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Computer users fight 'bloatware' (1998)
- Jimithy123 5y agoI really miss the 90s internet. That CNN page was so simple, and loaded so fast! No paid and reload for ads.
- goto11 5y agoWhere were you in the 90's if web pages loaded fast? Surely not behind a modem.
- Jimithy123 5y agoOh no. I meant that the page loaded fast now. I had a 56k modem just like everyone else.
- DavidPeiffer 5y agoWhile my memories of 1990's internet are basically looking up jokes on Ask Jeeves and slow page load times over dialup, I hope this is reminiscent of what you remember from CNN. http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en
- neonate 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/19990203170007/http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9808/12/bloatware.idg/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990203170007/http://www.cnn.co...
- pjc50 5y agoRemarkable how you could publish the same article today with only minor details changed. We're currently going round "why does Windows 11 require only new PCs". The big difference is that Lotus and Corel are no longer the giants. Nice to see that Corel are still in business: https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/free-download/ https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/free-download/
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoThat hot air balloon! Damn, nostalgia! EOL'ing Windows 10 is going to create so much e-waste, because people are so lazy and would just pay for a new computer rather than learn Linux, so, thanks, Microsoft for helping us reach a 1.5 degree world sooner than 2040!
- rightbyte 5y agoIt is probably fine though, for the wrong reasons. Corparations for some reason seem to rotate computers every three years on a lease. Trashing perfectly good computers. I have a hard time imagining any consumer care about some EOL date at all. And rightfully so.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoWell, when their Windows 10 computer tells them "I'm now expired", and they can't even update to Windows 11, what will they do? Join the Russian^W baddies-of-the-day bot network? I guess/hope there'll be a Windows 11 Light or something like that to keep these old computers going.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoThe computer moved to the cloud and the whole internet became bloatware. :(
- dusted 5y ago'Computer users completely given up fighting 'bloatware' (2021) (HN comments section)'
- hulitu 5y agoYou can't fight "progress". Today if your programm depends of less than 10 libraries, it's not cool.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoHas anyone ever actually tried to fight against bloat in the workplace? It really doesn't go down well. Most developers love it.
- tremon 5y agoBloat is the developer version of outsourcing. Why write something from scratch when we can import this library that does 80% of what we need? Sure, it isn't ideal and is way too complex for what we need, but at least it's cheaper this way.
- southerntofu 5y agoI don't exactly disagree, but i think bloatware is not just measured by features. Some very capable software are very tiny in size and easy on resources, while some very simple software can be very "bloated" (another commented pointed out a 300MB "driver").
- jart 5y agoIt's cheaper because users are the ones who pay for it. The less conscientious people are at each layer of the stack the bigger the snowball gets.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoIn frontend, we import libraries that requires us to write more code. Then we defend it as "best practice" because someone on the internet said it was.
- FartyMcFarter 5y agoHow many of us are spending time reducing bloat in our own (or our companies') software? We should put our money where our mouth is, when we have the power to make that decision.
- ratww 5y agoAgree 100%. At my company we have some OKRs that involve reducing code size by a certain percentage. We do some rough measurement before of what we can reduce. So far we've been doing good. Most of our bloat is due to duplication (literal copy and paste) of UI components and patterns. And also to hasty architectural decisions, especially around error handling. Other than that, there is a general attitude of removing unpopular features that cause more trouble than they're worth, or at least moving them to totally separate services.
- 1cvmask 5y agoThis one of the fundamental laws of computing. Bloatware grows with the footprint of computing and the Internet. Object oriented programming and frameworks definitely played a role.
- southerntofu 5y ago"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- javajosh 5y agoSize is a trade-off that is easy to ignore in the moment of installation. And so far we've mostly gotten away with it. It's not going to last. The trade-off used to be about computer resources (disk size, network bandwidth), but now it's about human resources, and the tendency of even the smallest programs to exceed the complexity budget of any human mind. This is a total loss of the "right to repair" as an emergent property of the system, and that's very bad. We've come up with clever ways to make it appear simpler, e.g. virtualization. Aha, you've used tools to shrink the whole cluster into a single process! It's a degenerate form of abstraction that yields the illusion of simplicity, while not just not simplifying, but adding considerable complexity itself. My point is that small software matters, always mattered, and will always matter, just not for the reason you'd expect.
- jaclaz 5y ago>My point is that small software matters, always mattered, and will always matter, just not for the reason you'd expect. Well said, I would go further and say that smaller, simpler more efficient programs are more efficient, I mean even from a purely energy consumption viewpoint, 1 gigabyte of whatever will always cost more (in money or electricity) than 1 megabyte (even if not 1 thousand times, still a lot of times).
- goto11 5y agoThe reality is that users overwhelmingly prefer "bloat", i.e. feature rich integrated tools. Joel Spolsky explained it many years ago: Sure everyone only use 5% of the features of Word - but they use different 5%, which is why nobody uses your elegant minimalist bare-bones word processor. The alternative to "everything but the kitchen sink" software is Unix style "do one thing well" focused tools. Which is fine if you are a programmer who knows how to select and string tools together (with a bit of scripting thrown in) to solve a task.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agosame for search engines. "which is the best mobile in 2021 " or even "how to take screenshot on laptop" to "how to get pregnant".
