6 ms·

I’ve been switching away from the web and back to native in a big way and it’s making my life much easier. The web sucks. It’s the worst part of modern computin

by marrs 5y ago

I’ve been switching away from the web and back to native in a big way and it’s making my life much easier. The web sucks. It’s the worst part of modern computing by far. It’s like wading through treacle. Even this article took an age to load and it’s just text. Frankly, I’m amazed Medium even allowed me to view it. Usually I’ve exceeded my ration card.

inter_netuser 5y ago
I wish there would be a way to block rationing websites, so that I don't even see them.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  How would that work in this case, would you just not see this entire HN post?
  - gverrilla 5y ago
    I wouldn't care, honestly.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  You could almost certainly do this with ublock origin and custom filters but you would probably miss out on some content worth reading.
smoldesu 5y ago
I recommend setting up a Nextcloud while you're at it. It's a great way to replace Google Drive without sacrificing privacy or functionality.
- marrs 5y ago
  I’ve thought about that, but for now I can manage with rsync. I’ll look at it again if I have to collaborate with non-technical people though.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Or if you can't drop Google Drive, use something like Cryptomator. I use it on top of my OneDrive and it works really well, both on all my desktops (Windows, Linux, Mac) and Android.
emodendroket 5y ago
Most of those gates are easily defeated by the "clear application storage" button in Chrome.
- marrs 5y ago
  echo “medium.com 127.0.0.1” >> /etc/hosts # works too :)
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I don't think the Web sucks, just what many have been building on it, certainly the most popular options. . . It is up to us to build something better, and the Web offers a better framework than most other options: Human-readable code, mostly text Decentralized and independent Great tooling for just about any platform 25+ years of public knowledge I think we're only beginning to see a new epoch of Web tools which: Can be run locally and remotely Support just about any browser, certainly no-JS and Lynx Work hard to help the user without demanding anything Allow easy migration of content between instances and instances between hosts Full honesty and transparency of internal works I might be a bit biased, since I have been writing such a thing, but almost every day I see another project here on HN which has similar values and functionality.
- marrs 5y ago
  I hope you’re right. Personally I think that epoch peaked with jQuery. I’ve been watching the culture of web development steadily descend from what you describe to whatever it is we have now. But software history is circular, so maybe those good times are coming again.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    software history is like rest of history. it won't repeat, but it will rhyme. c.f. endless attempts/experiences rediscovering basic principles behind UI toolkits now taking place in web-dev land. Not identical to 1990-2005, but rhymes like crazy.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    Yeah, I've been watching the same as you describe, and I think jQuery was the peak, but also the beginning of the descent into abstraction. A couple of years ago, I realized that the art of web development is about to be lost, and I started to re-learn all those lost skills, such as direct DOM manipulation, feature-checking, backwards compatibility testing, etc. I now have a reasonably functional website which works back to the earliest HTTP/1.1 browsers, like IE3 and NN2, classics like Windows Safari and Opera 12, and many many other lovable, once again usable browsers.
oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
> Even this article took an age to load and it’s just text. There's a few images, too, the first of which is ~2MB.
gentleman11 5y ago
I can learn things so quickly because of the web. When I was growing up, I couldn’t have dreamed that I could have access to so much without going to multiple libraries, and the thousands of video tutorials are just something new to humanity. The web doesn’t suck imho, although it does introduce some serious privacy issues
- spideymans 5y ago
  I don’t disagree with you, but I think the web was far better for learning a decade ago than it is now. Now I have to wade through paywalls, clickbait farms, SEO scams, useless auto-generated articles, etc… Some specific examples: When looking up resources on high school level mathematics, it appears that fully half of the content is paywalled. Often this paywalled content isn’t particularly valuable in the first place (eg, hiding a basic multiplication chart behind a paywall) And a more technical example: when I was learning the Angular framework, damn near all the results on Google were SEO scams. It was content masquerading as tutorials, but when you reach the end (often after investing significant time), they try to extract money from you to read the rest of the guide. It’s gotten to the point where I’d be willing to pay money to filter out all the garbage from the web.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    When looking up resources on high school level mathematics, it appears that fully half of the content is paywalled. For stuff like basic math, which literally hasn't changed for a century, I find the old books at archive.org to be very useful.
  - marrs 5y ago
    YouTube-dl is your friend. As for your attempts to learn Angular, maybe Google was doing you a favour ;) For the maths, look up Eddie Woo on YouTube
- marrs 5y ago
  I was referring more to the web as a runtime for apps. YouTube is full of great content but the app on my TV is pretty rubbbish. The website’s not bad in fairness
zzo38computer 5y ago
I have scripts disabled and some other things disabled. It loads fast for me.
efitz 5y ago
The web sucks because why would I possibly want random people to write code to execute on my machine when I just want to view content? The web is chock full of shit JavaScript; most of which is not adding value for me (ad placement, etc) and some of which is at odds with my interests (trackers, etc). We have every single web site wanting to give me some sort of unique experience when all I want is to navigate to the information I want and maybe buy something. I think that the web is insane. I want the web to deliver content and I want my client to present it to me in a way I control. Instead, every server wants to control my browser so they can control my experience and extract data from me. It messed up.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Twitter, followed closely by YouTube, is the epitome of this disease. Displaying short paragraphs of text with images and video is something web browsers have been perfectly capable of doing for decades (perhaps a little later with the video, but still more than a decade ago), and so is posting such short pieces of text and uploading files containing images and video. Yet these days, to do that somehow requires a disturbingly slow-loading and resource-consuming JS "webapp" that complains if you're not using one of the very few "supported" browsers or even just a slightly older version thereof, refuses to work with a "sorry, an error occurred" message frequently, and has a UI that looks like it was made for illiterate 5-year-olds? The average web forum works fine with absolutely NO JS, yet has a UI with a superior set of functionality and richness. Surprisingly, Twitter and YouTube used to be far more user-friendly and less resource-consuming than they are today. Then... I'm not sure what happened. I guess it could be called "the modern web".
