" mode._
|
| In another world this mode dominated UI/UX design and
| development and the result was beautiful and efficient. Where
| design more resembles a haiku than an unedited novel.
|
| We don't get to live in that world, but it's not hard to
| imagine.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it is sort of hard to imagine; a world populated
| mostly by humans that appreciate that sort of simplicity is
| pretty different!
|
| If we had modern computers in 200X, we wouldn't just have
| music on our myspaces, we'd put whole games there I bet.
| csande17 wrote:
| People did, in fact, embed games on MySpace, mostly using
| Flash if I recall correctly.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| _> That 's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the
| experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. ...
| an alternate "lite/basic" mode_
|
| Why does this need to be the "alternate" choice though? What
| does current Discourse provide that e.g. PhpBB or the DLang
| forum do not? (Other than mobile friendly design, which in a
| sane world shouldn't involve more than a few tweaks to a
| "responsive" CSS stylesheet).
| Cacti wrote:
| Voice, video, realtime interaction, a devoted user base, an
| incredible amount of money...
| a_bored_husky wrote:
| Discourse, not Discord.
| Cacti wrote:
| whoopsie. thanks.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| What do you mean by voice and video? Why would I want to
| have voice in a forum? I think that would be akin to
| receiving voice messages in messengers. Or do you mean,
| that for these kinds of things a widget can be displayed?
| That certainly is possible in old style forums. It is just
| HTML, an embed code away.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I like the scroll view in discourse. Makes it super easy to
| follow a thread. The subthreads and replies are also easier
| to use. The search is better, the ability to upvote makes it
| better for some use cases, and in general phpbb is a mess in
| terms of actually being able to see what's useful and what
| threads are relevant.
|
| I think flipping the question makes more sense, why do you
| think some forums switched to or started using discourse
| instead of just using phpbb? I can guarantee you that it's
| not just to follow a fad or whatever, most niche or support
| forums don't care about that.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I do think trendiness and modern feeling uis are
| requirements for most forums these days from most
| perspectives.
|
| I say this as someone that frequently uses and enjoys both
| rue brutalist design of a text web browser and the emacs
| mastodon client.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I was thinking about this when I saw this post earlier today.
|
| Why shouldn't the default be: does this website work in Lynx?
| I think that's a damn good baseline.
|
| And in response to the other parent post, on a (almost) new
| iPhone, both news sites & Twitter continuously crash and
| reload for me. I'm not sure what the state of these other
| popular sites are because I don't use them.
| yawaramin wrote:
| > The only thing that might is a wholesale different client
| architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the
| slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic"
| mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved
| successful
|
| But it is gaining popularity with the unexpected rise of htmx
| and its 'simpler is better even if it's slightly worse'
| philosophy.
| golergka wrote:
| Isn't that 'worse is better' philosophy?
| LoganDark wrote:
| I think it's rather a "performance is more important than
| functionality" philosophy.
| yawaramin wrote:
| In the case of the devices we're talking about,
| performance _is_ effectively functionality.
| LoganDark wrote:
| My point exactly. By making your website fast and light,
| you make it easier and more pleasant to use. HTMX has a
| limited set of actions that it supports, so it can't do
| everything that people typically want. It can do more
| than enough though. (remember websites that actually used
| the `<form>` element?)
| lukan wrote:
| The most performant site is a blank page.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Astute observation.
|
| It should be easy to use this as a "north star" and your
| only job is to not screw it up hardly at all.
|
| Some people are just worse screw-ups than others.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| It's not even just the middle-income countries--I have an
| iPhone 13, so only three years old, on a US wifi connection
| with high speed broadband, and it can't handle the glitzy bloat
| of the prospectus for one of my ETFs. I don't understand why a
| prospectus shouldn't just be a PDF anyway, but it baffles me
| that someone would put so much bloated design into a prospectus
| that a recent phone can't handle it.
| eviks wrote:
| It shouldn't be a PDF because they don't reflow text,
| especially important for phones
| literallycancer wrote:
| Make 2 pdfs.
| eviks wrote:
| there are more than 2 screen widths
| bombcar wrote:
| Most of those users have the advantage of not using English -
| and so there are often sites in their native language that
| cater to lower power devices.
|
| But if you're in that middle world country AND your official
| language is English, you're gonna have a hell of a slow time.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| > For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in
| the single-digit GBs
|
| I live in a poor Southeast Asian country.
|
| People with small data plans don't use data from efficient
| websites, they use wifi which is omnipresent.
|
| 30GB of data on a monthly plan is $3.64. Which is about 4-6
| hours of minimum wage (minimum wage is lower in agricultural
| areas).
|
| But more to the point, people don't use data profligately like
| in the West. Every single cafe, restaurant, supermarket, and
| mall has free wifi. Most people ask for the wifi password
| before they ask for the menu.
|
| I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up
| their data too fast.
|
| It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've
| never actually lived in a developing country.
|
| People here run out of data from watching videos on TikTok,
| Instagram, and Facebook. Not from website bloat.
| keybored wrote:
| I mean not using Data Plan here in Northern Europe was me 11
| years ago... and me using it sparingly because video or songs
| would blow through the Data Plan instantly was me eight years
| ago.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Thank you for the first hand experience anecdote!
|
| I think one way for first world country citizens to empathise
| with this is how people behave when on roaming data plans
| during overseas trips. One does keep to public WiFi as much
| as possible and keep mobile data usage to a minimum or for
| emergency purposes.
| lozenge wrote:
| "It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've
| never actually lived in a developing country."
|
| You mean, the one developing country you live in.
|
| You are also missing the full spectrum of users. People don't
| just browse the web for fun. They look for important
| information like health or finance information, they might
| not want to do that in a public place or they might not be
| able to put it off for when they next have wifi.
|
| If you are building an e commerce website it might not
| matter, but you could be building a news site, or any number
| of other things.
| andai wrote:
| Could you elaborate on features and polish, i.e. give some
| specific examples?
| zdw wrote:
| Is this new or old reddit being benched?
|
| That would be an interesting direct comparison.
| re wrote:
| New Reddit, per the appendix. I think that Old Reddit is likely
| to be fairly competitive (I would guess placing near
| Wordpress), and yeah I agree it would be interesting to have in
| the table to see how far it's fallen.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Next try out the search engines.
|
| Anecdotally, Google Search loads ~500ms faster than DuckDuckGo on
| the OG Pinephone.
| jhanoncomm wrote:
| That is one performance metric. What about energy use and
| loading search results not just the home page. I find DDG
| faster from a perception point of view. I imagine on sone
| metrics it is faster.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Sorry, should have been more precise. I was measuring loading
| search results. E.g.:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=test9999
|
| vs.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=test9999&ia=web
| ponector wrote:
| Did you measure time user needs to scroll and click reject
| google cookies?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I'm glad people remember what WW in WWW means. :)
|
| It makes me very sad to see that reddit's new design is so heavy
| it can't even be accessed by part of the world. It's like parts
| of the internet are closing theirs doors just so they can have
| more sliding effects that nobody wants.
|
| Or maybe I'm just a weird one who prefers my browser to do a full
| load when I click a link.
|
| Btw there was a time everyone kept talking about "responsive" web
| design and, having used only low-end smartphones and tablets, I
| kept finding it weird that there was such focus on the design
| being responsive for mobile devices when those mobile devices
| were so extremely slow to respond to touch to begin with. Of
| course I know that's not what they meant, but it still felt
| weird.
| Izkata wrote:
| > I'm glad people remember what WW in WWW means. :)
|
| Welcome to the Wide Web, where bloat is the norm.
| anthk wrote:
| A simple text site such as Reddit and some Digg clones are nearly
| unusable under an Item ATOM with a JS based client.
| maxloh wrote:
| YouTube is one of the slowest websites I have ever used.
|
| It takes several seconds to load, even with moderate hardware and
| fast internet connections.
| jhanoncomm wrote:
| Reddit for me is the slowest site. And while old.reddit fixes
| this they try to steer you back to main reddit at any
| opportunity!
| genewitch wrote:
| RES fixes this, i think. It's a browser extension that forces
| everything to stay the way it was when reddit worked fine -
| before publishers bought it.
|
| I don't have any issue with reddit usability, although i do
| use it a lot less since they nuked my cellphone app from
| orbit as a cash grab.
| Vilian wrote:
| Same, but i'm using lemmy more
| lazypenguin wrote:
| YouTube doesn't feel zippy as a website but the reliable and
| speed of videos have been very good for me. I remember the days
| when buffering videos was hell.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I remember watching YouTube in 720p HD back in 2009 on a mid-
| range laptop of the era and it felt faster than the current
| experience _on an M1_ where the page often stutters and takes
| seconds to load.
|
| As far as I know, nothing changed on the video detail page to
| justify such a huge performance degradation. There's still a
| player, there are still comments, there are ads and suggested
| videos.
|
| Everyone working on that pile of shit should be ashamed. They
| would've been better off literally doing nothing and just enjoy
| the incremental performance gains as the hardware got faster.
| INGSOCIALITE wrote:
| web bloat also impacts my sanity
| genewitch wrote:
| as a data point youtube is _unusable_ on raspberry pi 3. This
| happened within the last year, because prior to that you could
| "watch" videos at about 10-15FPS which is enough, for instance,
| to get repair videos in a shop setting (ask me how i know). When
| the raspberry pi model B - the first one released - came out, you
| could play 1080p video from storage, watch youtube, play _games_.
|
| I'm not sure what youtube is doing (or everyone else for that
| matter.)
|
| If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business,
| someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for
| these sorts of shenanigans. eating CPU cycles for profit (ad-tech
| would be my off the cuff guess for why youtube sucks on these low
| power devices) should be loudly derided in the media and people
| should use more efficient services, even if the overall UX is
| worse.
| LM358 wrote:
| Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The
| Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other
| codecs a while ago.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I have no idea if it still works, but the "h264ify" browser
| extension used to be great for working around this issue (by
| forcing youtube to serve h264)
| https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify
| genewitch wrote:
| i did a full apt dist-upgrade to try and get the h264ify
| plugin to install and if i remember correctly i never was
| able to get it to install. I upgraded from "chromium" to
| "chromium-browser" and set all the compositing and other
| settings recommended for the RPI.
|
| and to reply to another sibling, "yt-dlp" isn't workable,
| this is for a senior citizen that does small motor repairs.
|
| I got an HP elitedesk that's a few years old coming in
| monday to replace the RPI; hopefully that will last another
| 3 years before google et al decide to "optimize" again.
| antisthenes wrote:
| RPI 3 for a senior citizen seems like a poor solution in
| the first place.
|
| I would have opted for a small business-pc that is x86
| based and 3-4 years old.
| geraldhh wrote:
| a used laptop that can play youtube videos can be had for
| about the same money
| geraldhh wrote:
| ytdl-format=best[vcodec!*=vp9]
| gerdesj wrote:
| Is YT so impoverished they can't manage some sort of
| negotiation mechanism that includes x264 and makes it work?
| treflop wrote:
| That might be more on the browser that you're using. It
| might be saying "yes I can play this format" to a format it
| can barely play.
