8 ms·

How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must

How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?

theodric 5y ago
Chrome became so bloated and crap and slow that in 2020 I moved over to Firefox (which has been imperfect, but better), so my anecdata suggests that browsers don't actually get faster overall, but ebb and flow as feature creep and optimization compete for dominance.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  Typing this on Midori Android, it feels faast! I was using Firefox until a few days ago, but I feel I should change. That's on a Galaxy S4, mind you. Dillo is blazing fast on desktop, but doesn't support https very well. It also doesn't support JavaScript, which isn't a big deal to me.
- art0rz 5y ago
  To me it feels like bloated browser profiles makes the browsers sluggish. I get annoyed with how slow Chrome is, so I switch Firefox. After a while the Firefox profile gets bloated and I get annoyed and switch back to Chrome with a clean profile and it feels really quick again. Ad infinitum.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    The fix for 99% of firefox problems is: firefox -p, make a new profile
  - pabs3 5y ago
    The Firefox profile manager and Chrome temporary files would let you test this theory.
  - ksec 5y ago
    I dont understand how profile could make such a difference but that is also my experience as well. Everything is fast in a clean profile.
    - jd3 5y ago
      On Firefox, if you have an unbelievably large number of entries in your History, Bookmarks, and/or Downloads (your Firefox "Library" — chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml), you could theoretically become limited by insert/update performance in Firefox's embedded sqlite, I believe.
sirk390 5y ago
Https multiplied latency by three when opening websites compared to 10/15years ago where many websites were http. And also many websites include more tracking, for example Google search results used to directly send you to the result page. Now they first send you to Google so that they know you clicked but it also adds noticeable latency.
- no1lives4ever 5y ago
  With the advent of CDNs, edge routing and global hosting, things have actually gotten way better for those of us who use US based websites from the other side of the world. I am from India and back in 1990s the latency used to be huge because we had internet via satellite. Then we got internet via submarine cables but even with that latency is > 300ms for a server based in the US. Now in 2021, most popular websites use CDNs and have servers based out datacentres closer to India and the page load speed and latency has gone down significantly for us. But page bloat is a different matter, I still remember spending the greater part of a day (or maybe more0 downloading the MSIE 2.0 installer on a 1200bps dial up modem. Today page sizes > 1mb are common even on mobile sites.
- xnx 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure Google currently uses an async ping https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp) instead of a redirect to log what's been clicked. It's been a very long time (if ever?) since they didn't have result click logging at all.
  - sirk390 5y ago
    Indeed, I didn't know about the ping attribute. However, you will see they still do click tracking on the google image results for example. And if you check this article from 2013, you will see that they had it back then (I'm not sure when they removed it): https://chainsawonatireswing.com/2013/03/20/how-to-disable-googles-click-tracking-crapification-of-search-result-urls/ https://chainsawonatireswing.com/2013/03/20/how-to-disable-g...
gostsamo 5y ago
Jevons paradox to the rescue: the more ads you can handle, the more you will be served.
vultour 5y ago
Why is this comment flagged?
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  Some 10x rockstar developer with a wrinklebrain considered it low IQ rambling and got offended but got quickly btfo by fellow smoothbrain hackernews readers who share my sentiments.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Popular apps will be as slow as user can tolerate. Because if they're not slow enough, it invites developers to introduce another abstraction layer. Good thing is, that it's possible to create truly groundbreaking apps using non-conventional techniques, as web becomes faster and richer with new APIs. For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. Someone will do it. It'll be awesome. I have one example to prove my words. I used iPhone 4S. With iOS 6 I was able to use navigator software which worked very snappy and awesome. Few years later with iOS 9, navigator was very slow, forcing me to buy new phone eventually. With iPhone 8 it returned to blazing fast. But it did not have any new functions. They just started to consume more memory, just because they can. My UX did not change a little bit. I just had to buy new phone with infinitely faster CPU and loads of RAM, just to keep my UX from degrading.
- mofosyne 5y ago
  If only we can charge a price for taking up too much ram or cpu cycles.
  - eru 5y ago
    Just don't use it?
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  > For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. This has been promised since at least the WebGL and asm.js days. It still won't happen, but not mainly for technical reasons, but for business reasons. ...but of course also some technical reasons. Asm.js/WASM and WebGL/WebGPU are fine, but most other web APIs are a mess and the web is a highly unstable platform, APIs are deactivated or deprecated on a whim, APIs change behaviour unpredictably, behaviour differs between browsers, etc etc... TL;DR: the web needs a proper "DirectX initiative" like what Microsoft did in the late 90's to get Windows gaming off the ground.
  - nsomaru 5y ago
    What are the business reasons? Surely the web is just a platform for delivery? Payment etc can happen through the browser.
afgrant 5y ago
It has been for more than a decade: “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
flohofwoe 5y ago
Not just the internet: case in point, the new Xcode 13 has some really embarassing performance problems on my mid-2014 13"MBP. I guess the Xcode team switched to shiny new M1 Macs between Xcode 12 and 13.
- realusername 5y ago
  It's good I need to use the apple laptop & Xcode only just to build my flutter app, otherwise I would have given up just how slow it is, every click takes ~5 seconds.
- afgrant 5y ago
  I don’t intend this as facetious, but how many years do you expect closed-source OS vendors to support their first-party hardware?
