8 ms·

The web feels slower than it was 10 years ago too. It's fascinating how we tend to over-engineer and bloat things.

by sunseb 9y ago

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
The web is hundreds of times more feature-rich than 10 years ago too though. But, sites like HN are some of the few that are still built like they were 10 years ago. The rest all adds rich JS frameworks (for supposed faster interaction after the first load), a few billion social links, ads, cookie banners, "sign up for our newsletter" or "pay our subscription pls" popups when you first land on them, rich fonts, animations, images, etc. I mean it's a lot nicer if you look at it from a distance after it's loaded, but it's not as snappy as it used to be.
- joshmarlow 9y ago
  I'll add another thing to your list - segment! It's so weird to me to see a homepage load, look into my dev tools and find that my browser is talking to Facebook.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  And yet I find myself increasingly reaching for tools to remove that complexity: Outline.com, Reader Mode, Pocket (despite its many, many flaws). Not infrequently: stripping out content, running it in Markdown, and generating a static document (PDF, ePub, text) that I can just fucking read.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Noscript or Umatrix?
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Neither of those are an option on Chrome/Android, and I don't think they apply on Firefox/Android (not sure about disabling JS). Firefox does offer uBlock, at least, which is a massive relief. I also run (on the router) a large, and after significant modularisation by me, flexible dnsmasq blocklist that addresses another large set of issues. On desktop (Linux, MacOS), I have and use: NoScript, uBlock, uMatrix, and Stylish, as well as Reader Mode. It's still often less aggrevating to grab source or rendered text and create a standalone Markdown text, for various reasons. I'm looking into the notion of a browsing mode that presumes the website designer is an idiot and that the HTML markup is at best a hint at what the semantic structure ought to be -- see concepts such as POSH (Plain Old Structural HTML), and ... a few other things. Work in (very slow) progress.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        Could have sworn i have seen a version of Noscript that worked with Firefox on Android.
        dredmorbius 9y ago
        Checking: there are multiple javascript toggles, but not "Noscript" specifically AFAICT. "NJS" seems to be among the closest to that. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=javascript https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=javascrip...
        digi_owl 9y ago
        Ah, it never went beyond the alpha stage. https://noscript.net/nsa/ https://noscript.net/nsa/ Only reason i bumped into it was because i was toying with Tor for Android, and their fork(?) of Firefox had it bundled.
- sunseb 9y ago
  I agree modern websites look a lot nicer... Or do they? They all look the same: big images, not much text, the top bar, yeah this newsletter thing to upsell with these crappy (but effective) marketing techniques... Somehow I feel old school websites (HN, Reddit, and so) are more sticky, more addictive, more unique. They focus on what we really want: contents and communication with others.
  - sunseb 9y ago
    Another thing I realized it's nonsense lately: object oriented programming. It's often an over-engineered bloat that only works for trivial Programming 101 courses (yeah the famous Employee or Bike class). But in 10+ years of programming, I found that OOP is just a complete mess (you end up with awful classes in your code like Service, Manager, AbstractFactory, and so). I wish we could just use variables and functions, that's all we need really. :)
    - ams6110 9y ago
      > I wish we could just use variables and functions, that's all we need really. You still can. You need decent data structures too, but I never in over 20 years really "got" OOP. It seemed needlessly complicated. Functions and data always seemed to do the job for me.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        OOP as most people get to know it seems to be a bleak application of the original concept. And the original was not aimed at dealing with the internals of a single program sitting on a single CPU, but grand simulations running on massive clusters. There each "object" would could very well be a process of its own, running on its own dedicated hardware. Effectively OOP became another one of those buzzwords on the bingo board...
    - rpeden 9y ago
      It depends on what kind of development you're doing. For most web and business programming I've done, at the end of the day I'm mostly just taking data and transforming it into other data. Most of the time, looking at these programs as a series of functions through which data gets piped to obtain the result works well. As a result I think that functional programming is a good fit a ton of code that is written using OOP. For fun, I tried converting some old side projects to F#. Once I'd gotten used to the language, I ended up being able to express the same ideas more clearly, and with fewer lines of code. Functional programming isn't magic, but it can be very effective when used in the right places. Lately, I've been getting into game development as a hobby. And when I'm simulating a miniature world with hundreds or thousands of stateful actors, I find that OOP works really well - in that the way to code models the game world aligns well with my mental model of the game world. You absolutely can program games using a functional style - I've just found OOP to be a better fit here for my uses. It's still useful to use a functional approach where you can, though, even inside an OOP game code base. John Carmack has written and spoken about this.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  Hit counters, guestbooks, web rings, autoplay midi files, under construction gif animations, cursor animations, HTML frames, etc. We've been adding unnecessary garbage to webpages since almost the very beginning of WWW.
nickjj 9y ago
It doesn't need to be slower. You can still use server rendered templates and have things load extremely fast. Most sites don't need 3mb of JS to show structured text.
digi_owl 9y ago
Over-design perhaps, but i would say that the web is under-engineered, as engineers would find the inefficiencies and get around them.

