9 ms·

> Hardware capability increases exponentially, but software somehow just bloats up, using the power and space, without providing much more functionality or val

> Hardware capability increases exponentially, but software somehow just bloats up, using the power and space, without providing much more functionality or value. I disagree. Our baseline for software has increased dramatically. If you don't care much about the added functionality or value of the new software, use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web. There are obvious improvements in browsers which you are so used to that you forgot them: tabs, ability to zoom, process-level isolation for websites, support for newer protocols, CSS, Unicode support, font rendering things I'm probably not aware of, a built-in debugger and inspector in the browser, and so on. Again, if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience.

Paianni 9y ago
Yeah, screw everyone who makes use of Lynx, Netsurf or any of the extreme lightweight browsers still maintained today.
- rejschaap 9y ago
  Lynx and NetSurf are more usable because they have been maintained. I'm sure 2017 Lynx is much more bloated than 1997 Lynx. Current day Lynx users will probably find 1997 Lynx unusable. All of this despite the fact that preventing bloat is probably one of the core goals of Lynx, which it obviously wasn't for Netscape.
- richthegeek 9y ago
  All 7 of them!
  - coroxout 9y ago
    I love lynx. I may be alone (or in a group of 7), however, judging by how often I get a 403 Forbidden error because a site is set up to reject anything with a user agent of lynx. Seems to be a default of many Wordpress setups. e.g. lynx slatestarcodex.com. Maybe I should just tweak the user agent, but hey, lynx pride. (edit: looks like it's the "libwww" part of the default lynx user agent which gets me blocked, not the "lynx" part. OK, I will edit that out. Ha!)
amelius 9y ago
> if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. But perhaps that's only because we had more time to figure the requirements out.
- swsieber 9y ago
  Yup. I don't think an improvement in UX requires additional computer load.
daemin 9y ago
I think for the starkest contrast, play games from 10-20 years ago. If the difference in graphics, animation, physics and world size doesn't amaze you, then the changes in user interface should. It is so much easier to play modern games, especially for the disabled.
- JoachimSchipper 9y ago
  For fancy modern games, it's pretty clear where the increased hardware power went - indeed, "graphics, animation, physics and world size". But people complaining about the poor use that today's software makes of today's hardware are usually not talking about games.
- tome 9y ago
  > the changes in user interface should Yeah, but that's not a consequence of better software!
  - jaggederest 9y ago
    What would you call the exact same functional piece of software with a more effective user interface besides better software?
- sametmax 9y ago
  Yeah but the level design sucks, the writing is terrible, open worlds are bloated with useless details and not much gaming, gameplay are repetitive and lack innovations, atmosphere and personal touch has been traded for myriad of pixels. Those games are big fat short interactive movies and without souls. The best games I played recently are all indie stuff that I could have played on a much older machine.
  - jerf 9y ago
    "The best games I played recently are all indie stuff that I could have played on a much older machine." If you try it, you may discover that's not the case. A lot of indie stuff is taking advantage of faster computers to use things with higher levels of abstraction, and indie games often have really quite terrible levels of performance relative to the complexity of the game as compared to a AAA title. They run at 60fps because they're net simpler, and a lot of times you may find they're barely running at 60fps on a medium-class machine. I'm not complaining, because the alternative is often that the game simply wouldn't exist if the only choice the developers had was to drop straight into C++ and start bashing away with OpenGL directly.
gaius 9y ago
use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web All the actually useful bits of the web, text, images, etc would still work. I bet you could still shop on Amazon with one of those old browsers. The power is being sucked to run the 10Mb+ of JS, Flash and other crap that ads add to every page.
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  Lack of TLS would prevent Amazon shopping.
- ehnto 9y ago
  Working in e-commerce, there is a truly monstrous amount of javascript tracking snippets that enterprise level sites use. 30+ individual snippets and tracking pixels being pulled into the page. Polluting the console with JS errors and console logs. Thanks to Google Tag Manager, we don't even get a say anymore. It's out of our hands. We can put hours into optimising animations and UX but it is in vain once the marketing companies get their hands on the GTM account. With enterprise level clients near quarterly change of marketing provider, I'm sure many of the snippets aren't even being used anymore, they sit there because the new account manager is too afraid to remove them and no one truly understands what gets delivered to the customer's browser. We will spend immense time architecting performant backend solutions and infrastructure, then we decide that tens of thousands of completely disjointed lines of javascript, that we've never seen unminified and have no idea who wrote it, is probably fine to deliver straight to the browser. Don't worry, caching will solve the network problem, and everyone has quad-core smartphones now so it's probably okay. Weird, the screen keeps flickering and scrolling isn't smooth. Oh well, probably a browser bug.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    ...and then you deliver those tens of thousands of lines of JS to a browser running uBlock Origin and 80% of it gets ignored, restoring speed and lowering memory requirements at the tiny cost of not seeing your ads or being tracked by ad networks.
    - 9y ago
SyneRyder 9y ago
