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The web apps I use are incredibly sluggish when compared to a desktop app on a 1993 Mac. And I'm not just talking about operations that require network request

The web apps I use are incredibly sluggish when compared to a desktop app on a 1993 Mac. And I'm not just talking about operations that require network requests. I'm talking about simple UI responsiveness to (for instance) acknowledge a click and hold on a handle so I can start to drag-and-drop items in a list. I'm talking about drop-down menus that take over a full second to open. I'm talking about lag when typing text into a UI, such that if you type a whole sentence and then click in the wrong place after you finish typing but before the second half of it renders out character by character (for instance, because you noticed and want to correct a typo), the second half of your sentence ends up transposed into the middle of the first half. Ridiculous. This was a solved problem 25 years ago.

fauigerzigerk 9y ago
>I'm talking about drop-down menus that take over a full second to open. That is not a limitation of the platform though.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Indeed, it's instead a symptom of the software bloat that the OP discusses. Hardware is quite literally millions of times more powerful than it was 25 years ago, but software is slower. Many of the most egregious examples of this happen to be on the web because a) it involves an additional layer of abstraction, relative to OS-native applications; b) designers are involved more in web apps than native apps, and they refuse to use native browser widgets, which are performant; and c) for a handful of reasons web development culture is biased towards building on top of existing libraries, which results in excessive layers of abstraction. And then you add the networking layer (and for many web apps having your data "in the cloud" adds very little beyond what a native app provides even without background data syncing), and add seconds to every tiny interaction that used to seem instantaneous.

fauigerzigerk 9y ago

>I'm talking about drop-down menus that take over a full second to open. That is not a limitation of the platform though.

twobyfour 9y ago
Indeed, it's instead a symptom of the software bloat that the OP discusses. Hardware is quite literally millions of times more powerful than it was 25 years ago, but software is slower. Many of the most egregious examples of this happen to be on the web because a) it involves an additional layer of abstraction, relative to OS-native applications; b) designers are involved more in web apps than native apps, and they refuse to use native browser widgets, which are performant; and c) for a handful of reasons web development culture is biased towards building on top of existing libraries, which results in excessive layers of abstraction. And then you add the networking layer (and for many web apps having your data "in the cloud" adds very little beyond what a native app provides even without background data syncing), and add seconds to every tiny interaction that used to seem instantaneous.