6 ms·
If there is one thing Google services seem to have in common, it is that they're burdened with sluggish javascript. Whether it is Google Maps, Google Groups, Go
by Yetanfou 10y ago
If there is one thing Google services seem to have in common, it is that they're burdened with sluggish javascript. Whether it is Google Maps, Google Groups, Google Image browser (in Image search), all of them like to spike the CPU at 100% for a while doing their thing, leaving the user staring at a frozen tab or window. Having been around a bit I remember where Google Groups came from, it used to be called Deja News. Back in the day I made a 2-pane browser for reading news groups, functionally comparable to what Google Groups does nowadays with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast. Mind, this was in the time where we counted ourselves lucky with our 4 Mbit fixed line and our 400 MHz Pentium II developer machines, using Netscape 4.x on a Linux 2.x kernel with Afterstep or FvWM (or olvwm for Sun-OS aficionados).
While these 'modern' services might be more flexible with their largely client-generated UI, I feel that this comes at too high a price. This problem is not just limited to Google services, other sites and services are similarly hampered. Thing is, I'd have expected better performance from Google.
- kasparsklavins 10y agoYoutube also does this.. the interface is frozen for me on page navigation for around 2-5 seconds before I can start interacting.
- vortico 10y agoThis is why I always use `mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...` https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...` instead of clicking on Youtube links. It bypasses all the Javascript and plays the raw video stream. (youtube-dl needs to be installed.)
- duozerk 10y agoSee also the awesome youtube-dl script: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ - especially useful for videos you plan to watch more than once. It also handles far more than just youtube, despite the name.
- vortico 10y agoAnd for even more video services with an emphasis on live and one-time streams, see http://docs.livestreamer.io/ http://docs.livestreamer.io/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- d8421l01vv4r 10y agoLivestreamer is discontinued. I suggest people try https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink
- ams6110 10y agoDoes youtube-dl get the ad-free videos for YouTube Red subscribers?
- duozerk 10y agoI have never seen any ad on youtube; are they really integrated into the video itself ? from the fact that I never saw any either in the browser (with ublock origin) or through youtube-dl, I kinda just assumed they were distinct videos played by the JS player beforehand - and thus easy to bypass - and not an integral part of the main video file. Anyway, to answer your question: youtube-dl can perform the page fetching and the download in the context of an authenticated user (for example for age-limited videos), so I assume that any advantages associated with a youtube account would most likely work with it.
- chiph 10y agoThat's your ad-blocker. YouTube has started pausing playback for the 12-30 seconds while the ad plays (even if blocked), so you see a black screen.
- kasparsklavins 10y agoPlayback is okay. Its the homepage and subscription pages that are freezing up.
- lightbyte 10y agoSo THATS why all videos appear to freeze up for me? Been driving me crazy trying to figure out why.
- czed 10y agoI had the same problem...Luckily it's easy to fix. Disable your ad blocker and refresh your video with ads until you get the one that is a survey. Once you finish the survey you can enable your ad blocker and things will be normal again.
- chiph 10y agoSince my reason for running a blocker is to prevent an ad-delivered malware infection -- I think I'll stick with the black screens, as annoying as they are.
- gdulli 10y agoDejaNews was great. It may be the first and canonical example of a service being ruined after it was acquired.
- amyjess 10y agoI use earlyoom to prevent the godawful slowdown that comes with running low on memory, and I've found that it aggressively kills Gmail. There are times I've actually had to turn earlyoom off in order to read my mail, even.
- pmlnr 10y ago> with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast When things were HTML, like most things "back in the days", thing were fast. Frames, maybe iframes, and ready-to-consume HTML. Does Squirrelmail rings a bell? It was one of the earliest popular webmails in PHP, and it run every machines I accessed internet with, including 96MB RAM Pentium I MMX laptop. The current trend of outsourcing rendering to the client is not really a gain for anyone: the server side still does a lot of arranging and magic on that data which is served, while it could just generate HTML. Serve the already done HTML, replace the parts in the DOM like we did in the beginning of the AJAX days, and things would be much faster. Out of curiosity, I installed a lesser known browser, Dillo. It's dumb: it can parse a minimal amount of CSS and probably HTML ~4; the rest, it drops. And voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum HTML without JS - became instant. Using the word "fast" would be an understatement. We need to go back to the roots, otherwise we're using a lot of CPUs as heaters.
- CaptSpify 10y ago> And voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum HTML without JS - became instant. I've been using umatrix for this effect. I have some sites that unfortunately I need to use JS on. Sure, some sites fail to the point of not even working, but overall, I find sites faster, more user friendly, and more responsive than pre-umatrix.
- Elrac 10y agoI used to host SquirrelMail on my little $10/month personal server. My users (OK, friends and relatives) were quite happy with it! There's a lot broken with the recent model of browsing, essentially, applications rather than content.
- Kiro 10y agoAnd I presume Google Maps works great in Dillo?
- pmlnr 10y agoNo, it absolutely doesn't. However there were maps before Google Maps, not even bad ones. The greatness of Google Maps: a, satellite images; b, near-live traffic data; c, geotagged images. Oh, wait, the third is gone, and the second is not thanks to Google but to a startup they bought ;)
- platz 10y agoGoogle Keep has one of the worst start-up time delay's I've ever experienced on a web app - which is kind of terrible for note taking.
- jhoechtl 10y agoI really have very modest keeps - 25 maybe? The startup and idling Javascript requirements of keep are insane.
- Kiro 10y agoGood luck making Google Maps without JavaScript.