>If you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. I still use Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 whenever I can. It's faster to startup and use than any of the versions that came afterwards based on .NET. The built-in effects are a bit outdated, but it still runs most Photoshop compatible plugins. And I still run Windows 2000 in an isolated offline VM for some of my work. Even emulated, it's blistering fast on modern day hardware. The entire OS runs great in less RAM than a Blogger tab (assuming the article's numbers about 500MB - 750MB RAM are correct). There is some excellent and efficient new software being made (Sublime Text and Alfred spring to mind), but please, don't give me another Electron-based 'desktop' app.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  A lot of the memory usage in modern browsers is from aggressive caching - computers today have multiple gigabytes of RAm that would otherwise go unused, so browser vendors keep more assets in memory between pageloads to avoid reloading them from the disk cache or worse: the network. Operating systems themselves take advantage of this abundance of memory by also keeping things in-memory for longer - I remember my beefy 2GB/RAM computer from 10 years ago still paged processes and data out to disk when I had Photoshop CS and Firefox 2 side-by-side, but now that I have 32GB of RAM - and have done for the past 2+ years, I csnnot recall having experienced any disk-thrashing due to paging since then.
  - mysterydip 9y ago
    The problem is the myriad of low end devices for sale that many consumers buy. Check out all the sub-$300 notebooks and you'll be lucky to find 4GB of RAM. So while 32GB is available today, I wouldn't call it the norm.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I do think it's a mistake to look at high memory usage and immediately assume the software causing it is bad. There's basically no downside to using otherwise-inert memory, so plenty of programs will eat whatever memory you have but degrade nicely when you're out. Hell, several IDEs seem to cache their tab contents just because they can, and that's only a text file on disk. If my memory usage never drops below 70% of available, I have no real complaints. Of course, there is the question of why that much memory usage is even possible. I don't blame Chrome for eagerly caching webpages - it's delightful when I'm on shaky internet and pages don't reload every time I change tabs. But I do object to whoever decided a Blogger tab should have 750 MB worth of crap to cache in the first place. I increasingly feel like many webpages are actively hostile to their users; in service to click rates and advertisers they eat bandwidth, squander memory, and actively oppose security measures like adblocking and SSL enforcement. That, at least, seems like a step backwards.
twobyfour 9y ago
The web, where I can now use a browser to get a slower and clunkier version of the same sorts of simple applications I could use on the desktop 20 years ago? Applications whose interfaces used to be snappy on 1997 hardware and now crawl in my poor abused browser? Oh, but the data is now available over a network. And don't get me started on how text-centric websites used to load faster over a 56k connection than I can now get a JavaScript-abusing news site to load and render a simple article over fiber.
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  I don't think web technologies are the main problem (perhaps with the exception of CSS but that's a productivity issue) The problem is that we're not actually running applications on the web platform. We're running them on advertising platforms. I'm pretty sure that roughly 99% of my browser CPU usage goes towards loading and running ads. And browsers are optimized for that task, which has consequences even when not running ads. We have a business model and payments processing crisis, not a technology problem.
  - danieldk 9y ago
    I disagree, paid ad-free Google Mail still eats hundreds of megabytes of memory. The same is true for many other paid-for web apps.
    - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
      That is true to some degree for memory but not at all for CPU usage and only to a much lesser degree for network usage. Also, the entire architecture of browsers is very much geared towards running tons of totally unpredictable crappy adds. I don't think the multi process architecture most browsers use nowadays would have come to pass without crashing Flash adverts.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    I don't think web technologies are the main problem (perhaps with the exception of CSS but that's a productivity issue) As an application delivery platform, web technologies certainly are a serious problem. They're literally decades behind the curve in many respects. A big part of this is the classic problem that tools built for one purpose (presenting hypertext documents with some light interactivity) have been repurposed for something completely different (web apps) because they were what was available, not necessarily what was good. This goes for HTML and CSS of course, but also for JavaScript. Even with the improvements of recent years and the much better runtime environments provided by modern browsers to execute the JS code, it's still a relatively weak language for writing non-trivial applications, and the community is still following numerous practices that we've long known to be unwise and learning lessons that the rest of the application programming world figured out many years ago. A textbook example is that in JS world, "unidirectional data flow" in modern UI libraries is treated as some sort of amazing new idea. SmallTalk was using the same fundamental principle in MVC in the 1970s. Many variations have evolved in desktop applications since then, dealing with a variety of practical lessons learned from experience with the original concept. In JS world, it's considered a big new feature of recent years that you can now write code in multiple files, import what you need from one file in another in some standardised way, and thus break your application down into manageable parts for development but ship a single combined "executable". Again, most major programming languages created since at least the 1970s have supported modular design, in many cases with much better support for defining clear interfaces between the modules than JS offers even today. In JS world, having discovered the concept of modular design and libraries relatively recently, naturally we're now seeing state-of-the-art build tools that use "tree shaking" to import only the code actually needed from one module in another, instead of bringing in the whole module. Dead code elimination has been a bread and butter feature of optimising compilers since... Well, you get the idea. Next week: Stability and standards are useful things, data structures and algorithms matter, standard libraries with good implementations of data structures and algorithms are how you combine those things to make the everyday requirements