10 ms·

This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse. S

This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse. So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do that? Why do elements randomly jump around for the first 2 minutes? what is the problem there?) I don't want to just blindly blame JS. Look at this page! JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized). But why does the average experience suck so much?

pkulak 5y ago
> Why do elements randomly jump around for the first 2 minutes? what is the problem there?) Devs not bothering to put element dimensions in the markup, or otherwise not making the dimensions available/calculable at page load.
boring_twenties 5y ago
Most people will put up with slow-loading pages up to some extreme threshold. So, if you reduce your page's loading time from, say, 1 second to 400 millis, you won't gain any significant number of users. On the other hand, if you use those extra 600 millis to hold an auction for ad space on the page, you make more money immediately. Therefore we can expect any for-profit site to load only fast enough to keep users from giving up (even if they feel frustrated or whatever), and no faster than that.
jrnichols 5y ago
> But why does the average experience suck so much? to the current crop of web designers/developers/etc, they literally may not remember a time when the web was a lot faster. they don't remember the days of websites loading just fine (ok, most of the time..) over a 56k modem. they've grown up with the web the way it is, javascript and all. that's what I gather, anyway.
lenkite 5y ago
"JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized)" This actually means that you love C++. But HN crowd will hate that lol. https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
michalstanko 5y ago
The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets. I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question. As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display? I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable? "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed So where is the bloat from, really. Javascript can be really fast. It's just, nobody really cares? I guess?
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    Best answer that I can give you is: Because many of the ad companies are run by sales people. Seriously, we struggled with an ad/retargeting company, they ran EVERYTHING of a single EC2 instance and they didn’t understand the internet. If/when their service went down the checkout pages of all their clients would timeout. The word async meant nothing to them, but hey better to crash than not track users. They would continuesly lie about their implementation, because they failed to under basic terminology. “This is a HA setup, right?”, “Yes, it’s a cloud solution in AWS”. That just meant: Why would AWS go down?
    - Volker_W 5y ago
      > They would continuesly lie about their implementation Really? Could you give more examples?
      - mrweasel 5y ago
        Sure, we wanted to use Google Tag Manager, to load their javascript, because they already lied about it being async. So we’d use GTM to avoid them blocking our order confirmation page, when they had issues. So we asked if that would be an issue. It would not, their product worked well with Google products. It did not work, it completely failed to pick up the correct dom elements, it had never been tested with gtm. Again they also promised that they’d more to a real HA setup, but the never did. Oh I forgot. They claimed that their solution was custom made, tailored to the need of their business and the business of their customers. When we asked for a few tweaks, to make implementation easier it turned out to not be true. It was in fact an off the shelf solution and they had no influence on the development. We only found out because some of the Javascript revealed the real authors.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Javascript is one of the major reasons, but also trackers, huge graphics and loads of videos. Old pages still load fast so it's not the browser's fault. Say what you want about https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/, but it loads instantly, is full of all animations and doesn't lag down the browser. The problem is modern design, basically. We've invented server-rendered pages, then started rendering everything client side with frameworks like React, then we've started pre-rendering React on the server and completing content in the client, and now the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way around again to technologies like Flutter that just render an application in a canvas shudder. People want interactivity, and developers want that interactivity to be consistent across their website. To do so, they need to recreate and emulate everything the browser does. In the case of React and other JS frameworks, that even includes constructing fake DOMs. Back buttons get overridden, links get turned into buttons that do custom routing, you name it and there's a layer of Javascript you can download to avoid having to do the