  - amyjess 5y ago
    The sad part is that Twitter wasn't always like that. I remember old versions of Twitter being pretty snappy. Facebook too... the latest redesign is an abomination, and as much as I like having a dark mode, the new UI is so slow and so laggy that it makes me not want to use Facebook anymore. But I've been using Facebook since 2005 when it was just a LAMP system that served server-rendered HTML, and it was amazing. I remember my peers talking about how Facebook was so much better than MySpace because it was so clean and snappy.
tiew9Vii 5y ago
Native is now broken/deteriorating because of the web/online first obsession. I moved house last year and was on a very poor internet connection, 0.5Mbps up, 1Mbps down at best, often unreliable. This made using my computer (Mac's) unbearable! When I turned on the computer and it started up, apps that auto start in the task bar would phone home checking for updates or whatever and block until they timed out / got a response. The computer wasn't usable until all completed due to blocked UI. Opening an application the same. When opening an app it'd phone home to do what ever it does while blocking everything else until complete so can continue with the startup process. The obsession with analytics in apps made latency in apps much higher as I suspect analytics where being sent from the main thread instead of best effort in a background thread pulling from an event queue. Then there's the obsession of packaging a SPA webapp in it's own browser to run locally as a perceived native app, aka Electron. Take Teams/Slack both clunky, unresponsive user interfaces and resource hogs for what they are.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  Windows 10 works pretty well offline, FWIW. And of course you can make linux do almost anything you want it do.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Most everything works fine offline (think: airplane mode) - where it all goes to crap is when there is a connection but it’s slow, high latency, or losing packets. In fact, sometimes it’s worth it to hit airplane mode if your connection is bad until after everything is running.
    - OkGoDoIt 5y ago
      Exactly this. My personal hell recently has been the Audible app on iOS. I walk a lot and listen to audiobooks and often on my walks my cellular connection is not great, one bar or so. The Audible app had a redesign a year or two ago where it now instead of showing your library letting you play whatever you were listening to, it loads a home screen that tries to get you to buy more books, and you can’t do anything else until that finishes loading. But since it fails to load on a crappy connection, I usually end up killing the app, enabling airplane mode, and then re-opening the app. So stupid. For reference, my audiobooks are stored locally, a network connection is not required to continue playing. Yet somehow they have hindered the main functionality of the app by what I can only assume is sloppy coding.
fungiblecog 5y ago
Yes, the web gives us one feature - sharing - but at the cost that every other function is much much worse.
rektide 5y ago
> I’ve been switching away from the web and back to native in a big way and it’s making my life much easier. if you are on mobile it doesn't matter. mobile native is in at least half the cases just as post-file cloud-ified as the web. this change is coming for native apps too. no one escapes. blaming the web for this is shallow & sad to me. everyone is clamoring for adoption, for ease of use, for just works, and putting all the data in the cloud (and de-prioritizing user access) has been a hugely hugely successful trend (alas). I have no idea what web you are on but perhaps you should be using better sites that aren't waded through like treacle. person Nally this article loaded in under 3s on my 4 year old phone with no ad blockers (shame on me). load times vary a lot & it's easy to complain about but there are plenty of bad apps, not efficiently coded, that could better make use of features too. few apps are lively enough, have access to anywhere like the vast troves of data most sites interiorly contain, so it's also an absurd comparison.
- marrs 5y ago
  if you are on mobile it doesn't matter. I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I'm not saying that I'm ditching the Twitter website for the native Twitter app. I'm saying that I'm ditching Twitter. I'm also not blaming the web as a technology. I'm saying that websites are becoming unusable. I have no idea what web you are on but perhaps you should be using better sites that aren't waded through like treacle. We're both on Hacker News so I suspect we just have different standards. person Nally this article loaded in under 3s We have different standards. Let me show you how Medium compares to a website that isn't a pile of crap. https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-work-anymore-d276271bfa40 https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui... 16 requests, 257.63 KB / 67.48 KB transferred, Finish: 30.97 s, DOMContentLoaded: 2.53 s, load: 4.87 s. https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html 1 request, 1 MB / 206.34 KB transferred, Finish: 1.74 s, load: 2.69 s.
Hammershaft 5y ago
Obsidian is a great notetaking app that operates as an interface over your own standard accessible markdown files. More of that please.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> The web sucks. It’s the worst part of modern computing by far. It does and I understand you're speaking in the context of desktop. But what about mobile apps? I cannot imagine computing without web equivalent for mobile apps which often collect unnecessary data and on-average users are powerless to do anything about it. Worst are the mobile only applications, Hence applications like Clubhouse can get away with using mobile number as identifier. Not that I miss using Clubhouse on web, But just an example of what no-web computing looks like.
- marrs 5y ago
  I still belong to a WhatsApp group, but I’m plotting a course out of the social media empire. We should still have web apps where they add value - I’m writing one at the moment - but I’ve reduced my reliance on Google Suite in particular and I’m more productive as a result.