easy to meet, and if much of software development is about managing complexity then routinely pulling in minor features from an ecosystem that exponentially increases the number of transitive dependencies you have to manage probably isn't a smart move. It's not just JS, though. The layout engine in browsers was designed to support HTML documents, reasonably enough. Unfortunately, that means laggy performance in web apps that keep regenerating a large amount of page layout information because of that heritage. A great deal of effort has been spent in recent years trying to work around that fundamental weakness, with varying degrees of success. Likewise the CSS formatting model were designed around those documents, and again is quite limited in even basic layout needs for an application UI. Some of the bleeding edge changes are making that slightly less painful, but there are still a lot of awkward interactions. It is true that much of the modern web seems to have been taken over by spyware and ads. I'm afraid that's what we get for having a culture where a lot of people want all their content and services for free, and until we fix that culture we're probably stuck with the ads (and will probably see a variety of laws in the coming years to fight back against the technical victory of ad blockers). But this definitely isn't the only reason the web of today is bloated and slow.
pasta 9y ago
I'm not sure if I agree. My goto example is Blender. It has a footprint of 300MB, starts within 1-2 seconds and uses 70MB on startup. Compare this to a program like 3ds Max and you will ask yourself where all your resources went. I think today most software loads everything on startup, while programs like Blender use a modular approach.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  Just another example of sheer brute power alone not making things fast. It's also about latency and responsiveness.
sametmax 9y ago
On the Web the balance is not as good. We had decent video, CSS, page update, notifications, unicode support and the like 10 years ago. We didn't gain that much since then. But the page load time took a X5 hit. Yeah some UI is nicer, and we do have better completion, real time is snappier and all. But hell. We lost most pagination, pages feels slow, there are so many, sharing informations went down the toilet in exchange for big echo chambers. The only thing that are clearly better is my hardware and bandwidth, both on mobile and computer, and professional service quality that went up in quality a lot. The web itself, the medium, feels more sluggish than it should be given the power horse of infrastructure I got to access it.
- Joeri 9y ago
  Pages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels slower despite my phone and connection being much faster. It seems web developers have stopped caring at all about performance. If you look at where the bloat went, it's mostly three things: - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests) Most likely culprits are retina class graphics and "hero graphic" designs. - Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. - video Now that flash has disappeared, it got replaced by auto-playing video, which is even worse as far as page bloat is concerned. [1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/ https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    - Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. You are blithely ignoring the reason for all this bloat: unwanted adtech surveillance.
    - amiga-workbench 9y ago
makomk 9y ago
You can't avoid the bloat by using an older browser, because the web itself has grown bloated over the years. Modern browsers try their best to make that bloat a little more manageable but despite being written by probably some of the best developers out there they can barely keep up.
icedchai 9y ago
Functionality has increased dramatically... but has it increased orders of magnitude? It doesn't feel that way. (For comparison, I ran Netscape 4 on a Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM.)
justin66 9y ago
> Again, if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. If I didn't have to trade files with others I could quite happily use Microsoft Office 97 in lieu of whatever the new thing is called. The issue with web browsers is only slightly more complicated. I'd love to go back to a world where web pages didn't try to be computer programs, but that's obviously not going to happen for a while.
- jasonhanley 9y ago
  Agreed. I used Office XP (2002) until... I think about 2013 or so where I started running into incompatibility problems that just couldn't be resolved no matter what I tried.
  - justin66 9y ago
    That was a good version as well. I can even stomach - barely - Office 2007, with all the ribbon-related goofery, but the low-contrast UI on the newest stuff is just sadistic. (I mean, it's not enough to make me switch to Open Office or Nacho Libre...)
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      It pushed me off of Office completely. I used Office XP as long as I could, then 2007 when I could. I gave up on 2013 completely - it's just not worth using a proprietary program that clearly hates its users. If I need to export to Office I use Google Docs, because Libre is still too frustrating. If I don't need a .doc output, it's Latex for pretty things and Textedit for the rest. I agree that most of the Office-analogues out there aren't very usable, but I'm surprised at how rarely I need one.
- qbrass 9y ago
  >If I didn't have to trade files with others I could quite happily use Microsoft Office 97 in lieu of whatever the new thing is called. I could go back even further and use Microsoft Works.
jackmott 9y ago
a lot of people do use software from 10 years ago because it works better and is more efficient. old versions of visual studio, vim, emacs, all come to mind.
flavio81 9y ago
> Again, if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. Try 1987 Ventura Publisher. That's 30 years ago. You can publish a whole magazine or a 1000 page book on a modest (<4MB) PC with 286 processor with it. It has a great GUI, excellent usability and, dare to say, isn't slow at all. On the IDE side, the IDE environments for Lisp on the Lisp machines of the early 80s, or the Smalltalk environment for the early 80s Xerox computers have nothing to envy the modern IDE environments that are commonly used for languages like Java.
kazinator 9y ago
> If you don't care much about the added functionality or value of the new software, use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web. If I can have the web from that era to go with it, I'm happy.