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    The thing is, this is in areas that worked fine for over a decade. Somebody must have decided that Xcode's text input code (that's one of the things that got slower) needs to be rewritten for no obvious reasons, but then didn't optimize it as much as the old code. What's the point of new hardware if the new software that's written for it makes it just as slow (or in this case: much slower) than the old hardware?
  - ddalex 5y ago
    not OP, but for the lifetime of the hardware ? or, at least, should be specified in T&C when buying the hardware I am still pissed off that my 2012 Macbook Air is no longer receiving OS updates - compare that to Microsoft that allows me to run windows on basically any PC
    - afgrant 5y ago
      The “lifetime of the hardware” is defined by the lifetime of the supporting software, which ultimately boils down to the popularity of the platform you’re on
easygenes 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder how much of this feeling comes from expecting more from more power/thermal/area constrained devices. My experience working with top-shelf workstation-grade CPUs in mid-tower cases with excellent cooling is far separated from my experience even with M1 Macs. Having 16 cores, 64GB+ RAM, and 300W of thermal capacity is a big improvement. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-5950x https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Compare Zen 3 to M1... M1 is a generation ahead in lithography and enjoys an appreciable thermal/efficiency advantage resultingly. Zen 3 and M1 have neck-and-neck single core performance on many tasks. Yet Zen 3 can offer many more cores and make up for its efficiency in raw thermal envelope availability. Then also the expectation from older and more inexpensive devices. If one gets used to M1-level performance, a $200 CPU from 4 years ago starts to look quite slow; e.g., the Ryzen 5 1600: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-5-1600 https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Once we start to look at the truly power constrained, say a mainstream phone from a few years ago; let's say the iPhone 8/X since it's one of the best selling in recent history. Then you're at about 50% of the single threaded performance AND working with fewer cores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones#2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a11_bionic-1655-vs-apple_m1-1804 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a11_bionic-1... There is another large factor at play in the past 20 years in particular though: that is the increasing predominance of "Python-like" languages. I mean that in the sense that more of the code we interact with on a daily basis is written at a very high level than 20 years ago. Python in particular is just about the least efficient of all the most widely deployed languages. Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency: https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf 2021 Top Languages: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/
solarkraft 5y ago
What the browser giveth, the web developer taketh away. I tremendously hate it and it’s not like developers are incapable of building performant software, quite the opposite. But that’s just not where the resources go. The common sentiment (I have heard this directly uttered) is “If the user has 8GB of RAM, why wouldn’t I use it?”.
- wahern 5y ago
  Recent exceptions: 1) Chrome in Android has recently begun to hang when trying to go back to a previous page. It's gotten so bad that I end up clicking multiple times, which all register in rapid succession. If I click more times than the history depth for the tab (say 3 or 4), I end up back on the home screen and a lost tab with lost (or at least not conveniently recoverable) history. 2) AMP. When Google began pushing AMP my objections were mostly based on principle; performance was mostly a wash for me. Now the AMP viewer is so slow and so crash prone that I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I'm glad to see that AMP is clearly failing. On the other hand, Android and Chrome still strongly favor AMP, and I'm too lazy to wrestle with Google over default settings, so when I don't have the presence of mind to explicitly open a web site (e.g. when using Google News) I'm left to suffer the poor performance and bugginess in addition to other intentional AMP headaches--lack of copy+paste, less scrolling and zooming control, etc. Not quite the same thing, but related, technologies like QUIC are really only beneficial in the context of a web ecosystem built by Google. QUIC shines on websites pulling in many resources from disparate hosts, which in most cases is a situation created by advertising and analytics services. IOW, these days much of the benefits of Google's work simply pays down the debts Google itself created or advocated. And while Google still stands out for the amount of labor it invests in open source security and performance, it's just a matter of time before we pass break even into negative return territory. That happened long ago with Google Search itself; Google Search results are as slow, irrelevant, and obscured by obnoxious and misleading advertising as the competitors it originally, rapidly displaced. Heck, when Google began those investments (Android, Chrome, OS security, etc) they were crystal clear why they were making them--to nurture and grow an ecosystem into which they could grow their advertising business, same as their rationale for making a snappy search service and a non-intrusive advertising network. There's a limit to how well they can improve that ecosystem, but the limit for exploiting that ecosystem can easily result into a situation far worse than the one Google originally saved us all from. Consider why rendering work is even relevant in 2021. It's not for the benefit of services like Netflix or YouTube, which already enjoy low-power hardware acceleration, and arguably not for games or similar interactive content. It's so they can continue shifting their advertising ecosystem from minimalistic text-focused display boxes to animations and videos peppered up, down, over, and under content views. They can't do that if advertising-laden web pages drain your battery in 15 minutes, as notorious Flash-based ads once did. Steve Jobs' famously removed Flash from mobile; Google, for obvious reasons, is taking the alternative path.
cblconfederate 5y ago
The only solution to that is if the browser starts absorbing more of the stuff that developers now use javascript for, like UI components etc.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Designers will wrinkle their noses at standard components and will ask something custom to stand out.
  - eru 5y ago
    Perhaps something like exokernels for the browser might be the solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
I haven't had a faster processor in years. (Maybe decades?) (But they get more power efficient and quieter, this is true.)

