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One thing that they didn't quite touch on is the incredible increase in the performance of web browsers. They did talk about more and more people using a compu
by mdasen 11y ago
One thing that they didn't quite touch on is the incredible increase in the performance of web browsers.
They did talk about more and more people using a computer as a window to the internet, but didn't talk about how much more efficient the software powering that window had become. Apple launched Safari in 2003 and Chrome/V8 was released in 2008. So even as we've wanted our web apps to do more, the engines running them have gotten so much better.
When most software that people were using was being written in C/C++, an increase in the amount of work the program wanted to do needed to be matched by an increase in performance. Compilers have gotten better, but nothing near the impact that modern web browsers have had. So older computers have benefitted from a huge increase in browser performance (the browser being the thing executing most "applications") over the past decade in a way that we never really saw in previous computing generations.
- fungos 11y agoGood thing browsers aren't written in javascript.
- tachyonbeam 11y agoAFAIK, much of the Firefox UI is written in JS. FF and Chrome extensions are too.
- fungos 11y agoYes, usually the slow parts of them all. The core libs, render and vm are c/c++ (or even a little rust).
- davorb 11y ago> One thing that they didn't quite touch on is the incredible increase in the performance of web browsers. This has largely been offset by the fact that we're sending more and more data over the wire. The average web site is now 2.1MB in size.[0] [0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/16/technology/web-slow-big/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/16/technology/web-slow-big/
- rahimnathwani 11y ago"The average web site is now 2.1MB in size." s/site/page
- cdr 11y agoFirefox performance on my older laptop just gets worse and worse. Just a few tabs open to the wrong websites can peg CPU usage at 100%. As far as I can tell this is mainly due to Mozilla "improving" the guts of their rendering at some point and basically no longer supporting rendering with the laptop's terrible Intel graphics chip, forcing software rendering instead. Older hardware definitely often pays a price for supporting newer features.
- tehbeard 11y agoSame issue here, with the added bonus of Firefox assuming my touchpad is one it must "fix", and breaking scrolling with page up/down. Meanwhile chrome on that same machine runs great, albeit eating enough memory that switching applications is noticeable.