by marrs 5y ago

inter_netuser 5y ago

I wish there would be a way to block rationing websites, so that I don't even see them.

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
How would that work in this case, would you just not see this entire HN post?
- gverrilla 5y ago
  I wouldn't care, honestly.
michaelmrose 5y ago
You could almost certainly do this with ublock origin and custom filters but you would probably miss out on some content worth reading.

smoldesu 5y ago

I recommend setting up a Nextcloud while you're at it. It's a great way to replace Google Drive without sacrificing privacy or functionality.

marrs 5y ago
I’ve thought about that, but for now I can manage with rsync. I’ll look at it again if I have to collaborate with non-technical people though.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Or if you can't drop Google Drive, use something like Cryptomator. I use it on top of my OneDrive and it works really well, both on all my desktops (Windows, Linux, Mac) and Android.

emodendroket 5y ago

Most of those gates are easily defeated by the "clear application storage" button in Chrome.

marrs 5y ago
echo “medium.com 127.0.0.1” >> /etc/hosts # works too :)

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I don't think the Web sucks, just what many have been building on it, certainly the most popular options. . . It is up to us to build something better, and the Web offers a better framework than most other options: Human-readable code, mostly text Decentralized and independent Great tooling for just about any platform 25+ years of public knowledge I think we're only beginning to see a new epoch of Web tools which: Can be run locally and remotely Support just about any browser, certainly no-JS and Lynx Work hard to help the user without demanding anything Allow easy migration of content between instances and instances between hosts Full honesty and transparency of internal works I might be a bit biased, since I have been writing such a thing, but almost every day I see another project here on HN which has similar values and functionality.

marrs 5y ago
I hope you’re right. Personally I think that epoch peaked with jQuery. I’ve been watching the culture of web development steadily descend from what you describe to whatever it is we have now. But software history is circular, so maybe those good times are coming again.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  software history is like rest of history. it won't repeat, but it will rhyme. c.f. endless attempts/experiences rediscovering basic principles behind UI toolkits now taking place in web-dev land. Not identical to 1990-2005, but rhymes like crazy.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Yeah, I've been watching the same as you describe, and I think jQuery was the peak, but also the beginning of the descent into abstraction. A couple of years ago, I realized that the art of web development is about to be lost, and I started to re-learn all those lost skills, such as direct DOM manipulation, feature-checking, backwards compatibility testing, etc. I now have a reasonably functional website which works back to the earliest HTTP/1.1 browsers, like IE3 and NN2, classics like Windows Safari and Opera 12, and many many other lovable, once again usable browsers.