theodric 5y ago

Chrome became so bloated and crap and slow that in 2020 I moved over to Firefox (which has been imperfect, but better), so my anecdata suggests that browsers don't actually get faster overall, but ebb and flow as feature creep and optimization compete for dominance.

MayeulC 5y ago
Typing this on Midori Android, it feels faast! I was using Firefox until a few days ago, but I feel I should change. That's on a Galaxy S4, mind you. Dillo is blazing fast on desktop, but doesn't support https very well. It also doesn't support JavaScript, which isn't a big deal to me.
art0rz 5y ago
To me it feels like bloated browser profiles makes the browsers sluggish. I get annoyed with how slow Chrome is, so I switch Firefox. After a while the Firefox profile gets bloated and I get annoyed and switch back to Chrome with a clean profile and it feels really quick again. Ad infinitum.
- mavhc 5y ago
  The fix for 99% of firefox problems is: firefox -p, make a new profile
- pabs3 5y ago
  The Firefox profile manager and Chrome temporary files would let you test this theory.
- ksec 5y ago
  I dont understand how profile could make such a difference but that is also my experience as well. Everything is fast in a clean profile.
  - jd3 5y ago
    On Firefox, if you have an unbelievably large number of entries in your History, Bookmarks, and/or Downloads (your Firefox "Library" — chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml), you could theoretically become limited by insert/update performance in Firefox's embedded sqlite, I believe.

sirk390 5y ago

Https multiplied latency by three when opening websites compared to 10/15years ago where many websites were http. And also many websites include more tracking, for example Google search results used to directly send you to the result page. Now they first send you to Google so that they know you clicked but it also adds noticeable latency.