hard work. This is partially because of how demanding people have become. They expect any proper web page to be like Facebook. People, especially customers, want features, and they want them fast. Big companies that have their own developers are pushing their users towards their apps, sometimes intentionally sabotaging their website (looking at you, Reddit) to force people to download their invasive, native code. Websites have become applications, and applications are inherently taxing on most systems. Google tried to combat this in their own, misguided way with AMP. If it wasn't for their stupid caching architecture, I'd be a fan of AMP because of the speed it can provide compared to "modern" web pages. I don't think any of this will change unless we convince web developers to stop relying on all of these "modern" technologies and just write proper web pages. From the reactions here on HN, there are two groups of people in this debate: the people like us, who lament how slow the web has become, and the people who will never give up their fancy frameworks because of the productivity it allows them, and will never give in to the web Luddites who want to take away their fancy cross-platform tools that run just fine on their $2000 M1 Macs. There are also a lot of web developers out there that are just shit, but we can't help those.
- Debug_Overload 5y ago
  > web developers out there that are just shit The technical term is webshits.
pacifika 5y ago
Lack of care and attention. By developers who are pressured to keep sprint velocity up. By product owners who follow the ideal path. By designers who want sites to work like their mock-ups. By testers who don’t have enough time to test under specified features. By clients who are focused on reporting upwards and tracking business goals. And by prioritising new learning experiences over boring reliable solutions.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  What's wrong with wanting a site to look like a mockup?
  - pacifika 5y ago
    Typically results in custom controls and working against the browser provided affordances
    - ricardobayes 5y ago
      Of course, but I pride myself in able to create custom code and not just rely on some built-in stuff.
      - ninkendo 5y ago
        Why do you consider it a good thing to not use standard controls?
      - usrbin 5y ago
        The operative piece of the above post (to me) is "working _against_ the browser", not the existence of custom code per se. IME lots of problems with UI development have come (partly) from shoehorning tech to do something it's not meant to do, at the expense of speed, accessibility, and general usability. If the built-in thing doesn't do what you need, by all means build something that does, but it's worth keeping in mind that often the useful thing that end users actually need/want is the built-in thing.
  - 5y ago
ricardobayes 5y ago
I suppose most devs don't use tree-shaking when importing modules. The frameworks themselves don't add much bloat usually. I do believe however single page apps are a fad and we are going to return to SSG/SSR which is already apparent in new JS frameworks like NextJS.
clove 5y ago
Did you try restarting your computer? If that doesn't work, try restarting your router.
- dang 5y ago
  Sorry for the offtopicness, but I need you to see this and don't have another way to contact you. You have posted a great many comments that broke the HN guidelines egregiously. (I'm not talking about this thread.) Comments like this are bannable offenses on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352983 I'm not going to ban you right now, partly because those threads are all at least a week old and partly because your account has years of history on HN. However, we need you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on. If you keep breaking them like this, we're going to have to ban you. In particular, it's absolutely not acceptable to attack other users the way you've been doing, no matter how strongly you disagree with them. That goes against everything this site is supposed to be for.
  - clove 5y ago
    Sorry, dang. I've read over the rules. Thanks for giving me another chance.
    - dang 5y ago
      Appreciated!
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  That message you get on YouTube when their loading fails so they suggest “restarting your device” always annoys me.
turing_complete 5y ago
Browsers aren't fast. Computer hardware is.
- acdha 5y ago
  Browsers are fast, too. Think about all of the hard work which has gone into advanced hardware acceleration, JIT engines, etc. That work deserves respect even if the median front-end developer squanders it with bad decisions.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
It's basically Parkinson's law. If someone is given NASA's resources to move a piece of paper across the room, they will find a way to use a space shuttle to do it and call you oldfashioned for doing it by hand.
- majani 5y ago
  Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art platformers are now above 1GB in size https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/id1552347138 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/... When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge