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago

> Even this article took an age to load and it’s just text. There's a few images, too, the first of which is ~2MB.

gentleman11 5y ago

I can learn things so quickly because of the web. When I was growing up, I couldn’t have dreamed that I could have access to so much without going to multiple libraries, and the thousands of video tutorials are just something new to humanity. The web doesn’t suck imho, although it does introduce some serious privacy issues

spideymans 5y ago
I don’t disagree with you, but I think the web was far better for learning a decade ago than it is now. Now I have to wade through paywalls, clickbait farms, SEO scams, useless auto-generated articles, etc… Some specific examples: When looking up resources on high school level mathematics, it appears that fully half of the content is paywalled. Often this paywalled content isn’t particularly valuable in the first place (eg, hiding a basic multiplication chart behind a paywall) And a more technical example: when I was learning the Angular framework, damn near all the results on Google were SEO scams. It was content masquerading as tutorials, but when you reach the end (often after investing significant time), they try to extract money from you to read the rest of the guide. It’s gotten to the point where I’d be willing to pay money to filter out all the garbage from the web.
- userbinator 5y ago
  When looking up resources on high school level mathematics, it appears that fully half of the content is paywalled. For stuff like basic math, which literally hasn't changed for a century, I find the old books at archive.org to be very useful.
- marrs 5y ago
  YouTube-dl is your friend. As for your attempts to learn Angular, maybe Google was doing you a favour ;) For the maths, look up Eddie Woo on YouTube
marrs 5y ago
I was referring more to the web as a runtime for apps. YouTube is full of great content but the app on my TV is pretty rubbbish. The website’s not bad in fairness

zzo38computer 5y ago

I have scripts disabled and some other things disabled. It loads fast for me.

efitz 5y ago

The web sucks because why would I possibly want random people to write code to execute on my machine when I just want to view content? The web is chock full of shit JavaScript; most of which is not adding value for me (ad placement, etc) and some of which is at odds with my interests (trackers, etc). We have every single web site wanting to give me some sort of unique experience when all I want is to navigate to the information I want and maybe buy something. I think that the web is insane. I want the web to deliver content and I want my client to present it to me in a way I control. Instead, every server wants to control my browser so they can control my experience and extract data from me. It messed up.

userbinator 5y ago
Twitter, followed closely by YouTube, is the epitome of this disease. Displaying short paragraphs of text with images and video is something web browsers have been perfectly capable of doing for decades (perhaps a little later with the video, but still more than a decade ago), and so is posting such short pieces of text and uploading files containing images and video. Yet these days, to do that somehow requires a disturbingly slow-loading and resource-consuming JS "webapp" that complains if you're not using one of the very few "supported" browsers or even just a slightly older version thereof, refuses to work with a "sorry, an error occurred" message frequently, and has a UI that looks like it was made for illiterate 5-year-olds? The average web forum works fine with absolutely NO JS, yet has a UI with a superior set of functionality and richness. Surprisingly, Twitter and YouTube used to be far more user-friendly and less resource-consuming than they are today. Then... I'm not sure what happened. I guess it could be called "the modern web".
- amyjess 5y ago
  The sad part is that Twitter wasn't always like that. I remember old versions of Twitter being pretty snappy. Facebook too... the latest redesign is an abomination, and as much as I like having a dark mode, the new UI is so slow and so laggy that it makes me not want to use Facebook anymore. But I've been using Facebook since 2005 when it was just a LAMP system that served server-rendered HTML, and it was amazing. I remember my peers talking about how Facebook was so much better than MySpace because it was so clean and snappy.