no1lives4ever 5y ago
With the advent of CDNs, edge routing and global hosting, things have actually gotten way better for those of us who use US based websites from the other side of the world. I am from India and back in 1990s the latency used to be huge because we had internet via satellite. Then we got internet via submarine cables but even with that latency is > 300ms for a server based in the US. Now in 2021, most popular websites use CDNs and have servers based out datacentres closer to India and the page load speed and latency has gone down significantly for us. But page bloat is a different matter, I still remember spending the greater part of a day (or maybe more0 downloading the MSIE 2.0 installer on a 1200bps dial up modem. Today page sizes > 1mb are common even on mobile sites.
xnx 5y ago
I'm pretty sure Google currently uses an async ping https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp) instead of a redirect to log what's been clicked. It's been a very long time (if ever?) since they didn't have result click logging at all.
- sirk390 5y ago
  Indeed, I didn't know about the ping attribute. However, you will see they still do click tracking on the google image results for example. And if you check this article from 2013, you will see that they had it back then (I'm not sure when they removed it): https://chainsawonatireswing.com/2013/03/20/how-to-disable-googles-click-tracking-crapification-of-search-result-urls/ https://chainsawonatireswing.com/2013/03/20/how-to-disable-g...

gostsamo 5y ago

Jevons paradox to the rescue: the more ads you can handle, the more you will be served.

vultour 5y ago

Why is this comment flagged?

Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Some 10x rockstar developer with a wrinklebrain considered it low IQ rambling and got offended but got quickly btfo by fellow smoothbrain hackernews readers who share my sentiments.

vbezhenar 5y ago

Popular apps will be as slow as user can tolerate. Because if they're not slow enough, it invites developers to introduce another abstraction layer. Good thing is, that it's possible to create truly groundbreaking apps using non-conventional techniques, as web becomes faster and richer with new APIs. For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. Someone will do it. It'll be awesome. I have one example to prove my words. I used iPhone 4S. With iOS 6 I was able to use navigator software which worked very snappy and awesome. Few years later with iOS 9, navigator was very slow, forcing me to buy new phone eventually. With iPhone 8 it returned to blazing fast. But it did not have any new functions. They just started to consume more memory, just because they can. My UX did not change a little bit. I just had to buy new phone with infinitely faster CPU and loads of RAM, just to keep my UX from degrading.

mofosyne 5y ago
If only we can charge a price for taking up too much ram or cpu cycles.
- eru 5y ago
  Just don't use it?
flohofwoe 5y ago
> For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. This has been promised since at least the WebGL and asm.js days. It still won't happen, but not mainly for technical reasons, but for business reasons. ...but of course also some technical reasons. Asm.js/WASM and WebGL/WebGPU are fine, but most other web APIs are a mess and the web is a highly unstable platform, APIs are deactivated or deprecated on a whim, APIs change behaviour unpredictably, behaviour differs between browsers, etc etc... TL;DR: the web needs a proper "DirectX initiative" like what Microsoft did in the late 90's to get Windows gaming off the ground.
- nsomaru 5y ago
  What are the business reasons? Surely the web is just a platform for delivery? Payment etc can happen through the browser.

afgrant 5y ago

It has been for more than a decade: “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

flohofwoe 5y ago

Not just the internet: case in point, the new Xcode 13 has some really embarassing performance problems on my mid-2014 13"MBP. I guess the Xcode team switched to shiny new M1 Macs between Xcode 12 and 13.

realusername 5y ago
It's good I need to use the apple laptop & Xcode only just to build my flutter app, otherwise I would have given up just how slow it is, every click takes ~5 seconds.
afgrant 5y ago
I don’t intend this as facetious, but how many years do you expect closed-source OS vendors to support their first-party hardware?
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  The thing is, this is in areas that worked fine for over a decade. Somebody must have decided that Xcode's text input code (that's one of the things that got slower) needs to be rewritten for no obvious reasons, but then didn't optimize it as much as the old code. What's the point of new hardware if the new software that's written for it makes it just as slow (or in this case: much slower) than the old hardware?
- ddalex 5y ago
  not OP, but for the lifetime of the hardware ? or, at least, should be specified in T&C when buying the hardware I am still pissed off that my 2012 Macbook Air is no longer receiving OS updates - compare that to Microsoft that allows me to run windows on basically any PC
  - afgrant 5y ago
    The “lifetime of the hardware” is defined by the lifetime of the supporting software, which ultimately boils down to the popularity of the platform you’re on