  - philistine 5y ago
    Your two examples are horrible examples. Celeste is truly a pixel game. It uses pixels as an art style, but spending any time with the game reveals its complexity. - The resolution of the game is detached from the pixels, allowing them to be squished and squashed. - While it looks like they’re reusing assets, they really aren’t that much. A ton of areas have unique pixel tiles. - The code is complicated and complex; the physics and control are astoundingly advanced. - It has beautiful high resolution drawings of characters and cutscenes. - The music and sound is full fidelity. - Celeste is running on Unity, which is probably the biggest reason for its large size. That Castlevania game has a 3D main character, with Retina quality textures. Since it’s made for Apple Arcade, it has to support a 4K resolution for Apple TV, meaning all the game’s assets have to look reasonable on a screen at that resolution. The main character alone must weigh a couple megabytes.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    That's actually 48Megabits, not Megabytes, so it's 1/8th, so only 6MB.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    It's a bit unfair because modern pixel art games are literally nothing like old pixel art games. For one, the resolution has gone from 400x300 to ~3000x1500 and more, and the number of color went from 8 to millions. All those pixels in high-res pixel art have to still be stored somewhere. Even though I still agree that some games do not deserve to be as fat as they are.
kragen 5y ago
Dan Luu reports that Google penalizes his pages in search rankings because they don't include enough CSS and JS. It's not really half of the websites; it's the half you're being guided to.
- mikestew 5y ago
  There's a dead comment asking if you have a source, and the commenter appears to have attempted finding it themselves. As an aside, I vouched for the comment (which still shows as [dead]), because a quick glance at posting history shows just the singular comment as dead, with no indications of twattery to justify it. It's like a commenter with not-interesting post history just got a single comment randomly killed.
- greggturkington 5y ago
  Can you link to this please? Intuitively it seems every Core Web Vital would be improved by less code. I found this post [1] but it seems a but outdated and references AMP, which Core Web Vital metrics are supposed to replace (right?). https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
  - kragen 5y ago
    I don't remember when I saw it, and I could be misremembering it.
austincheney 5y ago
I can remember in the late 90s it would take about 20 minutes to download a 3mb MP3 file. My employer’s homepage is now about 8mb, according to the browser dev tools. > I don't want to just blindly blame JS. JS is a tool, a language. Don’t blame the tools as they have been refined to an astounding degree over the last 25 years. As a long time front end developer blame the business, specifically: * Developer incompetence. Do you really need the largest frameworks humanity has written and a million dependencies to put a couple lines of text on the page? Yes. Well, no, but most developers will claim otherwise and most businesses will refuse to hire those who are so capable. * Stalking. Analytics code is a silent performance killer and generally responsible for a lot of JS on many commercial websites. This wonderful stuff allows for session tracking via advertisements across various websites and at times serves as a point of malicious intent by both valid business interests and criminal organizations.
xorcist 5y ago
Web sites are getting better and better of maximizing user interaction time, which are what they are designed for. It's been that way since the ad industry took over the web.
mysterydip 5y ago
developer: "should we spend some time optimizing our website? we probably have a lot of bloat, and--" boss: "browsers today are so fast and capable, we don't need to waste resources on something that doesn't give us tangible ROI."
undebuggable 5y ago
The current compromise for monetization on the web is advertisiting. The web apps and sites are not optimized for snappiness, responsiveness, user experience. They are optimized for tracking and profiling, the market leading front-end frameworks enable mostly these.
crawl_soever 5y ago
According to web professionals Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner in the podcast: The Handmade Network Podcast: The Web's Problems & Future, w/ Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner https://handmade.network/podcast/ep/532a3573-490a-45e8-975d- https://handmade.network/podcast/ep/532a3573-490a-45e8-975d-... The web has grown from something to display documents to a platform for applications. Focus has been placed heavily on optimization of JS jit compilation, but currently browser DOM and CSS layout engines have not cought up leaving a disparity in performance on major browsers.
Donckele 5y ago