tiew9Vii 5y ago

Native is now broken/deteriorating because of the web/online first obsession. I moved house last year and was on a very poor internet connection, 0.5Mbps up, 1Mbps down at best, often unreliable. This made using my computer (Mac's) unbearable! When I turned on the computer and it started up, apps that auto start in the task bar would phone home checking for updates or whatever and block until they timed out / got a response. The computer wasn't usable until all completed due to blocked UI. Opening an application the same. When opening an app it'd phone home to do what ever it does while blocking everything else until complete so can continue with the startup process. The obsession with analytics in apps made latency in apps much higher as I suspect analytics where being sent from the main thread instead of best effort in a background thread pulling from an event queue. Then there's the obsession of packaging a SPA webapp in it's own browser to run locally as a perceived native app, aka Electron. Take Teams/Slack both clunky, unresponsive user interfaces and resource hogs for what they are.

LAC-Tech 5y ago
Windows 10 works pretty well offline, FWIW. And of course you can make linux do almost anything you want it do.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Most everything works fine offline (think: airplane mode) - where it all goes to crap is when there is a connection but it’s slow, high latency, or losing packets. In fact, sometimes it’s worth it to hit airplane mode if your connection is bad until after everything is running.
  - OkGoDoIt 5y ago
    Exactly this. My personal hell recently has been the Audible app on iOS. I walk a lot and listen to audiobooks and often on my walks my cellular connection is not great, one bar or so. The Audible app had a redesign a year or two ago where it now instead of showing your library letting you play whatever you were listening to, it loads a home screen that tries to get you to buy more books, and you can’t do anything else until that finishes loading. But since it fails to load on a crappy connection, I usually end up killing the app, enabling airplane mode, and then re-opening the app. So stupid. For reference, my audiobooks are stored locally, a network connection is not required to continue playing. Yet somehow they have hindered the main functionality of the app by what I can only assume is sloppy coding.

fungiblecog 5y ago

Yes, the web gives us one feature - sharing - but at the cost that every other function is much much worse.

rektide 5y ago

> I’ve been switching away from the web and back to native in a big way and it’s making my life much easier. if you are on mobile it doesn't matter. mobile native is in at least half the cases just as post-file cloud-ified as the web. this change is coming for native apps too. no one escapes. blaming the web for this is shallow & sad to me. everyone is clamoring for adoption, for ease of use, for just works, and putting all the data in the cloud (and de-prioritizing user access) has been a hugely hugely successful trend (alas). I have no idea what web you are on but perhaps you should be using better sites that aren't waded through like treacle. person Nally this article loaded in under 3s on my 4 year old phone with no ad blockers (shame on me). load times vary a lot & it's easy to complain about but there are plenty of bad apps, not efficiently coded, that could better make use of features too. few apps are lively enough, have access to anywhere like the vast troves of data most sites interiorly contain, so it's also an absurd comparison.

marrs 5y ago
if you are on mobile it doesn't matter. I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I'm not saying that I'm ditching the Twitter website for the native Twitter app. I'm saying that I'm ditching Twitter. I'm also not blaming the web as a technology. I'm saying that websites are becoming unusable. I have no idea what web you are on but perhaps you should be using better sites that aren't waded through like treacle. We're both on Hacker News so I suspect we just have different standards. person Nally this article loaded in under 3s We have different standards. Let me show you how Medium compares to a website that isn't a pile of crap. https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-work-anymore-d276271bfa40 https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui... 16 requests, 257.63 KB / 67.48 KB transferred, Finish: 30.97 s, DOMContentLoaded: 2.53 s, load: 4.87 s. https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html 1 request, 1 MB / 206.34 KB transferred, Finish: 1.74 s, load: 2.69 s.

Hammershaft 5y ago

Obsidian is a great notetaking app that operates as an interface over your own standard accessible markdown files. More of that please.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> The web sucks. It’s the worst part of modern computing by far. It does and I understand you're speaking in the context of desktop. But what about mobile apps? I cannot imagine computing without web equivalent for mobile apps which often collect unnecessary data and on-average users are powerless to do anything about it. Worst are the mobile only applications, Hence applications like Clubhouse can get away with using mobile number as identifier. Not that I miss using Clubhouse on web, But just an example of what no-web computing looks like.

marrs 5y ago
I still belong to a WhatsApp group, but I’m plotting a course out of the social media empire. We should still have web apps where they add value - I’m writing one at the moment - but I’ve reduced my reliance on Google Suite in particular and I’m more productive as a result.