easygenes 5y ago

Sometimes I wonder how much of this feeling comes from expecting more from more power/thermal/area constrained devices. My experience working with top-shelf workstation-grade CPUs in mid-tower cases with excellent cooling is far separated from my experience even with M1 Macs. Having 16 cores, 64GB+ RAM, and 300W of thermal capacity is a big improvement. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-5950x https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Compare Zen 3 to M1... M1 is a generation ahead in lithography and enjoys an appreciable thermal/efficiency advantage resultingly. Zen 3 and M1 have neck-and-neck single core performance on many tasks. Yet Zen 3 can offer many more cores and make up for its efficiency in raw thermal envelope availability. Then also the expectation from older and more inexpensive devices. If one gets used to M1-level performance, a $200 CPU from 4 years ago starts to look quite slow; e.g., the Ryzen 5 1600: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-5-1600 https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Once we start to look at the truly power constrained, say a mainstream phone from a few years ago; let's say the iPhone 8/X since it's one of the best selling in recent history. Then you're at about 50% of the single threaded performance AND working with fewer cores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones#2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a11_bionic-1655-vs-apple_m1-1804 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a11_bionic-1... There is another large factor at play in the past 20 years in particular though: that is the increasing predominance of "Python-like" languages. I mean that in the sense that more of the code we interact with on a daily basis is written at a very high level than 20 years ago. Python in particular is just about the least efficient of all the most widely deployed languages. Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency: https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf 2021 Top Languages: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/

solarkraft 5y ago

What the browser giveth, the web developer taketh away. I tremendously hate it and it’s not like developers are incapable of building performant software, quite the opposite. But that’s just not where the resources go. The common sentiment (I have heard this directly uttered) is “If the user has 8GB of RAM, why wouldn’t I use it?”.

wahern 5y ago
Recent exceptions: 1) Chrome in Android has recently begun to hang when trying to go back to a previous page. It's gotten so bad that I end up clicking multiple times, which all register in rapid succession. If I click more times than the history depth for the tab (say 3 or 4), I end up back on the home screen and a lost tab with lost (or at least not conveniently recoverable) history. 2) AMP. When Google began pushing AMP my objections were mostly based on principle; performance was mostly a wash for me. Now the AMP viewer is so slow and so crash prone that I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I'm glad to see that AMP is clearly failing. On the other hand, Android and Chrome still strongly favor AMP, and I'm too lazy to wrestle with Google over default settings, so when I don't have the presence of mind to explicitly open a web site (e.g. when using Google News) I'm left to suffer the poor performance and bugginess in addition to other intentional AMP headaches--lack of copy+paste, less scrolling and zooming control, etc. Not quite the same thing, but related, technologies like QUIC are really only beneficial in the context of a web ecosystem built by Google. QUIC shines on websites pulling in many resources from disparate hosts, which in most cases is a situation created by advertising and analytics services. IOW, these days much of the benefits of Google's work simply pays down the debts Google itself created or advocated. And while Google still stands out for the amount of labor it invests in open source security and performance, it's just a matter of time before we pass break even into negative return territory. That happened long ago with Google Search itself; Google Search results are as slow, irrelevant, and obscured by obnoxious and misleading advertising as the competitors it originally, rapidly displaced. Heck, when Google began those investments (Android, Chrome, OS security, etc) they were crystal clear why they were making them--to nurture and grow an ecosystem into which they could grow their advertising business, same as their rationale for making a snappy search service and a non-intrusive advertising network. There's a limit to how well they can improve that ecosystem, but the limit for exploiting that ecosystem can easily result into a situation far worse than the one Google originally saved us all from. Consider why rendering work is even relevant in 2021. It's not for the benefit of services like Netflix or YouTube, which already enjoy low-power hardware acceleration, and arguably not for games or similar interactive content. It's so they can continue shifting their advertising ecosystem from minimalistic text-focused display boxes to animations and videos peppered up, down, over, and under content views. They can't do that if advertising-laden web pages drain your battery in 15 minutes, as notorious Flash-based ads once did. Steve Jobs' famously removed Flash from mobile; Google, for obvious reasons, is taking the alternative path.

cblconfederate 5y ago

The only solution to that is if the browser starts absorbing more of the stuff that developers now use javascript for, like UI components etc.

vbezhenar 5y ago
Designers will wrinkle their noses at standard components and will ask something custom to stand out.
- eru 5y ago
  Perhaps something like exokernels for the browser might be the solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

I haven't had a faster processor in years. (Maybe decades?) (But they get more power efficient and quieter, this is true.)