4 ms·
> Web browsers are faster than ever before, but web sites are bloatier than ever before, eating up all the hardware and software capabilities. Are they? Have w
by kllrnohj 8y ago
> Web browsers are faster than ever before, but web sites are bloatier than ever before, eating up all the hardware and software capabilities.
Are they? Have web browsers actually gotten any faster at all over the last, say, 5 years? 10?
JS engines got a bit faster, but what about CSS & HTML parsing? 2D rendering performance? Layout engine performance? DOM performance? Mozilla made a bit of noise about this a year or two ago with their whole Project Quantum push - but had you ever heard a peep about this stuff prior to that? Or since? Nobody benchmarks this stuff, and yet it's insanely critical to interactive performance. But since it's harder to measure than JS performance, the only thing ever measured is JS performance. And occasionally, rarely, page load speeds.
Open up a 10MB plain text file in Chrome and it completely falls over. Zero JS. Zero CSS. Zero HTML. Just plain text. Are modern browsers really fast?
And for what it's worth modern computers are wide - 4 core with SMT is damn near low end these days. Yet the web is still incredibly stuck in the single-thread mode of operation. Both the browser internally and the platform itself (WebWorkers are far too slow, heavy, and restricted to meaningfully be used to offload interactive work). And there's almost no work being done to address this. WASM's threads are the only sliver of light here on the platform side. Is it really surprising that people throw RAM at the problem as a result? Throwing more caches at things is the natural response to being heavily starved for CPU on the single thread you can use.
- webmobdev 8y agoAgree 100% with you. All we have to do is look at the Opera browser with their Presto rendering engine to realise the truth of this - it really rattled Internet Explorer and Microsoft with its super fast rendering speed and small size that made it easy to download on slow connections. It made Internet Explorer and Firefox look like clunky and slow bloats of software. Opera was so good that they were able to charge for it, and despite the free browsers available many people bought it.
- zeroname 8y agoI'm not sure that's a fair comparison though, Presto didn't support HTML as thoroughly and it has since dropped out of the race entirely. We can't be piling more and more high-level crap onto the standard and expect Moore's law to keep up with it.
- webmobdev 8y agoAs far as I remember, Opera with its own rendering engine used to be one of the most web standards compliant browsers. That said, my point stands - I was pointing out how browsers like Firefox and Chrome are still bloated softwares compared to early Opera (pre Blink, Presto versions). Them "dropping out of the race" is irrelevant to that aspect.
- kirion25 8y agoIt's actually the opposite, Opera (Presto) was stricter in its adherence to standards. It was the first/second (depending on OS) to pass the acid 2 tests, and constantly was among the top scorers. That said, there were often compatibility problems on various websites, because they favored IE (which wasn't standards compliant), and rarely if ever tested on Opera.
- paulddraper 8y agoExactly. JS is absuerdly fast (comparatively). The DOM/rendering is sluggish (comparatively). The observation is the driving point behind virtual DOM. Also why high performance rendering uses Canvas or WebGL, at the expense of debugging tools, browser extensions, and accessibility.