| hinkley wrote:
| They encode videos ahead of time and they likely decided
| that whatever hardware you're judging them by is only .9%
| of the market so fuck those guys.
|
| Big companies use percentages in places they shouldn't and
| it gets them in trouble. .1% when you have a billion users
| is a million people you're shitting on.
|
| For me that might be a dozen people. Very different.
| wonnage wrote:
| Encoding and storing billions of videos in a format used
| by 0.1% of users feels like a waste though
| hinkley wrote:
| The context above was exclusion of people based on income
| level.
| geraldhh wrote:
| robustness is only wasted if you're lucky
| ogurechny wrote:
| Supposedly, the whole point of Google financing "open
| codecs" was for them to break free from MPEG codec
| licensing. I imagine the total amount of fees had a lot of
| zeros. So, yes, each time they don't serve H.264 (unless
| absolutely required) results in saving a lot of money.
| geraldhh wrote:
| every yt video is available as x264 but vp9 is cheaper
| (smaller) and has better quality
| extra88 wrote:
| Probably. I remember when YouTube switched _to_ H.264 (it
| might have been some Flash-based video before that). I had an
| older Mac mini hooked up to my TV at the time and suddenly
| video framerates dropped to an unwatchable level because they
| saved their bandwidth (and mine but I didn 't have to care
| about my Internet service was not metered) at the expense of
| client-side processing.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Its worth trying out different browsers. In my experience
| Chromium based browsers are a bit faster than Firefox on really
| low end devices (Pinephone, ...) as long as you have enough ram
| (>1Gb?).
|
| E.g. On the OG Pinephone a 720p video on Youtube is running
| smoothly in Chromium, but not Firefox.
| flir wrote:
| I've got an old Roku box that has started rebooting after a few
| minutes of playing youtube videos.
|
| In your case, maybe pulling the video with yt-dlp _then_
| playing it works...
| hinkley wrote:
| We need some watchdog group that watches page weight across
| sites and users and names and shames them.
|
| Maybe they could do that Consumer Reports style, or maybe it's
| an add on the works a bit like Nielsen ratings.
| ogurechny wrote:
| YouTube was not tested because monitors can't handle CMYK, and
| we need a lot of that extra coal black to color the results.
| pimlottc wrote:
| YouTube is definitely getting heavier. My early 2021 MacBook
| Air (Intel) now gets random video pauses under moderate load,
| something that never used to happen.
| nicce wrote:
| Could be just ads that adblocker tries to block. Google is
| trying new ways all the time to bypass adblockers.
| nicbou wrote:
| I had to upgrade my 12" Macbook because Youtube Music brought
| it to a crawl. I could play music or work, but not both.
| bombela wrote:
| That's absurd. I remember using winamp (and the skin
| compatible Linux clone, I forgot it's name) streaming
| internet radios while programing a toy OS in 2004. I could
| listen to music while compiling and running the BOSHS
| emulator on my AMD Atlon CPU with a whooping 256MiB of RAM.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I used a 12" Macbook as my main development machine. It ran
| IntelliJ with Python/Django applications, Postgres & Redis
| running in parallel (along with Safari, Mail, etc) around
| 2018-2020 just fine.
|
| Tried it somewhat recently around Ventura and the machine
| clearly appeared to be struggling with the OS alone. So we
| had a machine that used to be capable of actual, productive
| _work_ , and is now seemingly struggling at idle? It doesn't
| look like the new OS brought anything new or useful to the
| table (besides copious amounts of whitespace) either.
| userbinator wrote:
| I use Invidious for browsing the site, and watch the actual
| videos via a script that deobfuscates and gets the actual
| stream URL and then passes that to VLC.
|
| As another data point, YouTube a decade ago would've been
| perfectly fine on that hardware too. The culprit is web bloat
| in general, and more specifically the monstrosities of
| abstraction that have become common in JS.
|
| Even for those who don't believe at all in "climate crisis",
| there is something to be said for the loss of craftsmanship and
| quality over time that's caused this mess, so I think it's
| something everyone across the whole political spectrum can
| agree with.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Can you share that script? Also using invidious, but passing
| to vlc sounds good for saving cpu cycles.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Just use something like this: mpv
| --demuxer-max-bytes=1024MiB --vo=gpu --opengl-es=yes --ytdl
| --ytdl-format="best[height<=800]" "$url"
| geraldhh wrote:
| 'apt install yt-dlp mpv'
|
| then put this in '.config/mpv/mpv.conf' to twart hw
| requirements
|
| ytdl-format=best[height<=?720][vcodec! _=vp9] /bestvideo[heig
| ht<=?720][vcodec!_=vp9]+bestaudio/best[vcodec!*=vp9]/best
|
| and pass url's to it (i use 'play-with' ff extension)
| gruez wrote:
| >If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business,
| someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for
| these sorts of shenanigans
|
| By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a
| rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change.
| Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as
| plastic straw or bag bans.
| maigret wrote:
| IT is emitting around as much as aviation, and that was a
| surprise to me, most of it are due to client devices. Don't
| have the source at hand at the moment though. And of that,
| most emissions are upfront until you buy it. Buying a new
| device because it's not fast anymore causes emissions, not
| running it. Think about e-waste as well.
| gruez wrote:
| >IT is emitting around as much as aviation
|
| What counts as "IT"? It's most certainly a superset of
| "client devices", which is what my and the parent comment
| was talking about.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| It has a cumulative effect and drives the continual "upgrade"
| cycle. When you consider the life-time of an average mobile
| device, and the resources required to manufacture and ship
| them, it's a not insignificant problem.
| gruez wrote:
| Random source from google[1]:
|
| >Berners-Lee writes that in 2020, there were 7.7 billion
| mobile phones in use, with a footprint of roughly 580
| million tonnes of CO2e. This equates to approximately 1% of
| all global emissions
|
| Of course, not everyone is replacing their phones yearly.
| Another source[2] says the average consumer phone is 3
| years old. That works out to 0.33% of global emissions,
| assuming the phones aren't recycled/reused to developing
| countries. Even if assume people are upgrading their phones
| for app/web performance reasons, the impact is far less
| than 1%.
|
| [1] https://reboxed.co/blogs/outsidethebox/the-carbon-
| footprint-...
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-
| smartphon...
| nicce wrote:
| Isn't that quite huge number to be fair?
| gruez wrote:
| Compared to a single person's emissions? Yeah sure, but
| that's because anything multiplied by 8 billion people is
| going to be huge. The same could be said for plastic bags
| and/or straws. In relative terms it's absolutely
| minuscule, and in terms of low hanging fruit it's
| definitely not the top. You'd be far better off figuring
| out ways to decarbonize the electricity grid (40%) or the
| transport system (20%)
| Panzer04 wrote:
| To be clear, these emissions include the manufacturing
| cost, which for reasonable users seems to make up ~80-90%
| of the carbon footprint. The power usage of the phone
| itself and associated data centres etc is only a small
| portion.
|
| It's still somewhat surprising that one could attribute
| 0.2% of global emissions solely to phone power
| consumption... I would have expected it to be lower.
| dmwilcox wrote:
| I would imagine for phones and laptops the extraction of
| materials (rare earth metals to make fancy new chips,
| lithium for batteries,etc) is probably the bigger issue.
|
| Having gotten away from 500+ watt desktops as the standard
| for light non-gaming computing has been a win in the energy
| consumption court.
|
| I think there are lots of good reasons to avoid the upgrade
| cycle but energy consumption of the end device itself
| probably isn't it. (Embodied energy of the devices,
| environmental impacts of mining, no good EOL story for
| ewaste, etc)
| nottorp wrote:
| > By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a
| rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change.
|
| It adds up? How many devices are there? Tens of billions?
|
| Web 345 devs just don't care because the costs are borne by
| the customer.
| gruez wrote:
| The customer doesn't care either because a page that takes
| 5s longer to load on a 1W TDP SoC costs them around one-
| millionth of a penny. Even if you're refreshing 100 times
| per day it's only around 0.05 kWh per year, which at any
| reasonable electricity prices is a sum that's simply not
| worth worrying about. You'd get more savings from getting
| people to turn off their led light bulbs for a few minutes.
| nottorp wrote:
| US centric electricity prices view :)
|
| Also, it's not just your site. It's every site. And the
| customer pays all those millionths of a penny added up
| out of their pocket. And all those 5 second delays out of
| their lifetime.
|
| Edit: btw at a quick glance you underestimated cell phone
| soc TDP by a 2-4 factor.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| A single use of an electric kettle sounds like it would
| completely dominate this consumption.
|
| The time cost is certainly the greatest expense here,
| power is cheap in consumer computing contexts, generally
| speaking (at least nowadays with most things racing to
| sleep), and is mostly relevant because of battery life,
| not power cost.
| nottorp wrote:
| > A single use of an electric kettle sounds like it would
| completely dominate this consumption.
|
| But at least that gets you tea, instead of engagement.
|
| You've got to put X joules in to boil Y liters of water.
| No choice there, except giving up on the tea.
|
| You can greatly reduce the joules necessary to see cat
| photos though. And you don't have to give up on seeing
| the cat photos.
| zbrozek wrote:
| There's also a huge tendency to design for fast, high quality
| connectivity. Try using any Google product on airplane wifi. Even
| just chat loads in minutes-to-never and frequently keels over
| dead, forcing an outrageously expensive reload. Docs? Good luck.
|
| I wish software engineers cared to test in less than ideal
| conditions. Low speeds, intermittent connectivity, and packet
| loss are real.
| timeon wrote:
| What I find interesting is that design of websites is often
| 'mobile first' but rarely 'mobile connection first'.
| genewitch wrote:
| The last decade of my life has been a speedrun in "less than
| ideal conditions" for computing. CGNAT, 5mbit dsl, spotty
| "fixed wireless" and my latest debacle: starlink, although that
| seems to be getting better slowly; used to drop 15/60 seconds,
| now it drops more like 4/200 seconds. Constant power issues and
| lightning strikes - i only have 1 computer that has a working
| NIC, because evidently tiny power fluctuations are enough to
| send most chipsets into the graveyard. I had to switch to full
| fiber between all compute sites on my property, and a wifi
| backup, because copper is too risky.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Do you have earth return on your power?
| genewitch wrote:
| Yes, and it works, too. But i have outbuildings with
| servers and networking gear in them and metal conduit
| between buildings on/underground. Voltage potentials don't
| care, if there's a wet extension cord or something that's a
| less resistive path to start flowing and some gear is on
| that circuit or adjacent, it'll go.
|
| Overall switching to fiber is cheaper than aggressive
| lightning protection, and i moved all the network gear to a
| commercial UPS, and the interconnect between the "modems"
| and the switches is media converted to fiber for 3 feet.
| any time i have to run networking further than 6' or so i
| run fiber and put a media converter or a single gbic switch
| there. I'm hoping i futureproofed enough to upgrade to
| 10gbit in a year or so. My backup NAS has 10gbit but
| nothing else is connected at that speed yet.