You can also say this of software in general including operating systems. Sure, the hardware and network are a miracle. My 2 cents is that there is so much software to be written that most programmers are mediocre at what they do and/or their working environment makes it even more difficult to create efficient software systems. Similar correlations to Government.
- gonzo41 5y ago
  Hardware and networks get the easy stuff, it's just moving lots of data around. Software is where all the messy human stuff happens. So naturally it's a reflection of human beings. Ie messy. I'd say all the software on earth is done cheap. Quality doesn't really matter for most projects. Where it does matter, if there's money it happens.
antocv 5y ago
You did not pay for any page to load fast or to serve you what you are looking for. Every web-request, every click you make with your browser, can deliver you a response which is unknown to you or your browser before-hand. There is no way for you to see what you are buying before buying it if it was possible to buy page-loads. Say thanks because you are not in the EU and get the cookie and GDPR spam thrown at you as well. Worse than the 1999 popups.
hulitu 5y ago
> Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse Yes they can emulate a whole OS. It's browsing at what they suck. Seconds wasted for TLS handshake, seconds wasted on downloading MB of JS, then realizing content is missing, another TLS handshake, another download, then some ads, some tracking scripts and finaly the page is displayed. Of course if you don't use Chrome or Google DNS you will be penalized. And don't forget to accept all cookies.
- heurisko 5y ago
  > Seconds wasted for TLS handshake The few hundred milliseconds is worth it to stop someone sniffing my browsing details on an open network. I can remember browsing the web using 56k. That was slow.
  - xapata 5y ago
    Yeah, where's browsing the web like it's 1993?
- coldpie 5y ago
  > then some ads, some tracking scripts Well, these at least are fixable. The web is unusable without uBlock Origin and NoScript.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Seconded uBlock Origin, the web is unusable without it. I moved however from NoScript to uMatrix, which can block with more granularity, but needs to be either kept default off or "trained" because its factory settings are very strict and could block a lot of necessary stuff (ie, don't install it to non technical users).
    - rakoo 5y ago
      You can replicate NoScript and even uMatrix inside uBlock Origin now (uMatrix is even officially deprecated by uBlock Origin now) uBO gives a lot of flexibility and a traditional "no js" is absolutely possible (see https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/wiki/Blocking-...). You then select which source is authorized to push crap at your browser
namelosw 5y ago
> I don't want to just blindly blame JS. Look at this page! JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized). I agree with your point, but I have to point out that Figma is mostly built on C++/WASM.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  ah ok, did not know that
- nine_k 5y ago
  It runs on the web, and it's fast. Also, fronted parts that operate the DOM are necessarily JS.
throwawayHN378 5y ago
I have never experience load time issues with gmail. Granted I’m not a front end guy so I only know “seems slow” and “doesn’t seem slow”
- SilasX 5y ago
  Yeah I agree with all the parents other points, but Gmail has been an island of sanity, very rarely annoying me. Now, I’m usually using it on a fast computer but typical sites can’t even live up to that standard on the same machine.
nine_k 5y ago
I don't even mind Gmail taking some time to operate. What I do mind is pegging all 4 cores of an i5, and burning through my battery. (Sadly, my workflow is heavily dependent on multiple labels per email, and no IMAP client seems to work acceptably in that situation.)
- greggyb 5y ago
  I'm not sure what sort of workflow and mail client you desire, but Notmuch supports arbitrary tagging. Most coverage I've seen of it integrates with emacs or mutt (or similar text-based mail clients). That said, in searching for the project homepage, I also saw this project[1], which might be interesting if you're looking for something a bit less terminal. I'm sure there are more alternatives, but hopefully this is useful as a starting point for you. [0] https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/ [1] https://add0n.com/notmuch-email-client.html https://add0n.com/notmuch-email-client.html
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Thank you; likely I should finally give it a try.
runako 5y ago
I broadly agree, but you lost me at Figma being fast. Granted I am using an older MacBook Pro (2015), but using Figma in a browser usually requires that I close other apps to let Figma do its thing. Figma and Miro are the only sites I have encountered that incur this level of performance hit. Incidentally, mightyapp.com was founded to make browsing less resource-intensive by doing the rendering in the cloud. They highlight Figma and Miro (among others) prominently, so it seems others have similar experiences with Figma.

