5 ms·

I think this is BS, practically all of the performance problems on the Web are related either to the DOM or CSS, which Web Workers can't fix. If you have a pho

I think this is BS, practically all of the performance problems on the Web are related either to the DOM or CSS, which Web Workers can't fix. If you have a phone from 2014, something's gonna jank. It doesn't mean you're excluded. It means you'll have to live with jank. You'll get over it.

chrismorgan 7y ago
Many websites have too much of everything, but UI-thread JS is definitely the most common largest performance problem that prevents you from using pages. It’s the biggest thing where an architectural re-think has the biggest effect—though certainly just cutting down on all things will improve performance too.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Can you show me an example? Like I said, I call BS on this. What website does a non-trivial amount of pure JS on the main thread? What even is the use-case? React reconciliation? Secondly, how does it prevent you from using a website? Sure, jank is annoying, but it doesn't entirely prevent you from using the site. Perhaps you give up on the site, but that's up to you.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    > What website does a non-trivial amount of pure JS on the main thread? I challenge you to run a browser with no ad-blocker installed for one week, then block JavaScript (e.g. with NoScript; or with uMatrix and block scripts; or by setting javascript.enabled to false in Firefox). Your eyes will be opened at just how much JS is run and how much it slows things down. > What even is the use-case? Mostly analytics, ad-serving, privacy invasion and laziness/inefficient coding. > how does it prevent you from using a website? When it’s bad enough (which it often is, on slower mobile devices), you reach the point where you can’t perform tasks in a timely fashion. I chose the word “prevents” deliberately, because that is how it ends up.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      > I challenge you to run a browser with no ad-blocker installed for one week, then block JavaScript (e.g. with NoScript; or with uMatrix and block scripts; or by setting javascript.enabled to false in Firefox). I was looking for an example of a "bad website" that I could profile, not to see how disabling Javascript makes things faster. Of course it does make things faster. It also breaks everything. > Mostly analytics, ad-serving, privacy invasion and laziness/inefficient coding. I remain unconvinced that most any of this could be moved out to a web worker. It sounds more like a "death by a thousand paper cuts". > When it’s bad enough (which it often is, on slower mobile devices), you reach the point where you can’t perform tasks in a timely fashion. I do use slower mobile devices for testing other websites, I have yet to come across one site that's absolutely unusable. Granted, I didn't test the whole WWW. I'll ask you again: Show me one example of such a site, where I can fire up the profiler and observe that it's really the Javascript code and not the DOM or CSS/Layout reflows that's causing the performance issues. Only then can we start figuring out if Web Workers might help - which often they can't, because they are very limited.

chrismorgan 7y ago

Many websites have too much of everything, but UI-thread JS is definitely the most common largest performance problem that prevents you from using pages. It’s the biggest thing where an architectural re-think has the biggest effect—though certainly just cutting down on all things will improve performance too.

gridlockd 7y ago
Can you show me an example? Like I said, I call BS on this. What website does a non-trivial amount of pure JS on the main thread? What even is the use-case? React reconciliation? Secondly, how does it prevent you from using a website? Sure, jank is annoying, but it doesn't entirely prevent you from using the site. Perhaps you give up on the site, but that's up to you.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  > What website does a non-trivial amount of pure JS on the main thread? I challenge you to run a browser with no ad-blocker installed for one week, then block JavaScript (e.g. with NoScript; or with uMatrix and block scripts; or by setting javascript.enabled to false in Firefox). Your eyes will be opened at just how much JS is run and how much it slows things down. > What even is the use-case? Mostly analytics, ad-serving, privacy invasion and laziness/inefficient coding. > how does it prevent you from using a website? When it’s bad enough (which it often is, on slower mobile devices), you reach the point where you can’t perform tasks in a timely fashion. I chose the word “prevents” deliberately, because that is how it ends up.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > I challenge you to run a browser with no ad-blocker installed for one week, then block JavaScript (e.g. with NoScript; or with uMatrix and block scripts; or by setting javascript.enabled to false in Firefox). I was looking for an example of a "bad website" that I could profile, not to see how disabling Javascript makes things faster. Of course it does make things faster. It also breaks everything. > Mostly analytics, ad-serving, privacy invasion and laziness/inefficient coding. I remain unconvinced that most any of this could be moved out to a web worker. It sounds more like a "death by a thousand paper cuts". > When it’s bad enough (which it often is, on slower mobile devices), you reach the point where you can’t perform tasks in a timely fashion. I do use slower mobile devices for testing other websites, I have yet to come across one site that's absolutely unusable. Granted, I didn't test the whole WWW. I'll ask you again: Show me one example of such a site, where I can fire up the profiler and observe that it's really the Javascript code and not the DOM or CSS/Layout reflows that's causing the performance issues. Only then can we start figuring out if Web Workers might help - which often they can't, because they are very limited.