|
| edit: One time lightning hit a pine tree in the back of the
| house, and it used my dipole antenna to reach a tree 80'
| away, and apparently there was an extension cable near
| there, which went back into the house, and it went _all the
| way around the house_ , to reach the telco CPE box where
| DSL lived. the telco box and my mains earth are roughly 1
| meter apart. That surge took out my main desktop computer,
| a washing machine (singed the dryer where it arced between
| it and the washer), the toaster oven, a microwave, my NAS,
| and my router connected to telco. It went two different
| paths inside the house, along both outside walls, one via
| mains copper and the other via cat5e copper. That was quite
| an expensive misadventure.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Developers are expensive, so we give them fast connections and
| fast computers. Then we act shocked when modern software/web
| requires fast computers.
|
| Unless it's somehow regulated that people test less than ideal
| conditions it won't happen, yet most people (myself included)
| don't really want that either.
| nottorp wrote:
| I call this "Designed in California" like some fruity company
| proudly says on their devices.
|
| For software this means designed on top of the line hardware,
| with fast low latency internet. TFA describes the consequences.
|
| For hardware it means designed inside climate controlled dust
| free offices and cars for people with long commutes to work on
| straight roads where you don't have to pay much attention.
|
| Think phones shutting down if you have a real winter. Think
| smart turn stalks that can't signal a left turn on a crossroads
| that's not at 90 degrees. Think ultra thin laptops where the
| keyboard is so dust sensitive it lasts 3 months if you use them
| outdoors. Think a focus on audiobooks and podcasts because
| you're stuck in traffic so much.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I live in some hills and some days I need to fully drive out of
| them to get google maps to load the map. The map I am using
| half a gb to cache locally on my phone already. Whats even the
| point of that cache? Same thing with spotify. Why is there
| latency searching my downloads library in offline mode?
| myself248 wrote:
| Where "users with slow devices" equals "anyone trying to keep
| hardware running more than a few years", it seems. It's enforced
| obsolescence.
|
| I've said for a long time, devs should be forced to take a survey
| of their users' hardware, and then themselves use the slowest
| common system, say, the 5th-percentile, one day a week. If they
| don't care about efficiency now, maybe they will when it's
| sufficiently painful.
| logtempo wrote:
| thing is, boss is not a dev. He is a business man.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| If one cares about accessibility of a website to people with much
| slower devices, particularly living in less developed parts of
| the world, I guess there are more considerations:
|
| - using more clear English with simple sentence structures should
| make the content more accessible to people who don't read English
| with the fluency of an educated American
|
| - reducing the number of requests required to load a page as
| latency may be high (and latency to the nearest e.g. cloudflare
| edge node may still be high)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > reducing the number of requests required to load a page
|
| In practice this pretty much requires pure SSR and "multiple
| page" design, given the amount of network roundtrips on typical
| SPA sites. (Some lightweight SPA updates may nonetheless be
| feasible, by using an efficient HTML-swapping approach as seen
| in HTMX as opposed to the conventional chatty-API requests and
| heavy DOM manipulation.)
| lelanthran wrote:
| This article is basically unreadable for me 48 y/o on desktop).
| In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make it
| readable: font-size: 18px; line-height:
| 1.5em; max-width: 38rem;
|
| Now look how readable (and beautiful) it is. I read a lot of Dan
| Luu's posts, and each time I have to do this sort of thing to
| make it readable.
|
| Seriously, techies, it's an extra _64 Bytes_ to make your page
| more readable.
| hmottestad wrote:
| It's pretty terrible on my phone too. Almost no margins and
| small font. Thankfully Reader Mode works in Safari, which fixes
| everything.
| extra88 wrote:
| I agree that they should add some minimal CSS. But using your
| browser's Reader View also works, a click rather than multiple
| steps in DevTools.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Do you have any idea of the layers of tooling you _must use_
| these days to produce those 64 bytes, and how each of those
| layers change and remove was was fed from all the other layers?
| To get exactly those bytes out the other end of the tools would
| be a herculean effort.
|
| Because we can't just go around trying to understand basic web-
| based development without the frameworks ... can we?
| blehn wrote:
| I think your mods are sensible, however if Dan Luu added those
| CSS rules himself, there would be comments on here lamenting
| the low density and "excess whitespace". Luu's audience, on the
| whole, probably prefers the relatively unstyled approach.
| gnicholas wrote:
| The first time I saw this blog posted on HN I wondered how it
| could possibly be popular with such horrendous layout.
|
| The conclusion I came to is that the audience is very tech-
| savvy and is used to activating Reader Mode when they encounter
| pages like this.
| lstamour wrote:
| Actually when I hit pages like this, I use the increase font
| size buttons. I tend to do this on phones too, especially.
| Yes, reader mode is also an option, but just bumping up the
| font size works too. You could also go back to the days when
| we had 800x600 monitors and 16px tended to be just the right
| size for that. ;-)
| chmod775 wrote:
| I went with the other techie solution: resizing my browser
| window.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| How do you do that on mobile?
| skydhash wrote:
| Who read article like this on mobile? In a pinch, I'd
| just activate Reader Mode (Safari, iOS), or more likely
| save it for reading on a bigger screen (tablet,
| laptop,...)
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I just read it on Firefox mobile without reader mode.
| pbronez wrote:
| Read it on iOS Safari, without reader mode. Worked great.
|
| Only thing that annoyed me is that there are very lengthy
| appendices. Thus the scroll bar suggests the main article
| is much longer than it actually is.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| > Who read article like this on mobile?
|
| The irony of this on an article about how developers
| ignore users on low-performance mobile devices
| chmod775 wrote:
| Flip the phone into portrait mode.
| dxdm wrote:
| Firefox on Android has a button to activate Reader Mode
| right in the URL bar.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its already perfectly readable on mobile either
| vertically or horizontally (a rare affordance these days)
| youngtaff wrote:
| Might be for you, but the tiny text and cramped line
| height makes it painful for me
|
| Pretty sure the text size is likely to be marginal from
| an accessibility PoV, and the line length doesn't aid
| readability
| gnicholas wrote:
| Since I have a ton of tabs open and jump between them, this
| ends up not being a solution I use anymore.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| It's more of a hipster thing imo. For some people since it's
| minimalist and looks "old" , it must be good. Like I get
| keeping it simple but man it's CSS..
| anon373839 wrote:
| Yep, exactly. It's fashion. FOUC-chic.
| joeblubaugh wrote:
| Dan's site has been like this for over a decade. If it's
| a fashion, then he's one of the creators of it.
| anon373839 wrote:
| Brutalist web design has been a thing for a while:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| intersect/wp/2016/05...
|
| Some of it can be appealing, when basic ergonomic needs
| are met (readable text size and line length, adequate
| margins, and so forth). Most is just brutally
| pretentious, IMO.
| literallycancer wrote:
| The text fills the entire screen on mobile. That's a lot
| better than reading something where there's 50% of
| whitespace.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Or better yet a postage stamp of text between two ad
| players and a header and footer banner
| gerdesj wrote:
| I'm 53 and I'm at least five years behind getting my specs
| sorted out - they are currently perched right on the end of my
| nose now and I have to get the angle right sometimes
| (astigmatism).
|
| That page is nearly fine for me but I just hit CRTL + to scale
| up. That works for me.
|
| That page is pure text with no or at least minimal fiddling.
| You have your solution for your use case and I have mine. A
| blind reader will also have their solution, so they can even
| access it. Thanks to the simplicity of the source: all
| solutions to accessibility are also going to be reasonably
| simple.
|
| I think that Dan understands how to communicate effectively -
| keep it simple and don't assume that eyes will read your words.
| You can trivially (and you do) fiddle with the presentation
| yourself for your own purposes.
|
| I think that if you don't like the presentation of something
| like this then you could reformat it yourself, prior to
| engagement. Dan has kindly provided his message as a simple
| text stream that can be trivially fiddled with.
| solatic wrote:
| > That page is nearly fine for me but I just hit CRTL + to
| scale up. That works for me.
|
| How do you do CTRL++ on a mobile phone?
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Pinch to zoom, which since basically pinch to zoom was
| invented _should_ reflow elements.
| literallycancer wrote:
| In Brave you can do Accessibility - Text Scaling
| XorNot wrote:
| I'd prefer to see the grey text trend die honestly. I think my
| number one style-rewrite is just setting `font-color: black` on
| things.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I disagree. The user can change the window size, font size,
| colours, etc according to their own preferences.
|
| > I read a lot of Dan Luu's posts, and each time I have to do
| this sort of thing to make it readable.
|
| You shouldn't have to. You should be allowed to add a CSS file
| which can apply to multiple files, and then use that, instead
| of having to do it for each file individually.
| ordu wrote:
| _> In the dev tools I added the following to the body to make
| it readable_
|
| For cases when you don't agree with styles there is Reader
| Mode. Your way works also, but Reader Mode just simplier, it is
| just one click away.
| gnicholas wrote:
| True, although not all browsers have Reader Mode. Chrome
| didn't have it until last year, and the version they built is
| a sidebar, unlike most Reader Modes. This is probably because
| they want to make sure ads are shown alongside the Reader
| Mode.
| gitaarik wrote:
| In reader mode the colors in the table disappear. Ironical
| the author does style that.
| userbinator wrote:
| Then adjust your browser settings to your preference, because
| that certainly isn't mine either.
|
| I've had to _remove_ "max-width"'s from a ton of sites using my
| filtering proxy. My window is this big, I expect your content
| to fill it!
| dchest wrote:
| If you can't read font-size: 14px, you got your
| resolution/scaling/screen size wrong. The default text size is
| similar to the standard text size of OS UI controls. If you
| can't read them, I'd suggest to reconfigure your setup: change
| resolution, change scaling, or configure the default zoom
| level.
| progval wrote:
| You can change your browser's default font size if you find it
| too small. It's in Firefox's main settings page. Websites
| shouldn't force "font-size: 18px;" because it then makes the
| font smaller for users who picked a larger font in their
| browser.
| nottorp wrote:
| > max-width: 38rem; Now look how readable (and beautiful) it
| is.
|
| How is it readable when you're limiting text width and not
| taking advantage of the whole screen you paid for?
|
| [Turning 48 next month and wearing glasses.]
| wraptile wrote:
| FYI the optimal line length is 50-75 characters and that has
| been the standard for text since the type writers. You don't
| want to move your neck when you read a single line that's
| kinda silly.
| nottorp wrote:
| > that has been the standard for text since the type
| writers
|
| I have a feeling it was the standard because they used the
| minimum font size to make the letters readable, and that's
| how much it fit on the physical page width. Which was
| standardized before typewriters for unknown historical
| reasons?
|
| > You don't want to move your neck when you read a single
| line that's kinda silly.
|
| I don't have to move my neck to read the article spread
| across the full width of my monitor. On 13" laptop or 24"
| desktops. Are you using a 21:9 utrawide?
| wraptile wrote:
| It's been this way forever because it's not particularly
| difficult science and is extremely easy to test for so
| there are probably thousands of papers covering this.
| Here's a good summary by Baymard Institute[1].
|
| Also WCAG recommends line length set to <80 characters
| too [2]. I'm not sure what else could make this more
| convincing or official.
|
| 1 - https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
|
| 2 - https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/visual-
| presentat...