Paianni 9y ago

Yeah, screw everyone who makes use of Lynx, Netsurf or any of the extreme lightweight browsers still maintained today.

rejschaap 9y ago
Lynx and NetSurf are more usable because they have been maintained. I'm sure 2017 Lynx is much more bloated than 1997 Lynx. Current day Lynx users will probably find 1997 Lynx unusable. All of this despite the fact that preventing bloat is probably one of the core goals of Lynx, which it obviously wasn't for Netscape.
richthegeek 9y ago
All 7 of them!
- coroxout 9y ago
  I love lynx. I may be alone (or in a group of 7), however, judging by how often I get a 403 Forbidden error because a site is set up to reject anything with a user agent of lynx. Seems to be a default of many Wordpress setups. e.g. lynx slatestarcodex.com. Maybe I should just tweak the user agent, but hey, lynx pride. (edit: looks like it's the "libwww" part of the default lynx user agent which gets me blocked, not the "lynx" part. OK, I will edit that out. Ha!)

amelius 9y ago

> if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. But perhaps that's only because we had more time to figure the requirements out.

swsieber 9y ago
Yup. I don't think an improvement in UX requires additional computer load.

daemin 9y ago

I think for the starkest contrast, play games from 10-20 years ago. If the difference in graphics, animation, physics and world size doesn't amaze you, then the changes in user interface should. It is so much easier to play modern games, especially for the disabled.