- southerntofu 5y agoWe could argue the UNIX philosophy could be applied to higher-level problems, in which case GUI pipeline editors could provide feature-richness with very little bloat. I have hopes that structured shell (PowerShell/Nushell) is going to take us in this direction.
- jcelerier 5y agoMoving bloat in separate processes just adds more bloat as now you have serialization/deserialization & RPC everywhere in addition to your features
- southerntofu 5y agoGood point, though i would argue this could be little bloat compared to what we see today. The traditional C ABI is a demonstration that it does not have to have a huge performance impact, though in this specific case at the cost of soundness/safety. Also, with a project like Nushell specifically, it would be very interesting to explore zero-copy piping. Rust's memory model and mutability rules sound very adapted to making such optimizations in a safe way. Some mutating functions may clone the data at some point to mutate it, but for example filtering could be applied by chaining filtering iterators without requiring ownership.
- pca006132 5y agoRegarding binary size: If one can use dynamic linking, should we link the library statically? What if static linking can provide performance improvement (LTO for example, if you compile the library from source)? If the user is concerned about updating dependencies, what if the program is open source and they can update the dependencies freely and recompile it? And as scripting languages like Python and JS becomes popular, do we just consider the binary size for bloatware? What about their dependencies?
- DeathArrow 5y agoI wonder what 1998 users would have said if they encountered Electron based apps at that time. :)
- mhd 5y ago"People are using Flash to write real applications?"
- IYasha 5y agoAnd the funny part is that the flash player is 10 times smaller than Electron. And sometimes 10 times faster. And nicer.
- Lammy 5y agoThat was like the whole point of IE5, it just never really caught on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
- IYasha 5y agoA note about corporate thinking... I've worked for a small software company around 2010s, we had complex software that consisted of Delphi and BCB components and I made some parts in MFC. Turned out my part was very small compared to others. Our superior said the product was not looking solid enough as it does not take up a full CD! (so they added a giant InstallShi* installer and +200MB at instant)
- short12 5y agoThe bloatware battle has come to an end...basically when you have 8-64 threads/cores. And 16gigs of ram or more. It really makes no difference how bloated it is
- ketralnis 5y agoI don't agree at all. The new bloatware is spyware and tracking and advertising and "offers" and popups and subscription upsells. No matter how free you consider my resources, the software actually does bad things that I don't want it to do.
- supertrope 5y agoSmartphones have been an important counterweight to exponential growth in system requirements. They (especially Android phones) have slow CPUs, slower and metered Internet connections, and limited storage. I attribute the shift to "flat" user interfaces to popular adoption of mobile devices. Some people use them as their only computer. Even above average workstations still have constraints. Those above average specs will eventually be adopted by the masses and a chat app will only function on a system with 16GB of RAM.
- hulitu 5y ago> Smartphones have been an important counterweight to exponential growth in system requirements. They (especially Android phones) have slow CPUs, slower and metered Internet connections, and limited storage. I attribute the shift to "flat" user interfaces to popular adoption of mobile devices. Some people use them as their only computer. > Even above average workstations still have constraints. Those above average specs will eventually be adopted by the masses and a chat app will only function on a system with 16GB of RAM. Android is really bad. 1.8 Ghz and 4 GB Ram and has difficulties drawing the screen and switching screens .
- hulitu 5y agoMaybe for you. Did you heard that Intel processors can decrease the speed when the processor is hot ? And when you have 4 cores and Excel is keeping one at 100% load the other 3 will have reduced speed. But the other 3 must run all the services in the modern, secure OS which is Win 10. Good luck doing something else with that computer while Excel is calculating.
- desktopninja 5y agoLets be honest ... think we lost the war. We've accepted bloat in "Modern software". eg Web Browsers. I thoroughly miss Opera 11 (or was it 12) ... 16MB of exactly what a web browser should be vs 256MB+ of say Chrome/FF/${X}
- xvilka 5y agoAlso existence of Electron and other, similar technologies.
- vbezhenar 5y agoElectron is pretty capable technology. SpaceX uses Electron in space. I recently reverse-engineered firmware of some small device with tiny screen and underpowered CPU. It used Electron for its GUI. I would say that issue is not Electron itself. Issue is other GUI frameworks which are so terrible that developers prefer Electron despite its objective issues. I spent good amount of time learning WinAPI, learning MFC, learning Delphi, learning Swing, learning JavaFX, learning a little bit of WinForms. I wrote few native Android apps and iOS apps. I'm not an expert, but I saw enough APIs. I'm mostly backend developer. I know JS, but only enough to be able to read the code and do some modifications. If I would need to write GUI, I'd write it with HTML/CSS/JS any day. It's infinitely easier than whatever native tech there is. I did not try Flutter or SwiftUI though. Those are most modern frameworks, may be they improved.
- boondaburrah 5y agoThere is that most desktop UI frameworks don't appear to be built with programmatic creation in mind. Most webdev I've done involved a text editor to make my UI, while native (debatable, it's been Qt, Java Swing, WinForms, and waaay back when HyperCard) almost always involved a UI designer that would make hooks I could write plumbing code for. I definitely prefer desktop dev with a UI designer over webdev any day, but the webdev API (if I have to use an API to create my UI) is generally better. I'd never write desktop UI toolkit code by hand. I tried with Java Swing and it sucked, and the one time I was forced to use Qt Quick via code it was just JSON/JS anyway.