| nottorp wrote:
| > Also WCAG recommends
|
| "recommends". Want to deny me the option of longer lines?
| BlackFingolfin wrote:
| I just activate reader mode on his pages, works great. (Not
| disagreeing with you, just stating another workaround)
|
| Also wish his pages had dates on them (one or both of first
| posted / last updated) AFAIK he intentionally leaves them out,
| I don't get why.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > AFAIK he intentionally leaves them out, I don't get why.
|
| Some people like to brag about the timelessness of their
| articles [1], and that might be one reason. (I personally
| don't fully agree though, even the linked original
| WikiWikiWeb page has a last edited date.)
|
| [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiNow
| erichdongubler wrote:
| Funnily enough, Dan calls out the differences of opinion of the
| styling of his site starting at this paragraph:
|
| > Just as an aside, something I've found funny for a long time
| is that I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on
| this page (and a similar volume of appreciation mail). ...
| sams99 wrote:
| Highly Gamed === It is better if users with slow devices see a
| white screen for 30 seconds vs an indication that something is
| happening, because ... reasons?
| yawaramin wrote:
| You missed the point, which is that it's better if users with
| slow devices see actually useful content rather than a splash
| screen.
| ashayh wrote:
| This is bad from a global warming perspective.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Relating to the aside about opportunities in different countries:
| the comparison between potential programming career prospects
| between a poor American and middle class Pole feels reasonable
| for someone born around the same time as the OP (early '80s I
| guess) but I suspect it's since shifted in Poland's failure.
|
| I think the relative disadvantages of a poor American compared to
| their wealthier peers have increased as there's more competition
| (as the degree is seen as more desirable by motivated wealthy
| parents) and the poor student likely won't even have a non-phone
| computer at home where all their wealthier peers probably will.
| Possibly they could work around the competitiveness of computer
| science by going via some less well-trodden path (eg mathematics
| or physics) except that university admission isn't by major. They
| may also be disadvantaged by later classism in hiring. Meanwhile
| a middle class Pole will have access to a computer and, provided
| they live sufficiently near one of the big cities, access to
| technical schools which can give them a head start on programming
| skills (and on competitive programming which is a useful skill
| for passing the current kind of programming interview questions).
| To get the kind of good outcome described in the OP, they then
| need to get hired somewhere like Google in Zurich (somewhat
| similar difficulty to in the US except the earlier stages were
| easier (in the sense of being more probable) for the hypothetical
| Pole) and progress from there (maybe impeded by initially not
| being at the headquarters / fewer other employment opportunities
| to get career advancement by changing jobs). Class will be less
| of a problem as the hypothetical middle class pole isn't so
| different in wealth from other middle class Europeans and you get
| much less strong class-selection than when (e.g.) Americans are
| hiring Americans.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| >Many pages actually remove the parts of the page you scrolled
| past as you scroll
|
| There is a special place in hell for every web developer who does
| that.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| It's a performance optimization for rendering a large amount of
| html. If the DOM had all the items in memory it would perform
| much worse. Thankfully browsers are working on a feature where
| you can keep the markup in the DOM for things like CTRL-F
| without hurting performance.
|
| Granted the main reason such a technique is needed is designs
| that avoid pagination.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| We had web pages with big lists and tables in the DOM 20+
| years ago, they were fine. The difference is that now we use
| web frameworks that do work proportional to DOM size many
| times per second.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it's all a plane
| to make it harder for people to save stuff. If the content
| just stays there after you loaded, you could just save the
| page as HTML and, if there wasn't a lot of javascript
| shenanigans, it should save it okay. When you add this
| element, this doesn't work anymore. I'm pretty sure
| instagram, for example, does that with the intention of
| making it harder for people to save profiles.
| majewsky wrote:
| I am usually just a backend developer, but for a little
| reporting application that I built, I couldn't get the UI
| team to do a UI in the short time that I had to build it, so
| I had it output some basic HTML. About 10000 list items.
| Rendered imperceptibly fast on my browser.
|
| Then because of $mandate, the report was moved to the team's
| standard React UI frontend. Now it takes 5 seconds to load
| and only gives you like 100 items at a time, so Ctrl-F is
| broken. Also, filter dropdowns somehow did not work until
| they fixed it, so it appears like the select tag was not fit
| for their design and they rolled their own.
| raybb wrote:
| What is the feature called?
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Its content-visibility. It's already in Chrome but not
| Firefox or Safari: https://caniuse.com/css-content-
| visibility
| GIFtheory wrote:
| Using https://www.mcmaster.com/ makes me wish I were a hardware
| engineer. Makes every other e-commerce site feel like garbage. If
| amazon were this fast, I'd be broke within days. Why haven't
| other sites figured this out?
| bombela wrote:
| As a hobbyist, I cannot justify the cost of McMaster. I will
| confess that I often use it to find the precise name of a part
| for purchasing on Amazon/AliExpress.
|
| Maybe a quality service really does cost that much? But the gap
| in performances and usability is so great, it seems that
| something else must be at play sometimes.
| demondemidi wrote:
| I was expecting this to go one level deeper and point out that
| bloated sites that are critical, like: banking, medical,
| government -- can lead to problems paying bills or getting timely
| information (especially in the case of medical situations that
| aren't quite emergencies but close to it).
| hexage1814 wrote:
| What I noticed more and more is me using alternative front-end or
| deliberately changing my user-agent to some old browser in some
| sites that still have some legacy version
| mastazi wrote:
| > While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games
| with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean
| that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-
| centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums.
| While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than
| 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites.
|
| Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to
| implement that new tracking script and everyone assumes that
| users won't even be able to tell the difference.
| spintin wrote:
| PUBG is now a very special beast: It's CPU bound = we are
| unlikely to ever see a "AAA" game with anything beyond it's
| complexity for eternity. You can run it on a 1030 GPU at 60
| FPS.
| duck2 wrote:
| It's not like websites are GPU bound
| spintin wrote:
| No but most games are. Thus PUBG is an outlier.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Somebody has to be working on a Simcity or Civilization MMO.
| spintin wrote:
| I wish! The truth is server and client programmers rarely
| get along so persistent MMOs with alot of moving parts are
| only going to happen once one developer is schizo enough to
| do both well. AAA will never be able to do it.
| paledot wrote:
| (But don't under any circumstances break the four other
| trackers already running on the site.)
| rmbyrro wrote:
| You mean the four new ones they added last week alone, right?
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Newpaper sites are notorious for this.
| dsr_ wrote:
| To be fair, it is usually difficult to tell the difference
| between 243 tracking scripts and 244.
| Ruq wrote:
| Modern webdev is fugged
| emodendroket wrote:
| > Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team
| to implement that new tracking script and everyone assumes that
| users won't even be able to tell the difference.
|
| I mean, maybe they can but the business doesn't care. If you
| polled "users" of cable television I doubt anyone would say
| they prefer the experience of commercials.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| These days they coerce the dev team into implementing a tag
| manager so they can add their filthy trackers without asking
| the dev team.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The "they" here can't really coerce the dev team unless the
| dev team is willing to comply. Refusing to implement an
| unethical feature is always an option, and given that we're
| often considered engineers it is well within our right to
| deem something unsafe or against best practices.
| Escapado wrote:
| I hate all that tracking and marketing bs as much as the
| next guy but if the marketing team is the main stakeholder
| and is responsible for the budget that won't work. I also
| might be a bit biased as a freelancer but every team I
| worked in so far had other freelancers on it and if we
| strongly recommend aginst a practice but the client
| insisted then we basically had the choice to either abandon
| the project (and therefore our current source of income) or
| simply do what they say. I would love to be on a position
| where refusing is an option that would not cost me my gig.
| _heimdall wrote:
| This thread really has no purpose if we don't see it as
| enough of a problem to stand against. I really don't mean
| that to sound like I'm on a high horse (I'm sure it still
| sounds that way). There's nothing wrong with being okay
| with the trade offs, but we don't get to implement these
| features _and_ complain about how bad they are.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The sad part being that traditional marketing cares very little
| about these users outside of the aggregation parts.
|
| When the goal is to make people pay, a base strategy is to
| target user who are already spending money. So "fast enough on
| a current [device sales team is using]" becomes the baseline,
| and optimizing for older/weaker/cheaper environments isn't an
| proposition that will convince.
|
| Except when you're ad supported. Then the balance will be a bit
| more in the middle.
| dudul wrote:
| Just throw a ticket in jira for these stupid devs to "make it
| faster".
| champtar wrote:
| To make Jira faster ?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Firing up my neoliberal brain.
|
| We should just tax ad and spying on users bandwidth and
| front/backend end resource use.
| dogtierstatus wrote:
| One time long ago, e-commerce company i worked for decided to
| add tiktok analytics to the front-end. The dev team added the
| changes but were worried it might impact performance and UX. As
| a solution we were told to run the performance tests to check
| it.
|
| The performance tests were created to mimic user behaviour but
| only involved company APIs. Not third party requests. No one in
| the top level, cared about this bit of information. We ran this
| performance test and saw the the response times are almost the
| same so it's time to pat ourselves on the back and move on ...
| _heimdall wrote:
| Did no one call bullshit on the test before running it?
| Personally I'd just flat out refuse to run the test, likely
| designing the proper test comparing while third party scripts
| where enabled.
|
| Management and product owners should understand how these
| things work, and shouldn't ask for bogus data when they do.
| But teams implementing the changes should just flat out
| refuse when they know the request isn't reasonable.
| SadCordDrone wrote:
| Sir, in most companies if you suggest something technical
| without having equivalent political power, at best, no one
| will listen to you. At worst you will create political
| enemies.
|
| Probably there was an SDE-2 or SDE-3 who called bullshit on
| it and got ignored.
| _heimdall wrote:
| You call bullshit on it by either refusing to run the
| test, or better and more helpfully by running a test that
| answers the performance question.
|
| I've seen these kinds of requests plenty of ways.
| Sometimes those asking include a design or specs because
| they honestly thought that was the right way to do it,
| other times they are knowingly asking for (in this case)
| a useless test to check a box. In either case, IMO the
| right response is to ask questions to clarify the goals
| and build to that, changing the provided design or specs
| if necessary.
|
| I've had to play this out dozens of times over the years
| and never earned enemies from if, at one point I won over
| the PM leader that everyone on the dev team warned me
| about. Its all about tact and approach, assume everyone
| is on the up and up and just ask good questions to
| clarify the goals. Its hard to get mad at that unless its
| done in a condescending or argumentative way.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I imagine it has more to do with the monstrous website design
| than the tracking scripts. New reddit vs old reddit or desktop
| reddit vs mobile Reddit shouldn't be that different in terms of
| tracking. But the newer ones run like ass.
| sokz wrote:
| Reddit doesn't even run satisfactorily in my gaming laptop. I
| can run AAA games but a website is noticeably slow.
| pooper wrote:
| Just curious, are you using old.reddit.com?
| baseline-shift wrote:
| People can only comfortably read a maximum of 17 words per line.
| Best is 12. That text should be in two columns.
| kabes wrote:
| As someone who makes bloated sites I can only say that management
| doesn't give a fuck about bloat as long as features are checked
| of in due time. So please don't blame me
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What about pride in your vocation?