pkulak 5y ago

> Why do elements randomly jump around for the first 2 minutes? what is the problem there?) Devs not bothering to put element dimensions in the markup, or otherwise not making the dimensions available/calculable at page load.

boring_twenties 5y ago

Most people will put up with slow-loading pages up to some extreme threshold. So, if you reduce your page's loading time from, say, 1 second to 400 millis, you won't gain any significant number of users. On the other hand, if you use those extra 600 millis to hold an auction for ad space on the page, you make more money immediately. Therefore we can expect any for-profit site to load only fast enough to keep users from giving up (even if they feel frustrated or whatever), and no faster than that.

jrnichols 5y ago

> But why does the average experience suck so much? to the current crop of web designers/developers/etc, they literally may not remember a time when the web was a lot faster. they don't remember the days of websites loading just fine (ok, most of the time..) over a 56k modem. they've grown up with the web the way it is, javascript and all. that's what I gather, anyway.

lenkite 5y ago

"JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized)" This actually means that you love C++. But HN crowd will hate that lol. https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

michalstanko 5y ago

The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets. I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question. As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.

shp0ngle 5y ago
Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display? I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable? "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed So where is the bloat from, really. Javascript can be really fast. It's just, nobody really cares? I guess?
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Best answer that I can give you is: Because many of the ad companies are run by sales people. Seriously, we struggled with an ad/retargeting company, they ran EVERYTHING of a single EC2 instance and they didn’t understand the internet. If/when their service went down the checkout pages of all their clients would timeout. The word async meant nothing to them, but hey better to crash than not track users. They would continuesly lie about their implementation, because they failed to under basic terminology. “This is a HA setup, right?”, “Yes, it’s a cloud solution in AWS”. That just meant: Why would AWS go down?
  - Volker_W 5y ago
    > They would continuesly lie about their implementation Really? Could you give more examples?
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      Sure, we wanted to use Google Tag Manager, to load their javascript, because they already lied about it being async. So we’d use GTM to avoid them blocking our order confirmation page, when they had issues. So we asked if that would be an issue. It would not, their product worked well with Google products. It did not work, it completely failed to pick up the correct dom elements, it had never been tested with gtm. Again they also promised that they’d more to a real HA setup, but the never did. Oh I forgot. They claimed that their solution was custom made, tailored to the need of their business and the business of their customers. When we asked for a few tweaks, to make implementation easier it turned out to not be true. It was in fact an off the shelf solution and they had no influence on the development. We only found out because some of the Javascript revealed the real authors.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Javascript is one of the major reasons, but also trackers, huge graphics and loads of videos. Old pages still load fast so it's not the browser's fault. Say what you want about https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/, but it loads instantly, is full of all animations and doesn't lag down the browser. The problem is modern design, basically. We've invented server-rendered pages, then started rendering everything client side with frameworks like React, then we've started pre-rendering React on the server and completing content in the client, and now the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way around again to technologies like Flutter that just render an application in a canvas shudder. People want interactivity, and developers want that interactivity to be consistent across their website. To do so, they need to recreate and emulate everything the browser does. In the case of React and other JS frameworks, that even includes constructing fake DOMs. Back buttons get overridden, links get turned into buttons that do custom routing, you name it and there's a layer of Javascript you can download to avoid having to do the hard work. This is partially because of how demanding people have become. They expect any proper web page to be like Facebook. People, especially customers, want features, and they want them fast. Big companies that have their own developers are pushing their users towards their apps, sometimes intentionally sabotaging their website (looking at you, Reddit) to force people to download their invasive, native code. Websites have become applications, and applications are inherently taxing on most systems. Google tried to combat this in their own, misguided way with AMP. If it wasn't for their stupid caching architecture, I'd be a fan of AMP because of the speed it can provide compared to "modern" web pages. I don't think any of this will change unless we convince web developers to stop relying on all of these "modern" technologies and just write proper web pages. From the reactions here on HN, there are two groups of people in this debate: the people like us, who lament how slow the web has become, and the people who will never give up their fancy frameworks because of the productivity it allows them, and will never give in to the web Luddites who want to take away their fancy cross-platform tools that run just fine on their $2000 M1 Macs. There are also a lot of web developers out there that are just shit, but we can't help those.

Debug_Overload 5y ago
> web developers out there that are just shit The technical term is webshits.

pacifika 5y ago

Lack of care and attention. By developers who are pressured to keep sprint velocity up. By product owners who follow the ideal path. By designers who want sites to work like their mock-ups. By testers who don’t have enough time to test under specified features. By clients who are focused on reporting upwards and tracking business goals. And by prioritising new learning experiences over boring reliable solutions.

ricardobayes 5y ago
What's wrong with wanting a site to look like a mockup?
- pacifika 5y ago
  Typically results in custom controls and working against the browser provided affordances
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Of course, but I pride myself in able to create custom code and not just rely on some built-in stuff.
    - ninkendo 5y ago
      Why do you consider it a good thing to not use standard controls?
    - usrbin 5y ago
      The operative piece of the above post (to me) is "working _against_ the browser", not the existence of custom code per se. IME lots of problems with UI development have come (partly) from shoehorning tech to do something it's not meant to do, at the expense of speed, accessibility, and general usability. If the built-in thing doesn't do what you need, by all means build something that does, but it's worth keeping in mind that often the useful thing that end users actually need/want is the built-in thing.
- 5y ago

ricardobayes 5y ago

I suppose most devs don't use tree-shaking when importing modules. The frameworks themselves don't add much bloat usually. I do believe however single page apps are a fad and we are going to return to SSG/SSR which is already apparent in new JS frameworks like NextJS.

clove 5y ago

Did you try restarting your computer? If that doesn't work, try restarting your router.

dang 5y ago
Sorry for the offtopicness, but I need you to see this and don't have another way to contact you. You have posted a great many comments that broke the HN guidelines egregiously. (I'm not talking about this thread.) Comments like this are bannable offenses on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352983 I'm not going to ban you right now, partly because those threads are all at least a week old and partly because your account has years of history on HN. However, we need you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on. If you keep breaking them like this, we're going to have to ban you. In particular, it's absolutely not acceptable to attack other users the way you've been doing, no matter how strongly you disagree with them. That goes against everything this site is supposed to be for.
- clove 5y ago
  Sorry, dang. I've read over the rules. Thanks for giving me another chance.
  - dang 5y ago
    Appreciated!
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
That message you get on YouTube when their loading fails so they suggest “restarting your device” always annoys me.