JoachimSchipper 9y ago
For fancy modern games, it's pretty clear where the increased hardware power went - indeed, "graphics, animation, physics and world size". But people complaining about the poor use that today's software makes of today's hardware are usually not talking about games.
tome 9y ago
> the changes in user interface should Yeah, but that's not a consequence of better software!
- jaggederest 9y ago
  What would you call the exact same functional piece of software with a more effective user interface besides better software?
sametmax 9y ago
Yeah but the level design sucks, the writing is terrible, open worlds are bloated with useless details and not much gaming, gameplay are repetitive and lack innovations, atmosphere and personal touch has been traded for myriad of pixels. Those games are big fat short interactive movies and without souls. The best games I played recently are all indie stuff that I could have played on a much older machine.
- jerf 9y ago
  "The best games I played recently are all indie stuff that I could have played on a much older machine." If you try it, you may discover that's not the case. A lot of indie stuff is taking advantage of faster computers to use things with higher levels of abstraction, and indie games often have really quite terrible levels of performance relative to the complexity of the game as compared to a AAA title. They run at 60fps because they're net simpler, and a lot of times you may find they're barely running at 60fps on a medium-class machine. I'm not complaining, because the alternative is often that the game simply wouldn't exist if the only choice the developers had was to drop straight into C++ and start bashing away with OpenGL directly.

gaius 9y ago

use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web All the actually useful bits of the web, text, images, etc would still work. I bet you could still shop on Amazon with one of those old browsers. The power is being sucked to run the 10Mb+ of JS, Flash and other crap that ads add to every page.

LeoPanthera 9y ago
Lack of TLS would prevent Amazon shopping.
ehnto 9y ago
Working in e-commerce, there is a truly monstrous amount of javascript tracking snippets that enterprise level sites use. 30+ individual snippets and tracking pixels being pulled into the page. Polluting the console with JS errors and console logs. Thanks to Google Tag Manager, we don't even get a say anymore. It's out of our hands. We can put hours into optimising animations and UX but it is in vain once the marketing companies get their hands on the GTM account. With enterprise level clients near quarterly change of marketing provider, I'm sure many of the snippets aren't even being used anymore, they sit there because the new account manager is too afraid to remove them and no one truly understands what gets delivered to the customer's browser. We will spend immense time architecting performant backend solutions and infrastructure, then we decide that tens of thousands of completely disjointed lines of javascript, that we've never seen unminified and have no idea who wrote it, is probably fine to deliver straight to the browser. Don't worry, caching will solve the network problem, and everyone has quad-core smartphones now so it's probably okay. Weird, the screen keeps flickering and scrolling isn't smooth. Oh well, probably a browser bug.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  ...and then you deliver those tens of thousands of lines of JS to a browser running uBlock Origin and 80% of it gets ignored, restoring speed and lowering memory requirements at the tiny cost of not seeing your ads or being tracked by ad networks.
  - 9y ago

SyneRyder 9y ago

>If you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. I still use Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 whenever I can. It's faster to startup and use than any of the versions that came afterwards based on .NET. The built-in effects are a bit outdated, but it still runs most Photoshop compatible plugins. And I still run Windows 2000 in an isolated offline VM for some of my work. Even emulated, it's blistering fast on modern day hardware. The entire OS runs great in less RAM than a Blogger tab (assuming the article's numbers about 500MB - 750MB RAM are correct). There is some excellent and efficient new software being made (Sublime Text and Alfred spring to mind), but please, don't give me another Electron-based 'desktop' app.

DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
A lot of the memory usage in modern browsers is from aggressive caching - computers today have multiple gigabytes of RAm that would otherwise go unused, so browser vendors keep more assets in memory between pageloads to avoid reloading them from the disk cache or worse: the network. Operating systems themselves take advantage of this abundance of memory by also keeping things in-memory for longer - I remember my beefy 2GB/RAM computer from 10 years ago still paged processes and data out to disk when I had Photoshop CS and Firefox 2 side-by-side, but now that I have 32GB of RAM - and have done for the past 2+ years, I csnnot recall having experienced any disk-thrashing due to paging since then.
- mysterydip 9y ago
  The problem is the myriad of low end devices for sale that many consumers buy. Check out all the sub-$300 notebooks and you'll be lucky to find 4GB of RAM. So while 32GB is available today, I wouldn't call it the norm.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I do think it's a mistake to look at high memory usage and immediately assume the software causing it is bad. There's basically no downside to using otherwise-inert memory, so plenty of programs will eat whatever memory you have but degrade nicely when you're out. Hell, several IDEs seem to cache their tab contents just because they can, and that's only a text file on disk. If my memory usage never drops below 70% of available, I have no real complaints. Of course, there is the question of why that much memory usage is even possible. I don't blame Chrome for eagerly caching webpages - it's delightful when I'm on shaky internet and pages don't reload every time I change tabs. But I do object to whoever decided a Blogger tab should have 750 MB worth of crap to cache in the first place. I increasingly feel like many webpages are actively hostile to their users; in service to click rates and advertisers they eat bandwidth, squander memory, and actively oppose security measures like adblocking and SSL enforcement. That, at least, seems like a step backwards.