| grishka wrote:
| That Discourse guy is a classic example of someone designing
| their product for the world they wished existed instead of the
| world we actually live in. Devices with Qualcomm SoCs exist in
| billions, and will keep existing and keep being manufactured and
| sold for the foreseeable future. No amount of whining will change
| that. Get over it and optimize for them. People who use these
| devices won't care about your whining, they'll just consider you
| an incompetent software developer because your software crashes.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Or they take the route to say "not for you"
| grishka wrote:
| It only works when you have a coherent vision of your
| product. "We can't be assed to optimize our code because we
| value DX above all else" certainly isn't that.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Mind that not only low-end or old phones have slow CPUs.
|
| Both the $999 Librem 5 and the $1999 Liberty Phone (latest
| models) have an i.MX8M, which means they have similar processing
| power as the $50 phones the article is talking about.
|
| I tried to log into Pastebin today. The Cloudflare check took
| several minutes.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I really wish he compared an m3 Mac to a 6 year old intel chip
| and not some random processor I've never seen or experienced that
| I'm not sure is even available in the usa
| illusive4080 wrote:
| I can vouch that my 2017 MacBook Pro struggles with all kinds
| of tasks, especially web ones.
| chefandy wrote:
| The web is a communication medium: having bad delivery is going
| to impact the efficacy of the message. I've worked as both a
| developer and a designer, and as a developer I've certainly had
| to push back against content-focused people requesting things
| they didn't realize were, frankly, bananas. Tech isn't their job,
| so it was my job to surface those problems before they arose.
| However, as a designer, I've also had to push back against
| developers that refused to acknowledge that technical purity is a
| means to an end, not an end in itself. Something looking the same
| in lynx and firefox isn't a useful goal in any situation I've
| encountered, and the only people that think a gopher resource has
| better UX than a modern webpage stare at code editors all day
| long.
|
| No matter who it is, when people visualize how to solve a
| problem, they see how their area of concern contributes more
| clearly than others'. It's easy to visualize how our
| contributions will help solve a problem, and also hard to look
| past how doing something else will negatively impact your tasks.
| In reality, this medium requires a nuanced balance of
| considerations that depend on what you need to communicate, why,
| and to whom. Being useful on a team requires knowing when to
| interject with your professional expertise, but also know when
| it's more important to trust other professionals to do their
| jobs.
| keernan wrote:
| A problem that recently started in Feb 2024 for me is probably
| unrelated to the topic, but close enough that I'm posting in the
| hopes someone has an idea of what is happening.
|
| I am running on a relatively new Lenovo Legion (~ 18 months old)
| with 64kb of ram running windows 11. About 6 weeks ago I began
| getting the BSOD every time I streamed a live hockey game (I
| watch maybe 3 games a week from Oct to Jun via Comcast streaming
| or 'alternative' streams).
|
| The crashes happened multiple times every game. After maybe 10
| games of this, I began closing and reopening the browser during
| every game break. I've experienced zero crashes since doing that.
|
| When the crashes started, I was using Chrome - but I still
| experienced BSOD crashes when I switched and tested Fox and
| Brave. Just very odd to start happening suddenly without any
| changes to my machine that I could pinpoint - no upgraded bios or
| nvidia that I can recall.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| > with 64kb of ram running windows 11
|
| I hope you mean GB.
| aragonite wrote:
| > Another example is Wordpress (old) vs. newer, trendier,
| blogging platforms like Medium and Substack. Wordpress (old) is
| 17.5x / 10x faster (LCP* / CPU) than Medium and 5x / 7x faster
| (LCP* / CPU) faster than Substack on our M3 Max ...
|
| It's a persistent complaint among readers of SlateStarCodex (a
| blog which made a high-profile move to Substack from an old
| WordPress site). Substack attributes the sluggishness to the
| owner's special request to show all comments by default, but the
| old WordPress blog loads all comments by default and was fine
| even on older devices.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/sub...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b9p55g/any...
| publius_0xf3 wrote:
| He mentions Substack, which is maybe the most egregious example
| of bloat I regularly encounter. Like I cannot open Scott
| Alexander's blog on my phone because it comes to a crawl.
|
| But the Substack devs are _aware of this_. [They know it 's a pro
| blem](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16xsr8w/su
| b...).
|
| >I'm much more of a backend person, so take this with somewhat of
| a grain of salt, but I believe the issue is with how we're using
| react. It's not necessarily the amount of content, but something
| about the number of components we use does not play nicely with
| rendering content at ACX scale.
|
| >As for why it takes up CPU after rendering, my understanding is
| that since each of the components is monitoring state changes to
| figure out how to re-render, it continues to eat up CPU.
|
| They know--but they do nothing to fix it. It's just an
| impossibility, rendering all those comments.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| >Substack
|
| I don't access this site a lot, but I remember until very
| recently they had other front-end, it worked great. Honestly, I
| think they will follow the path of medium.com, and start to
| make the user experience worse and worse.
|
| It's a site where people post text, a few images, maybe 1 or 2
| videos per post. It shouldn't be complicated.
| Ruq wrote:
| Related: Too much of technology today doesn't pay attention or
| even care to the less technologically adept, either.
|
| Smartphones in my opinion are a major example of this. I can't
| tell you the number of people I've meet who barely even or don't
| even know how to use their devices. It's all black magic to them.
|
| The largest problem is the over-dependence on the use of "Gesture
| Navigation" which is invisible and thus non-existent to them.
| Sure, they might figure out the gesture bar on an iPhone, but
| they have no conception of the notification/control center.
|
| It's not that these people are dumb either, many of them could
| probably run circles around me in other fields, but when it comes
| to tech, it's not for a lack of trying, it's a lack of an
| intuitive interface.
| crabmusket wrote:
| It appears to me, as an outsider, that interfaces are designed
| with a "one size fits all" approach, at least at the prestige
| end of town. Instead of allowing the user to choose design and
| interaction that works for them, the designer (or product
| owner) acts as if they know what's best for all users.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| What would the alternative look like? Applications shipping
| as a bag of arrangeable buttons and widgets that the user
| assembles into pages?
| eviks wrote:
| Or the user picks from a set of assembled by someone else
| eimrine wrote:
| The smartphone world is too crooked to have an alternative
| IMO. Just keep eating everything the vendor gives you on
| the top of shovel.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Actually, I find this highly ideal. I wish there was a
| button to press which would switch the interface into an
| almost Visual BASIC GUI editor like thing, permitting me to
| edit the arrangements. Also, I would like it if such an OS
| was more strict on forcing its interface objects (think:
| SimCity 2000 for Win95 with GDI-integrated GUI good,
| SimCity 3000 with Fisher-Price full screen toy interface
| bad). Also throw out much of the post- Windows 2000/KDE 3.5
| desktop user interface 'innovation' but make all things
| editable in layout. I WANT MY COMPLICATED BUTTON GRIDS! :^(
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Siemens PLM NX 10 is another example of what I like in an
| interface. The GIMP big time as well for its
| customizability. You know what I don't like? Gnome. I
| curse Gnome 3 (namely, the design cancer Gnome fell to
| early on) for why KDE has yet to recover to the comfiness
| of KDE 3.5. Apple is another hate.
|
| I want a computational environment, I am a cyborg! I
| build my environments to my specifications. I am a
| privacy and control absolutist with these devices,
| because they are cybernetic extensions of my mind. SV:
| Stop being over-opinionated pricks trying to monetize
| every last drop of attention for every bottom-pocket
| penny in microtransactions. What we develop here is far
| and beyond more spiritual than we can all imagine. The
| utter lack of owner/user sovereignty shown lately,
| basically since iPhone and Facebook, captured in the term
| Enshittification, is absolutely appalling.
|
| Anyway, thank you for reading my unspellchecked schizo-
| ramblings. Now carry on with the great monetization,
| metatron hungers!
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I think this tends to sound like a better idea than it
| is. It's good for power users who want to optimise their
| UI to suit, but regular users aren't going to do that.
|
| Gesture navigation's lack of discoverability is a problem
| for sure, although I'm not sure how to best address it
| (people aren't likely to sit through tutorials...)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Congratulations, you just invented OpenDoc.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| I don't know, I've seen mature people who couldn't operate a
| cassette deck and likely would have trouble with a typewriter.
| These people definitely grew up around these devices.
|
| I don't think (modern) technology is at fault here.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It doesn't help when you get a new iphone it doesn't ship with
| its documentation. You have to get to the actual documentation
| page on apples site, and then dig a little to get to a page
| that looks like this (1) that merely outlines a few possible
| gestures. Not which ones to use when beyond a one sentence
| example. And this is just for the OS. What apps ship with
| documentation that outlines how these gesture functions are
| used in their app?
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/learn-basic-gestures-...
| illusive4080 wrote:
| My 2017 i7 MacBook Pro struggles on websites. It's absurd.
| cubefox wrote:
| I would still add that users running out of monthly mobile data
| volume are still a big issue, likely bigger than slow phones.
| They can't load most websites with 64 kbit/s, because they are
| multiple megabytes large, often without good reason.
|
| For example, when Musk took over Twitter, he actually fixed this
| issue for some time, I tested it. But now they have regressed
| again. The website will simply not show your timeline on a slow
| connection. It will show an error message instead. Why would slow
| connections result in an error message?!
|
| A simple solution that e.g. Facebook (though apparently not
| Threads) and Google use, is to first load the text content and
| the (large) images later. But many websites instead don't load
| anything and just time out. Probably because of overly large
| dependencies like heavy JavaScript libraries and things like
| that.
| ordu wrote:
| _> Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX_
|
| But TeX was designed to run on a single CPU-core, so no surprise
| here. I wonder what TeX could become if all Knuth had at the time
| a multicore machine with cores managing maybe 0.1 MIPS each (or
| even lower). Like what the world would become if we lived in a
| counterfactual world where Intel and its buddies starting in
| 1970s boosted not the frequency and instruction per second per
| core but number of cores?
|
| My take we'd switched to functional-style programming at 1980s
| with immutable data, created tools to describe multistage
| pipelines with each stage issuing tasks into a queue, while cores
| concurrently picking tasks from the queue. TeX would probably
| have a simplified and extra fast parser that could cut input into
| chunks to feed them into a fullblown and slow parser which would
| be a first stage of a pipeline, and then these pipelines somehow
| would converge into an output stream. TeX probably would prefer
| to use more of lexical scoping, to reduce interaction between
| chunks, or maybe it would make some kind of a barrier for
| pipelines where they all stop and wait for propagation of things
| like `\it` from its occurrence to the end.
|
| This counterfactual world seems much more exciting to me than the
| real one, though maybe I wouldn't be excited if I lived there.
| ahepp wrote:
| I assumed that to mean the layout work is limited to a single
| thread. You need to know what content made it onto page one
| before you can start working on page two, right?
