3 ms·

> I can confidently say that games and apps in the browser and Electron are noticeably slower than other apps In my experience the great majority of perceptibl

> I can confidently say that games and apps in the browser and Electron are noticeably slower than other apps In my experience the great majority of perceptible slowness in browser apps comes from DOM reflows, not JavaScript

josephg 5y ago
I’ve also seen plenty of web apps which load slowly because they load too much javascript. Most of it unused. I was asked to help out with one project my coworkers were working on where the bundler was pulling in multiple copies of momentjs, each complete with its own copy of the global time zone database. The page loaded way faster once we cleared that out. A few years ago I noticed most websites just seemed slower than they should on my computer. The culprit turned out to be metamask (an etherium wallet extension). It was adding 700 kilobytes of javascript to each page load thanks to web3. It also exposed my etherium address to any website that asked. The JS was cached, but just parsing that much code added noticeable lag to every page load. Everything felt zippy once I uninstalled that.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Loading assets != running JavaScript, which is what we're talking about here. It's also a difference between startup slowness and long-running slowness. And Electron, for example, would (normally) only ever be "loading" JavaScript from disk, like any other local app would.
chrismorgan 5y ago
In my experience, the great majority of perceptible slowness comes from badly-written JavaScript and running too much code, generally not even code that touches the DOM, though certainly touching the DOM too much in bad ways (and structuring the DOM in bad ways) often contributes to it. Certainly the web as a platform is slower than a precisely-built thing honed for speed for a particular use case, but speaking generally the web is only perceptibly slow when you write bad code (or are waiting for the network). Which is admittedly rather common.

josephg 5y ago

I’ve also seen plenty of web apps which load slowly because they load too much javascript. Most of it unused. I was asked to help out with one project my coworkers were working on where the bundler was pulling in multiple copies of momentjs, each complete with its own copy of the global time zone database. The page loaded way faster once we cleared that out. A few years ago I noticed most websites just seemed slower than they should on my computer. The culprit turned out to be metamask (an etherium wallet extension). It was adding 700 kilobytes of javascript to each page load thanks to web3. It also exposed my etherium address to any website that asked. The JS was cached, but just parsing that much code added noticeable lag to every page load. Everything felt zippy once I uninstalled that.

brundolf 5y ago
Loading assets != running JavaScript, which is what we're talking about here. It's also a difference between startup slowness and long-running slowness. And Electron, for example, would (normally) only ever be "loading" JavaScript from disk, like any other local app would.

chrismorgan 5y ago

In my experience, the great majority of perceptible slowness comes from badly-written JavaScript and running too much code, generally not even code that touches the DOM, though certainly touching the DOM too much in bad ways (and structuring the DOM in bad ways) often contributes to it. Certainly the web as a platform is slower than a precisely-built thing honed for speed for a particular use case, but speaking generally the web is only perceptibly slow when you write bad code (or are waiting for the network). Which is admittedly rather common.