twobyfour 9y ago

The web, where I can now use a browser to get a slower and clunkier version of the same sorts of simple applications I could use on the desktop 20 years ago? Applications whose interfaces used to be snappy on 1997 hardware and now crawl in my poor abused browser? Oh, but the data is now available over a network. And don't get me started on how text-centric websites used to load faster over a 56k connection than I can now get a JavaScript-abusing news site to load and render a simple article over fiber.

fauigerzigerk 9y ago
I don't think web technologies are the main problem (perhaps with the exception of CSS but that's a productivity issue) The problem is that we're not actually running applications on the web platform. We're running them on advertising platforms. I'm pretty sure that roughly 99% of my browser CPU usage goes towards loading and running ads. And browsers are optimized for that task, which has consequences even when not running ads. We have a business model and payments processing crisis, not a technology problem.
- danieldk 9y ago
  I disagree, paid ad-free Google Mail still eats hundreds of megabytes of memory. The same is true for many other paid-for web apps.
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    That is true to some degree for memory but not at all for CPU usage and only to a much lesser degree for network usage. Also, the entire architecture of browsers is very much geared towards running tons of totally unpredictable crappy adds. I don't think the multi process architecture most browsers use nowadays would have come to pass without crashing Flash adverts.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  I don't think web technologies are the main problem (perhaps with the exception of CSS but that's a productivity issue) As an application delivery platform, web technologies certainly are a serious problem. They're literally decades behind the curve in many respects. A big part of this is the classic problem that tools built for one purpose (presenting hypertext documents with some light interactivity) have been repurposed for something completely different (web apps) because they were what was available, not necessarily what was good. This goes for HTML and CSS of course, but also for JavaScript. Even with the improvements of recent years and the much better runtime environments provided by modern browsers to execute the JS code, it's still a relatively weak language for writing non-trivial applications, and the community is still following numerous practices that we've long known to be unwise and learning lessons that the rest of the application programming world figured out many years ago. A textbook example is that in JS world, "unidirectional data flow" in modern UI libraries is treated as some sort of amazing new idea. SmallTalk was using the same fundamental principle in MVC in the 1970s. Many variations have evolved in desktop applications since then, dealing with a variety of practical lessons learned from experience with the original concept. In JS world, it's considered a big new feature of recent years that you can now write code in multiple files, import what you need from one file in another in some standardised way, and thus break your application down into manageable parts for development but ship a single combined "executable". Again, most major programming languages created since at least the 1970s have supported modular design, in many cases with much better support for defining clear interfaces between the modules than JS offers even today. In JS world, having discovered the concept of modular design and libraries relatively recently, naturally we're now seeing state-of-the-art build tools that use "tree shaking" to import only the code actually needed from one module in another, instead of bringing in the whole module. Dead code elimination has been a bread and butter feature of optimising compilers since... Well, you get the idea. Next week: Stability and standards are useful things, data structures and algorithms matter, standard libraries with good implementations of data structures and algorithms are how you combine those things to make the everyday requirements easy to meet, and if much of software development is about managing complexity then routinely pulling in minor features from an ecosystem that exponentially increases the number of transitive dependencies you have to manage probably isn't a smart move. It's not just JS, though. The layout engine in browsers was designed to support HTML documents, reasonably enough. Unfortunately, that means laggy performance in web apps that keep regenerating a large amount of page layout information because of that heritage. A great deal of effort has been spent in recent years trying to work around that fundamental weakness, with varying degrees of success. Likewise the CSS formatting model were designed around those documents, and again is quite limited in even basic layout needs for an application UI. Some of the bleeding edge changes are making that slightly less painful, but there are still a lot of awkward interactions. It is true that much of the modern web seems to have been taken over by spyware and ads. I'm afraid that's what we get for having a culture where a lot of people want all their content and services for free, and until we fix that culture we're probably stuck with the ads (and will probably see a variety of laws in the coming years to fight back against the technical victory of ad blockers). But this definitely isn't the only reason the web of today is bloated and slow.