| smj-edison wrote:
| I've always wondered why people removed parts of the page when
| they were scrolled out. Like, don't you think the browser would
| already optimize for that? And even if it's not stored in the
| DOM, it's still being stored in the JavaScript's memory. It's
| frustrating when people try to reimplement optimizations that the
| browser already does better.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The browser does not in fact optimize that. Yes it's
| surprising. If you want it to do basic optimizations like not
| rendering invisible content you need to give it hints via
| obscure and relatively recent CSS rules nobody ever heard of.
| hotdailys wrote:
| When websites pack in too many high-res images, videos, and
| complex scripts, it's like they're trying to cram that
| overstuffed suitcase into a tiny space. Your device is
| struggling, man. It's like it's running a marathon with a
| backpack full of bricks.
|
| So, what happens? Your device slows down to a crawl, pages take
| forever to load, and sometimes, it just gives up and crashes.
| It's like being stuck in traffic when you're already late for
| work. And let's not even talk about the data usage. It's like
| your phone's eating through your data plan like it's an all-you-
| can-eat buffet.
|
| Now, if you're on the latest and greatest tech, you might not
| notice much. But for folks with older devices or slower
| connections, it's a real pain. It's like everyone else is zooming
| by on a high-speed train while you're chugging along on a steam
| engine.
|
| So, what can we do? Well, we can start by being mindful of what
| we put on our websites. Keep it lean, mean, and clean, folks.
| Your users will thank you, and their devices will too. And hey,
| maybe we'll all get where we're going a little faster.
| lmz wrote:
| Maybe we'll see the return of the proxy + lightweight browser
| model like Opera Mini.
| hotdailys wrote:
| And lightweight APPs, one tap to load all...
| nicbou wrote:
| I travel a lot and experience a wide range of internet connection
| speeds and latencies. Hotel Wi-Fi can be horrible.
|
| The web is clearly not designed for or tested on slow
| connections. UIs feel unresponsive and broken because no one
| thought that an action might take seconds to load.
|
| Even back home in Germany, we have really unreliable mobile
| internet. I designed the interactive bits of All About Berlin for
| people on the U-Bahn, not just office workers on M3 Macbooks with
| fiber internet.
| avodonosov wrote:
| Some years ago I tested real world web sites, turned out only
| about 30% of the javascript they load was actually invoked by the
| user's browser (even for sites optimied with Closure Compiler,
| that has some dead code elimination):
|
| https://github.com/avodonosov/pocl
|
| The unused javascript code can be removed (and loaded on demand).
| Although I am not sure how valuable that would be for the world.
| It only saves network traffic, parsing time and some browser
| memory for compiled code. But js traffic in the Internet is
| neglidgible comparing to, say, video and images. Will the user
| experience be signifiqanty better if browser is the saved from
| the unnesessary js parsing? I don't know of a good way to measure
| that.
| bsdpufferfish wrote:
| The most interesting part of this is the comments about software
| shifting from a normal career to a prestige target for wealthy
| families, and that this demographic shift has massive
| consequences on technology design and services.
| avodonosov wrote:
| I think bloat could be prevented if it was noticed the moment it
| is introduced.
|
| After application evolves bloated, it's difficult to go back and
| un-bloat it.
|
| Bloat is often introduced accidential/y, without need, and
| unnoticed just because developers test on modern and powerful
| devices.
|
| If developer's regular test matrix included a device with minimal
| hardware pewer that was known to run the product smoothly in the
| past, the dev could immediately notice the newly introduced bloat
| and remove it.
|
| A bloat regression testing.
|
| I call this "ecological development".
|
| We should all do this. No need to aim for devices that already
| have trouble running your app / website. But take a device that
| works today and test that you do not degrade with respect to this
| device.
| cuu508 wrote:
| > After application evolves bloated, it's difficult to go back
| and un-bloat it.
|
| It will be hard to get to pristine quality, but there ought to
| be some amount of low hanging fruit, where minimal changes
| bring noticeable improvement.
| avodonosov wrote:
| Maybe, but determining it will take some investigation. If
| the regular testing is done on a low profile device,
| developer knows as soon as possible that his recent changes
| introduced a bloat regression.
| julianlam wrote:
| It's a shame that NodeBB was not included in the list of forums
| tested.
|
| We worked really hard to optimize our forum load times, and it
| handedly beats the pants off of much we've tested against.
|
| But that's not much of a brag, the bar is quite low.
|
| Dan goes on and lambasts (rightfully so) Atwood for deriding
| Qualcomm and assuming slow phones don't exist.
|
| Well, let's chat, and talk to someone whose team really does
| dogfood their products on slower devices...
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Dan, I respect you and I feel your pain, but...
|
| > Another common attitude on display above is the idea that users
| who aren't wealthy don't matter.
|
| If you want to make money, then this is the correct attitude. You
| need to target the users who have the means to be on the bleeding
| edge. It may not be "fair" or "equitable" or whatever, but
| catering to the masses is a suicide mission unless you have a lot
| of cash/time to burn.
|
| This post reminds me of the standard Stallman quip "if everyone
| used the GPL, then our problems would be solved"
| richrichie wrote:
| I wonder how much of the bloat of modern shiny internet widgets
| is pure lipstick that does not add any tangible value.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Compare with one of my projects, [1]
|
| It is a minimal, though modern-looking web chat. The HTML, CSS
| and JS together is 5024 bytes. The Rust backend source is 2801
| bytes. It does not pull in anything from anywhere.
|
| [1] https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/minchat
| cuu508 wrote:
| Is there a demo site or screenshots somewhere? Add them to
| README :-)
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| I added a screenshot.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Clarification: The frontend does not pull anything, the backend
| pulls in libraries for websockets and json using cargo.
| nofunsir wrote:
| It impacts me, and I have a fast device!
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > As sites have optimized for LCP, it's not uncommon to have a
| large paint (update) that's completely useless to the user, with
| the actual content of the page appearing well after the LCP
|
| Aahh yes, the "I've loaded in my 38 different loading-shimmer-
| boxes, now kindly wait another 30 seconds while each of them
| loads more"
|
| Can we go back to "your page is loaded when _everything _
| finishes loading" and not these unhelpful micro-metrics web devs
| are using to lie to themselves and users about the performance of
| their site?
| Razengan wrote:
| Browsers should only display documents, not apps.
|
| That's what operating systems are for.
|
| Just give native apps what made the web popular in the first
| place:
|
| * Ability to instantly launch any app just by typing its "name"
|
| * No need to download or install anything
|
| * Ability to revisit any part of an app just by copy/pasting some
| text and sharing it with anyone.
|
| All that is what appears and matters to users in the end.
|
| --
|
| But I suppose people who would disagree with this really want:
|
| * The ability to snoop and track people across apps (via shit
| like third-party cookies etc)
| porcoda wrote:
| I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies. No
| developers appear willing to admit that there is a large cohort
| of not that great web programmers who don't know much (and appear
| to not WANT to know much) about efficiency. They're just as to
| blame for the sad world of web software as the big boss or
| corporate overlord that forced someone to make bad software.
| dijit wrote:
| "it's better for the company that I don't try, my time is
| expensive and any minute not spent on a feature is a waste of
| my salary" - is a common justification that I hear all too
| often.
| autoexec wrote:
| "It's better for the company that I don't try" seems like a
| convenient take for a dev without the skills to have. I'd
| argue that performance is a feature, and if someone can't
| deliver it their salary is being wasted already.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Performance is a feature and management often doesn't care
| to optimize for it. If the market valued performance more
| then we would probably see competitive services which
| optimize for performance, but we generally don't. I'm sure
| there's plenty of developers that could deliver improved
| performance, it's just a matter of tradeoffs.
|
| Maybe the people who care this much about performance
| should start competing services or a consulting firm which
| optimizes for that. Better yet, they could devote their
| efforts to helping create educational content and improved
| frameworks or tooling which yields more performant apps.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| One issue is, that the caring about performance is often
| not visible. How does management accout for or measure
| how annoyed people get visiting their bloated websites?
| How many people do not know better, how fast and snappy a
| not bloated website can be, because they apend all their
| time on Instagram, FB, and co? Even if a company does
| measure it somehow via some kind of truly well executed
| A/B test, other explanations might be reached for, to
| explain why a user left the website, than the
| performance.
| orangevelcro wrote:
| Isn't that what the tracking stuff is supposed to track?
| Measure things like how 'annoyed' people get by bounce
| rate and whatever other relevant metrics.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Yes, but how do you determin the actual reason for a
| bounce? The test would need to have all the same starting
| conditions and then let some users have a better
| performing version or something like that. But at that
| point one would probably rollout the better performing
| version anyway. Maybe artificially worsen the performance
| and observe how the metrics change. And then it is
| questionable, whether the same amount by which
| performance decreased would have the same effect in
| reverse, if the performance increased by that amount.
| Maybe up to a certain point? In general probably not. In
| general it is difficult, because changing things to
| perform better is usually accompanied by visual and
| functionality changes as well.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Performance is not a feature. Decisions about performance
| are part of every line of code we write. Some developers
| make good decisions and do their job right, many others
| half-ass it and we end up with the crap that ships in
| most places today.
|
| This "blame the managers" attitude denies the agency all
| developers have to do our jobs competently or not. The
| manager probably doesn't ultimately care about source
| control or code review either, but we use them because
| we're professionals and we aim to do our jobs right.
| Maybe a better example is security: software is secure
| because of developers who do their jobs right, which has
| nothing to do with whether or not the manager cares about
| security.
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| I can agree to a point, but it's not very scalable.
| Imagine if the safety of every bridge and building came
| down to each construction worker caring on an individual
| level. At some point, there need to be processes that
| ensure success, not just individual workers caring
| enough.
|
| Secure software happens because of a culture of building
| secure software, or processes and requirements. NASA
| doesn't depend on individual developers "just doing the
| right thing", they have strict standards.
| bezbac wrote:
| That's not fair. Sure, if there's an experienced dev who
| _values_ efficiency on the team, who pushes for the site to be
| more efficient or builds it more efficiently to begin with, the
| page would be better off. But it's mostly about incentives. If
| management doesn't care, they will likely not react well to
| programmers spending time making the site more efficient
| instead of spending half the time to just get it running and
| then crunching through their backlog.
| zilti wrote:
| It usually requires less time, not more, to create a slim and
| efficient page.
| rizky05 wrote:
| but can it do feature x that generates more $$$ ?
| rokkamokka wrote:
| Definitely not true in my experience, and I would think if
| it were true, most pages would be "slim and efficient".
| Where is the business value in doing anything else at that
| point?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The GP might not always be true, but no, we would not
| have slim and efficient sites, because of push web
| developers get to include all kinds of unnecessary
| tracking and in general bloat on websites.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Where is the business value in doing anything else at
| that point?
|
| You think developers prioritize business value? That
| isn't how employment works.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Static html sites are so easy. You can write one by hand
| in five minutes and it can run on a toaster. There's more
| business value in ads and dark patterns.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| True but only if you know how to. Also slim will 99% of the
| time be less code too.
| holri wrote:
| Usually bad web software correlates with bad content. Therefore
| having a slow device is an excellent filter helping to avoid
| garbage.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Unfortunately the modern web has consolidated to a point
| where you need to use them. For example, small local
| businesses that don't have a web site but do have a Facebook
| page.
