9 ms·

> The Dark Age - Somewhere on this path to render pages on the fly (SSR) and render pages on the client (SPA) we forgot about the performance of our webpages. W

• amluto 7y ago
  > But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. And we really have come full circle. Gmail performance, at least on Firefox, is awful.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    Whether or not this is true, when Gmail came out, it was WAY better (including faster) than everything that it competed with.
    • wolco 7y ago
      It was never faster then squirrelmail. It had cool features search was fast. But loading up your mailbox never as fast as other solutions.
      • robbrown451 7y ago
        I was considering things like Hotmail and Yahoo mail to be competitors. Free, ad supported, web based email. Was Squirrelmail that? I don't know I've hardly heard of it.
        • paulmd 7y ago
          Squirrelmail is a GNU licensed webmail client. If you get a domain and hosting and they provide webmail for your domain, it's likely through Squirrelmail or one of a handful of competitors
  • eyegor 7y ago
    Its performance is so horrible that even on a high spec machine with fast internet, you have plenty of time to click the "switch to plain ol html" button. Which is actually more in line with the performance I'd expect from a glorified file drawer.
    • waheoo 7y ago
      Loads instantly for me on FF desktop and laptop running linux. But i have experienced what youre talking about. You either have graphics hardware support disabled or youre laptop CPU is not running in perfoance mode and has its govenor set to something like balanced or power saving mode.
      • crooked-v 7y ago
        ...why is a web-based email client depending on graphics hardware?
        • alharith 7y ago
          The same reason your desktop based email client probably depends on it. It’s 2020 and developers are starting to make use of all the modern browser features. It’s time to stop thinking like the browser is some fickle thing that needs to be caressed and treat it like a sandboxed OS environment for delivering apps and content.
          • int_19h 7y ago
            We had rich desktop email clients - with more features than GMail - running on sub-GHz CPUs with integrated graphics. They also had better UI.
            • x3haloed 7y ago
              Obviously native code is faster than a generalized scripting language for the web. Again, it's all about what you're trying to achieve. You can still use those fast native clients, but you can also access your Gmail from any device that has a web browser, which is basically everything. If Gmail is slow today, then obviously Google has lost sight of that point.
  • stevewodil 7y ago
    It's of course perfectly fine using chrome, which may or may not be indicative of a serious problem for the open web
  • x3haloed 7y ago
    I was talking about the early Beta releases that caught on like fire. Specifically with their use of XHR. That doesn't mean that web apps are always slow and bloated.
• chmod775 7y ago
  > But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. Gmail is terrible. It's slow and most people prefer the static html version.
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    > It's slow and most people prefer the static html version. The only people I've ever heard talk about the static html version are a few HNers. I'd wager 99% of people don't care, don't mind their email client's first load being slow (they just keep it open in a tab anyways), and don't even know about the static html version.
    • movedx 7y ago
      > The only people I've ever heard talk about the static html version are a few HNers. I'd wager 99% of people don't care, don't mind their email client's first load being slow (they just keep it open in a tab anyways), and don't even know about the static html version. Are you claiming that because people are ignorant of an option that is clearly better for them, the option is redundant? So if people don't care about something, it's not better by definition of that fact?
      • ymolodtsov 7y ago
        Exactly zero everyday people switch to HTML-version. I’ve never seen anyone doing it in the wild. This sub-thread is just peak Hacker News.
        • movedx 7y ago
          > I’ve never seen anyone doing it in the wild. You watch people as they use Gmail? You actively ask them? I guess if YOU haven't seen anyone do it, no one must be doing it.
    • karatestomp 7y ago
      Most people know Google’s webapps are slow, they just don’t know how to do anything about it. Or they notice it as worse battery life and fans running constantly and think there’s something wrong with their laptop because they don’t realize a web app can cause that, or even know what a webapp is.
• WDCDev 7y ago
  > Use the right technology for what you're trying to build. Yep .. so if you want a rich responsive user experience, DON'T use any web technologies. GMail (AND Gsuite) is a perfect example of how a relatively simple concept like email can be turned into a slow, unresponsive piece of garbage.
  • karatestomp 7y ago
    I'm about 99% sure the store on the PS3 was webtech. That beast of a machine could barely run its own store. They lost a lot of money from me as a result of the store being super-slow, input laggy, and crashy (OOM I assume), and I can't be the only one. PS4 feels like they've taken webtech all over the OS interface. Its store's snappier than the 3 but the rest of the interface performs way worse. Usable, but far less pleasant. [EDIT] store should be snappier than the 3, mind, since it's way more powerful hardware—it's still kinda slow, considering.
    • paranoidrobot 7y ago
      All sorts of devices with some kind of UI are using a browser in some kind of kiosk/headless mode. STBs, Smart TVs, IFE systems are or were web based.
      • zitterbewegung 7y ago
        To be honest as time goes on the Smart piece of your device starts to get slower and slower. One of the main drivers for getting a amazon fire stick is that it is much more responsive than the Smart TV itself.
        • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
          I thought that but the Youtube app on both my smart tv and Apple TV are broken in exactly the same way and unusable without a regular reboot.