pasta 9y ago

I'm not sure if I agree. My goto example is Blender. It has a footprint of 300MB, starts within 1-2 seconds and uses 70MB on startup. Compare this to a program like 3ds Max and you will ask yourself where all your resources went. I think today most software loads everything on startup, while programs like Blender use a modular approach.

theandrewbailey 9y ago
Just another example of sheer brute power alone not making things fast. It's also about latency and responsiveness.

sametmax 9y ago

On the Web the balance is not as good. We had decent video, CSS, page update, notifications, unicode support and the like 10 years ago. We didn't gain that much since then. But the page load time took a X5 hit. Yeah some UI is nicer, and we do have better completion, real time is snappier and all. But hell. We lost most pagination, pages feels slow, there are so many, sharing informations went down the toilet in exchange for big echo chambers. The only thing that are clearly better is my hardware and bandwidth, both on mobile and computer, and professional service quality that went up in quality a lot. The web itself, the medium, feels more sluggish than it should be given the power horse of infrastructure I got to access it.

Joeri 9y ago
Pages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels slower despite my phone and connection being much faster. It seems web developers have stopped caring at all about performance. If you look at where the bloat went, it's mostly three things: - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests) Most likely culprits are retina class graphics and "hero graphic" designs. - Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. - video Now that flash has disappeared, it got replaced by auto-playing video, which is even worse as far as page bloat is concerned. [1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/ https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
- nerdponx 9y ago
  - Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies. You are blithely ignoring the reason for all this bloat: unwanted adtech surveillance.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago

makomk 9y ago

You can't avoid the bloat by using an older browser, because the web itself has grown bloated over the years. Modern browsers try their best to make that bloat a little more manageable but despite being written by probably some of the best developers out there they can barely keep up.

icedchai 9y ago

Functionality has increased dramatically... but has it increased orders of magnitude? It doesn't feel that way. (For comparison, I ran Netscape 4 on a Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM.)

justin66 9y ago

> Again, if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. If I didn't have to trade files with others I could quite happily use Microsoft Office 97 in lieu of whatever the new thing is called. The issue with web browsers is only slightly more complicated. I'd love to go back to a world where web pages didn't try to be computer programs, but that's obviously not going to happen for a while.

jasonhanley 9y ago
Agreed. I used Office XP (2002) until... I think about 2013 or so where I started running into incompatibility problems that just couldn't be resolved no matter what I tried.
- justin66 9y ago
  That was a good version as well. I can even stomach - barely - Office 2007, with all the ribbon-related goofery, but the low-contrast UI on the newest stuff is just sadistic. (I mean, it's not enough to make me switch to Open Office or Nacho Libre...)
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    It pushed me off of Office completely. I used Office XP as long as I could, then 2007 when I could. I gave up on 2013 completely - it's just not worth using a proprietary program that clearly hates its users. If I need to export to Office I use Google Docs, because Libre is still too frustrating. If I don't need a .doc output, it's Latex for pretty things and Textedit for the rest. I agree that most of the Office-analogues out there aren't very usable, but I'm surprised at how rarely I need one.
qbrass 9y ago
>If I didn't have to trade files with others I could quite happily use Microsoft Office 97 in lieu of whatever the new thing is called. I could go back even further and use Microsoft Works.

jackmott 9y ago

a lot of people do use software from 10 years ago because it works better and is more efficient. old versions of visual studio, vim, emacs, all come to mind.

flavio81 9y ago

> Again, if you think that software hasn't advanced much, simply use the software from 10 or 20 years ago, and see if you can stand the experience. Try 1987 Ventura Publisher. That's 30 years ago. You can publish a whole magazine or a 1000 page book on a modest (<4MB) PC with 286 processor with it. It has a great GUI, excellent usability and, dare to say, isn't slow at all. On the IDE side, the IDE environments for Lisp on the Lisp machines of the early 80s, or the Smalltalk environment for the early 80s Xerox computers have nothing to envy the modern IDE environments that are commonly used for languages like Java.

kazinator 9y ago

> If you don't care much about the added functionality or value of the new software, use Mosaic or Netscape 4.0 to browse the web. If I can have the web from that era to go with it, I'm happy.