| geraldhh wrote:
| seems fair to correlate "small local businesses that don't
| have a web site but do have a Facebook page" with "bad
| content"
| teamonkey wrote:
| My local butcher provides good content without being
| terminally online.
|
| Unfortunately this means needing to use Facebook to find
| out if they're open on a national holiday.
| geraldhh wrote:
| idk if "only facebook" is worse than no online presence
| at all
| holri wrote:
| Having only a facebook page and forcing people on that
| toxic platform, is a strong indication that they do not
| value freedom (of the web) and ethics. Again a good filter
| for business / people I want to avoid.
| FragmentShader wrote:
| > is a strong indication that they do not value freedom
| (of the web) and ethics.
|
| I don't think the average barbershop/restaurant owner
| will care about that, for instance? They just wanna set
| up a Facebook/Instagram and done, they can now instantly
| receive messages from clients to make reservations and
| also share their stuff with posts. I bet they don't even
| know they can make a website.
|
| Also, every time they end up getting a website, it's
| powered by Wordpress hosted in the slowest server you can
| imagine. And it will end up redirecting you to a
| propietary service to make your reservation (Whatsapp,
| Facebook, Instagram...)
|
| At least that's what I see in Europe and south america, I
| have no clue how it is everywhere else.
| dazc wrote:
| A friend of mine who was a barber asked me how much it would
| cost to build him a website and I said I would do him a basic
| 3 page site for free, although he would need to let me know
| if his opening hours had changed or he needed to tell
| customers he was on holiday, etc.
|
| He said, with no irony whatsoever, that he didn't realise it
| would be so complicated and decided not to take me up on the
| offer. I suspect this attitude is not the unusual with one-
| man businesses that have survived just fine thus far?
| tdudhhu wrote:
| You are right.
|
| I browse the web on Firefox with uBlock Origin, 3rd party
| cookies disabled, and so on.
|
| So I am missing the bloat most people talk about.
|
| But still apps like Clickup are really slow. It's just bad
| software.
| ksec wrote:
| Probably a bit of both.
|
| Client Side Rendering ( Regardless of Frameworks ) is hip, and
| gets more media attention. Sometimes backed by VC. It is new,
| it is complex. And fits both the hype cycle, software engineers
| complexity attraction, and Resume Driven Development model. And
| just like the article stated, it is suppose to bring so many
| good things in its idealogy to the table.
|
| Since majority of software developers wants to works on it, so
| their Resume gets a tick and could jump to another job later.
| Management now faces lots of application for these technology
| and zero for old and boring tech.
|
| >great web programmers who don't know much (and appear to not
| WANT to know much) about efficiency.
|
| Remember when Firefox OS developers thought $35 dollar
| Smartphone will one day take over the world and CPU will be so
| much faster due to Moore's law, performance will soon becomes
| irrelevant.
|
| I mean that is like Jeff hates Qualcomm, without actually
| understanding anything about Mobile SoC business nor the CPU
| behind it. And how ARM's IP works. A lot of people dont want to
| know "why" either.
|
| A more accurate description and also a general observation.
| Most software developers and especially those on Web
| Development have very little understanding of hardware or low
| level Software engineering. Cloud Computing makes this even
| more abstracted.
| atoav wrote:
| I have worked with such people. When I asked them specifics
| about the "result" (HTML, CSS, JS) they looked at me as if I
| was talking another language. They came from javascript
| framework world, and there they didn't really think all that
| much about that.
|
| My philosophy is nearly completely different, I ask myself what
| the minimum maintainable code is that would produce the
| equivalent of a well hand coded HTML+CSS+JS website. Usually
| the result is magnitudes smaller.
|
| One of those people asked me how I did realtime list filtering
| on 1000 table rows and still have it load fast ans perform well
| on mobile. While that isn't really a feat, all I sid was
| deliver the whole data on the first request and then hide non-
| filtered data dynamically. That means the webserver didn't have
| to do anything wild, orher than deliver the same cached data to
| everybody who filters that list and because this was the only
| javascript going on on that site it was (to them) unusually
| performant. If you look at a comparable table row from their
| solution (some framework, didn't have much insight into it) the
| resulting html was 80% boilerplate that they didn't even use.
|
| Web development is too entrenched and many wandered too far
| from the essentials of web technology.
| arp242 wrote:
| About 5 years ago I applied for a job at a company that enabled
| people in rural Africa to more easily sell the goods they
| produced (farmers, basket weavers, what-have-you).
|
| If you mainly target people in the US or EU, there's perhaps
| something to be said for not optimizing _too_ aggressively for
| low-end hardware and flaky low-bandwidth high-latency
| connections. But if you 're targetting rural Africa fairly
| aggressive optimisation seems like a no-brainer, right?
|
| Their homepage loaded this 2M gazillion by gazillion pixel
| image downscaled to 500 by 1000 pixels with CSS. It got worse
| from there. I don't recall the exact JS payload size, but it
| was multi-MB - everything was extremely frontend-heavy, which
| was double ridiculous because it was mostly a "classic"
| template-driven backend app from what I could see.
|
| I still applied because I liked the concept but the tech was
| just horrible. I don't really know why it was like this as I
| never got to the first interview stage, but it's hard to image
| it's anything other than western European developers not quite
| realizing what they're doing in this regard.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The website was never intended for people in rural Africa, it
| was intended for donors and governments in Western countries,
| so that the company could get juicy grant money and pay
| themselves to pretend to empower African farmers.
| mouzogu wrote:
| we need some html tag or attribute for slow network detection.
|
| instead of this nasty js feature detection that 99% of time no
| one does.
|
| prefers reduce motion was a good start. although its rarely
| respected.
| keybored wrote:
| The whole point of hierarchical organizations is that those
| higher up have more influence than those at the lower tiers.
| Cutting the blame in half doesn't make sense.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Having worked with the "big scary companies", I can say they
| are 100% to blame. It doesn't start with the developers but
| rather the budget. Unless folks at the top are tech savvy
| and/or have an engineering background, they typically only
| budget for new features and either under-budget or don't budget
| for maintenance and tech debt removal. And when they do budget
| for maintenance, it's handled almost exclusively by
| "maintenance teams" that are offshore and cheaper.
|
| So you have a feature team that works on a feature for 6
| months, does a 1 hour "KT Session" with the offshore
| maintenance team and hands them the code. The offshore team has
| some information on the feature but not enough to really manage
| existing tech debt, just to keep the lights on. And on top of
| this they know they are the lowest totem on the pole and don't
| want to get fired so they don't go out of their way to try and
| fix any existing code or optimize it, again just enough to keep
| the thing working.
|
| Then this cycle repeats 100-1000x within an org and pretty soon
| you have a scenario where the frontend has 2M lines of code
| when it really should be 250k max. A new feature team might
| come on with the brightest engineers and the best of
| intentions, but now they have to work within the box that was
| setup for them. Say they have a number of elements that don't
| line up with their feature mockups. The mockups might be
| incorrect, there might have been an upgrade to the UI kit, or
| the existing UI kit might need refactoring. Problem is none of
| that is budgeted for so the team is told to just copy the
| components and modify them for their own use. And of course on
| handoff to maintenance team, the new team does not want to mess
| with the existing feature work so they leave it as is.
| Management is non-technical so they don't know the difference,
| and you end up with 50+ components all called "Button" in your
| codebase from years and years of teams constantly copy/pasting
| to accommodate their new feature.
| p_l wrote:
| People who never worked with some of the bloated sites often
| forgot third party in the bloating.
|
| Marketing team mandating inclusion of at least one "Tag
| Manager" (if they are especially bad, there will be _multiple_
| ).
|
| A "Tag Manager" is a piece of JS that is installed together
| with an API key in the site... and then it downloads whatever
| extra JS that was configured for given API key. The actual site
| developer often has absolutely no control over it (the closest
| I got once was PoC-of-PoC where we tried to put even inclusion
| of tag manager behind an _actually_ GDPR-compliant consent
| screen).
|
| Marketing team gets to add "tags" (read, tracking, chat
| overlays, subscription naggers, whatever), sometimes with extra
| rules (that also take time processing!), all without involving
| the development team behind the site.
| andai wrote:
| So marketing department is responsible for web being such a
| sad and painful experience?
| p_l wrote:
| Not the only department.
|
| But consider how much of the bloated JS tends to be from
| external parties, and pretty much everything that isn't
| CDN-ed frameworks will be stuff either required by
| marketing, or flat out added through the use of a tag
| manager.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Blaming tag managers and marketing departments is quite
| common and yes while they are problems on some sites many
| developers overlook the impact of their technology choices
| e.g. client side rendering, JS based components etc
| titzer wrote:
| Is it really hard to believe that the solutions on offer are
| usually giant piles of steaming crap that do _way_ more than
| they should but are nevertheless easy to get set up and get
| going? When programming ecosystems get big, they accumulate a
| ton of ways of doing things and people keep trying to put a
| layer on top on top of a layer on top of a layer (like floors
| in an old house). It doesn 't matter if a thing underneath is
| O(n); someone will put another O(n) thing on top of that that
| represents all its data as strings and uses regex or horribly-
| inefficient JSON or something. Very few people ever think
| things from the ground up.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > there is a large cohort of not that great web programmers who
| don't know much
|
| I think you mean "programmers" not just "web programmers". I've
| worked with plenty of bloated over-engineered Java and C#
| codebases that take several _minutes_ to start on a very fast
| developer machine with 32 gigs of RAM. Sometimes, the worst
| offenders use "lower level" languages! The performance averse
| problem is endemic in the entire field, not just in the web.
| bradgessler wrote:
| It also impacts users with fast devices.
|
| When I load a bloated website on an iPhone 15 Pro Max over a
| Unifi AP 7 Pro access point connected to a 1.2Gb WAN, it's still
| a slow bloated website.
|
| If you build websites, do as much as you possibly can on the
| server.
|
| As an industry, how can we get more people to understand this?
| FrojoS wrote:
| Has someone attempted to do the math on how much CO2 is emitted
| because of needless bloat and adds?
| pompino wrote:
| I think it would be useful to separate data & code here. What if
| you kept the code the same, and downgraded the assets so the
| overall package is smaller/easier to process/execute? Or maybe
| tweaked the renderer so the same code & data can render quicker
| and slightly worse image quality consuming fewer CPU cycles?
| Basically I'm envisioning something like a game where the same
| game data+code can support multiple performance targets (except
| in this case the different CDN hookups to get the assets out,
| rather than everyone getting the bloated data download)
| apatheticonion wrote:
| This is why I'm excited for Web Assembly. Writing an efficient
| high performance, mutli-threaded GUI in Rust or Go would be
| awesome.
|
| Just waiting on it to be practically usable
| atahanacar wrote:
| Because non-web applications are always very efficient and high
| performance, right?
|
| The problem isn't the technologies available to us. Majority of
| devs just have no desire to write efficient code.
| jenadine wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. The browser ultimately need to render
| the UI from the DOM which is intrinsically linked with
| JavaScript. Wasm can help for some of the application logic
| maybe. But it also comes at a cost of some fixed overhead to
| bring up the wasm blob. JavaScript performance aren't that bad
| for UI.