turing_complete 5y ago

Browsers aren't fast. Computer hardware is.

acdha 5y ago
Browsers are fast, too. Think about all of the hard work which has gone into advanced hardware acceleration, JIT engines, etc. That work deserves respect even if the median front-end developer squanders it with bad decisions.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

It's basically Parkinson's law. If someone is given NASA's resources to move a piece of paper across the room, they will find a way to use a space shuttle to do it and call you oldfashioned for doing it by hand.

majani 5y ago
Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art platformers are now above 1GB in size https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/id1552347138 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/... When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge
- philistine 5y ago
  Your two examples are horrible examples. Celeste is truly a pixel game. It uses pixels as an art style, but spending any time with the game reveals its complexity. - The resolution of the game is detached from the pixels, allowing them to be squished and squashed. - While it looks like they’re reusing assets, they really aren’t that much. A ton of areas have unique pixel tiles. - The code is complicated and complex; the physics and control are astoundingly advanced. - It has beautiful high resolution drawings of characters and cutscenes. - The music and sound is full fidelity. - Celeste is running on Unity, which is probably the biggest reason for its large size. That Castlevania game has a 3D main character, with Retina quality textures. Since it’s made for Apple Arcade, it has to support a 4K resolution for Apple TV, meaning all the game’s assets have to look reasonable on a screen at that resolution. The main character alone must weigh a couple megabytes.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  That's actually 48Megabits, not Megabytes, so it's 1/8th, so only 6MB.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  It's a bit unfair because modern pixel art games are literally nothing like old pixel art games. For one, the resolution has gone from 400x300 to ~3000x1500 and more, and the number of color went from 8 to millions. All those pixels in high-res pixel art have to still be stored somewhere. Even though I still agree that some games do not deserve to be as fat as they are.

kragen 5y ago

Dan Luu reports that Google penalizes his pages in search rankings because they don't include enough CSS and JS. It's not really half of the websites; it's the half you're being guided to.

mikestew 5y ago
There's a dead comment asking if you have a source, and the commenter appears to have attempted finding it themselves. As an aside, I vouched for the comment (which still shows as [dead]), because a quick glance at posting history shows just the singular comment as dead, with no indications of twattery to justify it. It's like a commenter with not-interesting post history just got a single comment randomly killed.
greggturkington 5y ago
Can you link to this please? Intuitively it seems every Core Web Vital would be improved by less code. I found this post [1] but it seems a but outdated and references AMP, which Core Web Vital metrics are supposed to replace (right?). https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
- kragen 5y ago
  I don't remember when I saw it, and I could be misremembering it.

austincheney 5y ago

I can remember in the late 90s it would take about 20 minutes to download a 3mb MP3 file. My employer’s homepage is now about 8mb, according to the browser dev tools. > I don't want to just blindly blame JS. JS is a tool, a language. Don’t blame the tools as they have been refined to an astounding degree over the last 25 years. As a long time front end developer blame the business, specifically: * Developer incompetence. Do you really need the largest frameworks humanity has written and a million dependencies to put a couple lines of text on the page? Yes. Well, no, but most developers will claim otherwise and most businesses will refuse to hire those who are so capable. * Stalking. Analytics code is a silent performance killer and generally responsible for a lot of JS on many commercial websites. This wonderful stuff allows for session tracking via advertisements across various websites and at times serves as a point of malicious intent by both valid business interests and criminal organizations.

xorcist 5y ago

Web sites are getting better and better of maximizing user interaction time, which are what they are designed for. It's been that way since the ad industry took over the web.

mysterydip 5y ago

developer: "should we spend some time optimizing our website? we probably have a lot of bloat, and--" boss: "browsers today are so fast and capable, we don't need to waste resources on something that doesn't give us tangible ROI."

undebuggable 5y ago

The current compromise for monetization on the web is advertisiting. The web apps and sites are not optimized for snappiness, responsiveness, user experience. They are optimized for tracking and profiling, the market leading front-end frameworks enable mostly these.

crawl_soever 5y ago

According to web professionals Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner in the podcast: The Handmade Network Podcast: The Web's Problems & Future, w/ Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner https://handmade.network/podcast/ep/532a3573-490a-45e8-975d- https://handmade.network/podcast/ep/532a3573-490a-45e8-975d-... The web has grown from something to display documents to a platform for applications. Focus has been placed heavily on optimization of JS jit compilation, but currently browser DOM and CSS layout engines have not cought up leaving a disparity in performance on major browsers.