The web feels slower than it was 10 years ago too. It's fascinating how we tend to over-engineer and bloat things.

by sunseb 9y ago

The web feels slower than it was 10 years ago too. It's fascinating how we tend to over-engineer and bloat things.

The web is hundreds of times more feature-rich than 10 years ago too though. But, sites like HN are some of the few that are still built like they were 10 years ago. The rest all adds rich JS frameworks (for supposed faster interaction after the first load), a few billion social links, ads, cookie banners, "sign up for our newsletter" or "pay our subscription pls" popups when you first land on them, rich fonts, animations, images, etc. I mean it's a lot nicer if you look at it from a distance after it's loaded, but it's not as snappy as it used to be.

joshmarlow 9y ago
I'll add another thing to your list - segment! It's so weird to me to see a homepage load, look into my dev tools and find that my browser is talking to Facebook.
dredmorbius 9y ago
And yet I find myself increasingly reaching for tools to remove that complexity: Outline.com, Reader Mode, Pocket (despite its many, many flaws). Not infrequently: stripping out content, running it in Markdown, and generating a static document (PDF, ePub, text) that I can just fucking read.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Noscript or Umatrix?
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Neither of those are an option on Chrome/Android, and I don't think they apply on Firefox/Android (not sure about disabling JS). Firefox does offer uBlock, at least, which is a massive relief. I also run (on the router) a large, and after significant modularisation by me, flexible dnsmasq blocklist that addresses another large set of issues. On desktop (Linux, MacOS), I have and use: NoScript, uBlock, uMatrix, and Stylish, as well as Reader Mode. It's still often less aggrevating to grab source or rendered text and create a standalone Markdown text, for various reasons. I'm looking into the notion of a browsing mode that presumes the website designer is an idiot and that the HTML markup is at best a hint at what the semantic structure ought to be -- see concepts such as POSH (Plain Old Structural HTML), and ... a few other things. Work in (very slow) progress.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Could have sworn i have seen a version of Noscript that worked with Firefox on Android.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        Checking: there are multiple javascript toggles, but not "Noscript" specifically AFAICT. "NJS" seems to be among the closest to that. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=javascript https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=javascrip...
        digi_owl 9y ago
        Ah, it never went beyond the alpha stage. https://noscript.net/nsa/ https://noscript.net/nsa/ Only reason i bumped into it was because i was toying with Tor for Android, and their fork(?) of Firefox had it bundled.
sunseb 9y ago
I agree modern websites look a lot nicer... Or do they? They all look the same: big images, not much text, the top bar, yeah this newsletter thing to upsell with these crappy (but effective) marketing techniques... Somehow I feel old school websites (HN, Reddit, and so) are more sticky, more addictive, more unique. They focus on what we really want: contents and communication with others.
- sunseb 9y ago
  Another thing I realized it's nonsense lately: object oriented programming. It's often an over-engineered bloat that only works for trivial Programming 101 courses (yeah the famous Employee or Bike class). But in 10+ years of programming, I found that OOP is just a complete mess (you end up with awful classes in your code like Service, Manager, AbstractFactory, and so). I wish we could just use variables and functions, that's all we need really. :)
  - ams6110 9y ago
    > I wish we could just use variables and functions, that's all we need really. You still can. You need decent data structures too, but I never in over 20 years really "got" OOP. It seemed needlessly complicated. Functions and data always seemed to do the job for me.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      OOP as most people get to know it seems to be a bleak application of the original concept. And the original was not aimed at dealing with the internals of a single program sitting on a single CPU, but grand simulations running on massive clusters. There each "object" would could very well be a process of its own, running on its own dedicated hardware. Effectively OOP became another one of those buzzwords on the bingo board...
  - rpeden 9y ago
    It depends on what kind of development you're doing. For most web and business programming I've done, at the end of the day I'm mostly just taking data and transforming it into other data. Most of the time, looking at these programs as a series of functions through which data gets piped to obtain the result works well. As a result I think that functional programming is a good fit a ton of code that is written using OOP. For fun, I tried converting some old side projects to F#. Once I'd gotten used to the language, I ended up being able to express the same ideas more clearly, and with fewer lines of code. Functional programming isn't magic, but it can be very effective when used in the right places. Lately, I've been getting into game development as a hobby. And when I'm simulating a miniature world with hundreds or thousands of stateful actors, I find that OOP works really well - in that the way to code models the game world aligns well with my mental model of the game world. You absolutely can program games using a functional style - I've just found OOP to be a better fit here for my uses. It's still useful to use a functional approach where you can, though, even inside an OOP game code base. John Carmack has written and spoken about this.
cableshaft 9y ago
Hit counters, guestbooks, web rings, autoplay midi files, under construction gif animations, cursor animations, HTML frames, etc. We've been adding unnecessary garbage to webpages since almost the very beginning of WWW.

nickjj 9y ago

It doesn't need to be slower. You can still use server rendered templates and have things load extremely fast. Most sites don't need 3mb of JS to show structured text.

digi_owl 9y ago

Over-design perhaps, but i would say that the web is under-engineered, as engineers would find the inefficiencies and get around them.