| masa331 wrote:
| My own recent experience with this - i run a small sass web app
| and about a year ago i decided to partner with advertising
| company to help with the grow.
|
| Part of the plan was that they will remake our static homepage in
| Wordpress bc it will be easier to manage it for them and also
| easier to add a blog, which was part of the new plan. I know
| Wordpress is slow and i would say unnecessary also but i said yes
| bc i did not want to micromanage them.
|
| A year later we parted our ways and i was left with WP where the
| page load was abysmal(3-5 seconds) and about 10Mb of bs. There
| was something called "Oxy" or "Oxy builder" which would add a
| tons of style,js and clutter to the markup and kind of SPA page
| load style but horribly failing.
|
| So now i migrated the site to Jekyll, got rid of all the bs and
| it's back fast. And for me also again possible to really improve.
|
| So for my businesses i'm not touching WP ever again and that will
| be a huge bloat reduction in itself
| askonomm wrote:
| Seems like your issues were not with WP itself, but with
| whatever plugins and themes were added to it. Avoiding WP
| entirely for this is like avoiding a programming language
| because the 1 developer you had experience with sucked at it.
| WP itself can be very fast, as is evident by a ton of high
| profile sites running it (CSS-Tricks, TechCrunch, New York
| Times, Time Magazine, etc). I'm not a fan of WP myself, but
| that's just because I don't like how its built and how it
| entirely avoids modern programming standards, not because it is
| slow, which it most definitely doesn't have to be.
| anticensor wrote:
| This is a manifestation of Wirth's law, again.
| ksec wrote:
| >There are two attitudes on display here which I see in a lot of
| software folks. First, that CPU speed is infinite and one
| shouldn't worry about CPU optimization. And second, that gigantic
| speedups from hardware should be expected and the only reason
| hardware engineers wouldn't achieve them is due to spectacular
| incompetence, so the slow software should be blamed on hardware
| engineers, not software engineers.
|
| Not just the quote but the whole piece. I am glad this was
| brought out by Dan, and gets enough attentions to be upvoted. (
| Although most are focusing on Server Rendering vs Client Side
| Rendering; Sigh) A lot of what it said would have been downvoted
| to oblivion on HN. A multi billion dollar company CTO once
| commented on HN, why should I know anything about CPU or Foundry
| as long as they give performance improvements every few years.
|
| Not only Jeff Atwood, there are plenty of other Software
| developers, from programming languages authors, backend and
| Frontend Frameworks authors, with hundreds of thousands of
| followers, continue to pump out views like Jeff on social media.
| Without the actual understanding of hardware nor the business or
| selling IPs or physical goods.
|
| Hardware Engineers has to battle with Physics. And yet gets zero
| appreciation. Most of the appreciations you see _now_ around Tech
| circle are completely "new". For a long time no one heard of
| TSMC. ASML wasn't even known until Intel loss its leading node.
| Zero understanding of CPU design nor even basic development
| cycles. How it will takes years just to get a new CPU out. And
| somehow hate Qualcomm because they didn't innovate. A company
| that spends the highest percentage of revenue on R&D in tech
| industry.
| cettox wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I've started building
| https://formpress.org. Seeing the bloat in many form builder
| apps/services, I've decided there is need for a lightweight and
| open source alternative.
|
| How we achieve lightweightness? Currently our only sin is, our
| inclusion of jquery, that is just to have some cross browser way
| of interacting with DOM, then we hand craft required JS code
| based on features used in the form builder. We then ship a
| lightweight runtime, whose whole purpose is to load necessary JS
| code pieces to have a functional form that is lightning fast. Ps:
| we havent gone to the last mile in optimizations, but we
| definteley will. Even with current state, it is the most
| lightweight form builder out there.
|
| It is open source, MIT licensed, built on modern stack(react,
| node.js, Kubernetes and Google Cloud) and we are also hosting a
| freemium version.
|
| I think, there will be ever increasing need and market for
| lightweight products, as modern IT means a lot of products coming
| together. So each one should minimize their overhead.
|
| Give our product a go and let us know what you think?
| khiqxj wrote:
| the web is a pile of horse shit why is this even news. the best
| part is how all the SJW apple tesla cloud smart tech yuppies in
| tech dont care about how 99% of the world who cant afford to buy
| a new machine every year have an experience on their product
| worse in every way than dial up as they force every formerly
| paper transaction onto web. just opening firefox with blank home
| page can take deciseconds and even minutes. even opening a new
| blank tab is unresponsive and lags up the UI. on anything but
| mid-high range _desktop_ hardware.
|
| how does this even have 200 upvotes? i cant count more than 1 or
| 2 websites that doesnt have infinite bloat for useless nonsense
| like the cookie popup social media whatever 10 meme frameworks
| and 100 js libs injected into the page. HNers just read "bad
| stuff bad", respond "yup" like a zombie, and continue doing bad
| stuff
| hacker_88 wrote:
| PUBG runs on 60fps , Web runs 0.4fps. Oh No Optimization
| torginus wrote:
| I feel like there's a good point made by the Discourse CEO about
| Qualcomm (and competitors) - the product decision to segment
| their CPU line by drastic differences in single-threaded CPU perf
| is a highly anti-consumer one.
|
| In contrast AMD and Intel use the same (or sameish) CPU arch in
| all of their lineup in a given generation, the absolute cheapest
| laptop I could find used a Pentium 6805, which still has a GB6
| score of well over 1000, sold in a laptop that's cheaper than
| most budget smartphones.
|
| In contrast, Qualcomm and Mediatek will sell you SoCs that don't
| even have half of that performance as a latest-gen 'midrange'
| part.
| eneville wrote:
| Some might be interested in pre-compressing their sites:
| https://gitlab.com/edneville/gzip-disk
|
| It doesn't stop client CPU burn, but it might help get data to
| the client device without on-the-fly compression a bit quicker,
| which in my experience is helpful from the server side too.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| >Just as an aside, something I've found funny for a long time is
| that I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on this
| page (and a similar volume of appreciation mail)
|
| Yes! I've definitely _felt_ like this while using his website. Of
| course, today I just fixed it with
|
| main { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto; }
|
| but tbh, I don't want to install an extension to customise the
| css on this one site...
| augustk wrote:
| I have never understood why web browser designers don't care to
| provide a default style sheet that makes unstyled web pages
| look nice i.e. with proper spacing of elements and sizes of
| headings etc.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I've had this same experience with low-bandwidth situations while
| traveling: more than a few times I've cursed Apple for not making
| iOS engineers test with 3G or even 2G connections.
| bloatedforever wrote:
| I think Web bloat started with pretty urls, they provide nothing
| on top of traditional urls yet every request has to parse them
| unnecessarily. It's such a waste on a huge scale, especially for
| slow languages plus the expensive regex processing as well.
| uaserussia wrote:
| I have modern I7, 64GB RAM, RTX3090, a 7gbps NVME SSD and a 1Gbps
| internet connection. Can run pretty much any game maxxed out in
| 4k with 100 fps. Download 100GB files in few minutes. Can do all
| sorts of tasks and workloads. Can calculate the 20th billionth
| number of PI in a microsecond. What I cant do however is use
| twitter without stutters and hitches, or windows, or any shopping
| website.
|
| Nice work, webdevelopers!
| azangru wrote:
| > or any shopping website
|
| Could you give an example? I used a shopping website yesterday,
| both on a laptop and on an android phone, and apart from cookie
| banner popups (design choice, not hardware limitation), did not
| have any significant inconveniences.
| uaserussia wrote:
| Amazon, Ebay, Yeezy (which was better than most), Armani,
| Nike, any assortment of the regular webshopping webiste, even
| computer parts shopping websites lol. They're all slow and a
| glithcy mess. They're all horrible. Trying to browse them on
| my old 13inch screen thinkpad is akin to torture.
| archy_ wrote:
| > Something I've observed over time, as programming has become
| more prestigious and more lucrative, is that people have tended
| to come from wealthier backgrounds and have less exposure to
| people with different income levels. An example we've discussed
| before, is at a well-known, prestigious, startup that has a very
| left-leaning employee base, where everyone got rich, on a
| discussion about the covid stimulus checks, in a slack
| discussion, a well meaning progressive employee said that it was
| pointless because people would just use their stimulus checks to
| buy stock. This person had, apparently, never talked to any
| middle-class (let alone poor) person about where their money goes
| or looked at the data on who owns equity. And that's just looking
| at American wealth. When we look at world-wide wealth, the
| general level of understanding is much lower. People seem to
| really underestimate the dynamic range in wealth and income
| across the world.
|
| Perhaps the falling salaries for programming in the US could be a
| good thing in that regard. So many people get into this career
| because they want to make it big, which seems to drive down the
| quality of the talent pool.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| I don't care. Upgrade your device. You don't make me money.
| npteljes wrote:
| It's interesting research, but at the end of the day, the
| websites are there to make money. Well, looking at the table,
| maybe the author's own isn't, but the rest is. And so, I think
| the businesses don't optimize more because there isn't much more
| money to be made that way. Instead, the same effort is better
| spent elsewhere, like marketing, having a software that's quickly
| adaptable, that's easy to get interchangeable developers for. So
| they are optimized, just not for the speed on low-end devices.
| Different goals.
| lmpdev wrote:
| I was thinking about this the other day
|
| I'd happily pay $100/month to access the internet similar to
| that of pre-2005ish
|
| As in, banning almost all commercial activity
|
| I truly believe Google isn't getting worse, just the incentives
| behind the creation of web content have become progressively
| maligned with that of the user's desires
|
| I want a high quality internet, and am willing to fork out
| large sums of money to access it
|
| I hope I'm not alone
| npteljes wrote:
| Well, that's not the pre-2005 internet I remember. What I
| remember are popups, pop-unders, poisoned search results due
| to crude SEO tactics like including small background-colored
| text on websites, endless rings of web pages referring to
| each other, heavily blinking banners, and even the best ad
| blocker being so slow on the machine that it's no joke. And
| this is the commercial abuse only, there was a lot of other
| types going around.
|
| I do despise many aspects of the current internet, but I
| think that it's the fallibility of man that poisons the nice
| things, and I don't think that it was ever too much different
| in this regard.
|
| For a different internet, there are ways to go about it. I'm
| not sure how much of it you already know.
|
| Millionshort provides alternative search results to queries.
| I think this is similar to what you're looking for, and it's
| free.
|
| Alternative networks spring up from time to time, like the
| Gemini network. I'm not sure how much of a content desert
| they are, as I'm not a frequent user.
|
| Generally if you hang around in free software / open source
| spaces, they have a lot of people with an alternative take on
| the modern things, including people taking part of an
| internet that's not mainstream, for example by excluding
| running any JavaScript. This can lead to other places,
| forums, and so on.
|
| I wish you luck. But be prepared that the past is gone. Maybe
| never existed in the first place.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I believe HTML, CSS and JS needs an overhaul. There'll be a point
| where maintaining backwards compatibility will result in more
| harm than benefit. Make a new opt-in version of the three which
| are brutally simplified. Deprecate the old HTML/CSS/JS, to be
| EOL'd in 2100.
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