Donckele 5y ago

You can also say this of software in general including operating systems. Sure, the hardware and network are a miracle. My 2 cents is that there is so much software to be written that most programmers are mediocre at what they do and/or their working environment makes it even more difficult to create efficient software systems. Similar correlations to Government.

gonzo41 5y ago
Hardware and networks get the easy stuff, it's just moving lots of data around. Software is where all the messy human stuff happens. So naturally it's a reflection of human beings. Ie messy. I'd say all the software on earth is done cheap. Quality doesn't really matter for most projects. Where it does matter, if there's money it happens.

antocv 5y ago

You did not pay for any page to load fast or to serve you what you are looking for. Every web-request, every click you make with your browser, can deliver you a response which is unknown to you or your browser before-hand. There is no way for you to see what you are buying before buying it if it was possible to buy page-loads. Say thanks because you are not in the EU and get the cookie and GDPR spam thrown at you as well. Worse than the 1999 popups.

hulitu 5y ago

> Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse Yes they can emulate a whole OS. It's browsing at what they suck. Seconds wasted for TLS handshake, seconds wasted on downloading MB of JS, then realizing content is missing, another TLS handshake, another download, then some ads, some tracking scripts and finaly the page is displayed. Of course if you don't use Chrome or Google DNS you will be penalized. And don't forget to accept all cookies.

heurisko 5y ago
> Seconds wasted for TLS handshake The few hundred milliseconds is worth it to stop someone sniffing my browsing details on an open network. I can remember browsing the web using 56k. That was slow.
- xapata 5y ago
  Yeah, where's browsing the web like it's 1993?
coldpie 5y ago
> then some ads, some tracking scripts Well, these at least are fixable. The web is unusable without uBlock Origin and NoScript.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Seconded uBlock Origin, the web is unusable without it. I moved however from NoScript to uMatrix, which can block with more granularity, but needs to be either kept default off or "trained" because its factory settings are very strict and could block a lot of necessary stuff (ie, don't install it to non technical users).
  - rakoo 5y ago
    You can replicate NoScript and even uMatrix inside uBlock Origin now (uMatrix is even officially deprecated by uBlock Origin now) uBO gives a lot of flexibility and a traditional "no js" is absolutely possible (see https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/wiki/Blocking-...). You then select which source is authorized to push crap at your browser

namelosw 5y ago

> I don't want to just blindly blame JS. Look at this page! JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized). I agree with your point, but I have to point out that Figma is mostly built on C++/WASM.

shp0ngle 5y ago
ah ok, did not know that
nine_k 5y ago
It runs on the web, and it's fast. Also, fronted parts that operate the DOM are necessarily JS.

throwawayHN378 5y ago

I have never experience load time issues with gmail. Granted I’m not a front end guy so I only know “seems slow” and “doesn’t seem slow”

SilasX 5y ago
Yeah I agree with all the parents other points, but Gmail has been an island of sanity, very rarely annoying me. Now, I’m usually using it on a fast computer but typical sites can’t even live up to that standard on the same machine.

nine_k 5y ago

I don't even mind Gmail taking some time to operate. What I do mind is pegging all 4 cores of an i5, and burning through my battery. (Sadly, my workflow is heavily dependent on multiple labels per email, and no IMAP client seems to work acceptably in that situation.)

greggyb 5y ago
I'm not sure what sort of workflow and mail client you desire, but Notmuch supports arbitrary tagging. Most coverage I've seen of it integrates with emacs or mutt (or similar text-based mail clients). That said, in searching for the project homepage, I also saw this project[1], which might be interesting if you're looking for something a bit less terminal. I'm sure there are more alternatives, but hopefully this is useful as a starting point for you. [0] https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/ [1] https://add0n.com/notmuch-email-client.html https://add0n.com/notmuch-email-client.html
- nine_k 5y ago
  Thank you; likely I should finally give it a try.

runako 5y ago

I broadly agree, but you lost me at Figma being fast. Granted I am using an older MacBook Pro (2015), but using Figma in a browser usually requires that I close other apps to let Figma do its thing. Figma and Miro are the only sites I have encountered that incur this level of performance hit. Incidentally, mightyapp.com was founded to make browsing less resource-intensive by doing the rendering in the cloud. They highlight Figma and Miro (among others) prominently, so it seems others have similar experiences with Figma.