  • zitterbewegung 7y ago
• uk_programmer 7y ago
  > Pfff - That's completely wrong. SPAs are all about performance. Why are they consistently slower than especially when there is low bandwidth or bad reception (lost packets)? Your large JS script has to be downloaded and parsed by the browser. This is fine when you have high bandwidth and low package loss. But if the opposite is true that initial hit to get all your JS code can be really painful. Writing really fast JS is hard and is not normally something that can be done in a framework. I know React is better than things like Angular, but there is nothing faster than vanilla JS. I write a lot of pure JS and I write stuff to be very fast. However it requires more effort and a higher skill bar (to the point where I am weaker at server side development and terrible with databases). A lot of SPAs can be replaced with with a post back mechanism and some caching of assets (CSS etc) and a sprinkling of Ajax. The less you have to download, parse etc can really make things less painful when you are in that situation. The problem is that many developers don't bother to learn JavaScript properly so unless you give them a framework like Angular or similar you end up with the jQuery spagetti of the past. > Says who? I understand that the underlying structures of the web are all about transferring documents and other resources. But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. Why shouldn't we pursue that? Just because the original web architecture didn't account for it? Documents and other resources are content. It is about displaying content in a meaningful manner to the user. If it is something that the browser can't render (word docs for example) you need to deal with that appropriately. Sometimes a plain page with some links to download your files is more than sufficient. I used the old gmail lite version for years because it was faster and did most of the same things. If you gave that interface some nicer CSS most people probably couldn't tell that it was quite old (if done right). > Why shouldn't we pursue that? Just because the original web architecture didn't account for it? Generally the browser already knows how to deal with HTTP and the OS knows how to deal with documents you download (if it has the right programs installed). So I think generally things just end up better when you try to keep as things were intended to be built. I do however have the attitude of "the water takes the shape of the container" attitude to development. Whereas others don't.
• ksec 7y ago
  >Says who? I understand that the underlying structures of the web are all about transferring documents and other resources. But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. I have always thought Gmail wasn't really an App, and shouldn't / doesn't need to be an App. There are lots of so called Apps are nothing more than some documents with some interactivity. But people start using Javascript for everything. I hope Hey.com will prove this soon.
• satyrnein 7y ago
  Gmail is literally a document browser. I think Google Maps might be a better example.
  • sgustard 7y ago
    Amen. I feel like no one remembers the days of Mapquest where you'd click "next tile" and then watch the page reload just to scroll a few miles north, then repeat.
  • x3haloed 7y ago
    Google Maps is definitely a great example. I chose Gmail as my example, because from what I've read, that's where XHR was born, which is what I view as the birth of web apps. It's the idea that you don't have to pull an entirely new document from a server to update a small part of the view. I think that transforms the web from a simple document transfer system into something capable of behaving like an application.
    • youngtaff 7y ago
      Microsoft developed XHR in 1999 to support Outlook on the web.
• superkuh 7y ago
  > Says who? Everyone who isn't only on the web to try to make money. That's who. But all you for-profit types are runining it. As the browser becomes more powerful it is more important to secure it. As security becomes more important features are removed and the browser begins telling the user what they can and cannot do. And on the webmaster side it becomes infeasible for browsers to display your site or search engines to index it unless you depend upon the leased whim of third parties to get your centralized authority signed SSL cert.
  • buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
    > But all you for-profit types are runining it As someone who loves the internet largely due to all the cool things people have made for profit, I can’t imagine how they for profit people have hurt the internet more than they have helped it. You and I wouldn’t be talking right now if it weren’t for a company making hacker news for profit.
    • ethanwillis 7y ago
      That's not true we would be talking on something else. In fact, the forums of yore were much better communities than places like Hacker News. And sadly Hacker News is probably one of the better communities on the internet today.
      • whatarethembits 7y ago
        Ditto. Intrusion of for-profit entities into online communities have well and truly killed the spirit. I base that on the fact that being exposed on any online destination where people congregate these days such as, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news, Facebook, for even a few minutes a day results in me feeling tired, demotivated, sluggish, angry, confused and just generally down. This is in stark opposition to how hanging around in communities of yester year felt. Further, I'm 27 so it's not like I'm some old veteran that yearns for the 90s or something but the quality has palpably gone down year after year. Sure there are small enclaves within these behemoths that somewhat manage to preserve a pleasant community but they're increasingly hard to find and only a matter of time before they too lose that magic to effects of profit driven actions. Welp, on we go to the next post to read opinions of a nauseatingly self-assured tech nerd, who makes an above average living, declare everyone beneath as failed experiments of nature based on supreme principles of the free market..
• x3haloed 7y ago
  Update: OK, OK. I'm getting a lot of responses saying that Gmail is a bad example to use, because it's slow and bloated. I've responded to a few of those comments, but I think it should be addressed on a higher level. To clarify, I said "Gmail showed us", because from what I've read, the early Beta releases are where XHR was born, which is what I view as the birth of web apps. It's the idea that you don't have to pull an entirely new document from a server to update a small part of the view, which translates into a more seamless experience typical of native apps. I think that transforms the web from a simple document transfer system into something capable of behaving like an application. I think the explosion of JS frameworks since then are about how to effectively manage the use of XHR to update the view.