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It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even
by yomlica8 3y ago
It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.
I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!
- sidewndr46 3y agoEven worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.
- leidenfrost 3y agoThere was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.
- amaccuish 3y agoThe one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?
- yomlica8 3y agoI want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
- michaelt 3y agoWe A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s
- TeMPOraL 3y agoYou jest, but that's exactly how you get plausibly deniable dark patterns. It's a numbers game.
- p_l 3y agoWorse, sometimes the people who do it are completely unaware they are making a dark pattern, because they see the result of A/B test and convince themselves it's superior to what they think.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe ultimate version of this was done by Optimizely some years ago, where - let's assume here unintentional - bad UI design encouraged people to terminate their A/B tests early when the metrics favored the new version, leading to people without good understanding of statistics implementing dark patterns (or just stupid patterns), blissfully unaware that they've biased their own A/B tests so strongly that they could just as well be replaced by a piece of paper with words "NEW THING WORKS BETTER" written on it.
- esafak 3y agoIt maximizes their revenue until I decide to stop using Google. Joke's on them for not measuring long-term effects.
- flangola7 3y agoA/B testing is so gross. In other domains human experimentation of any kind, no matter how low risk, involves getting fully informed consent and ethics board approval before going ahead. Experimental behavior manipulation, without even telling the subject they are part of a manipulation experiment? You would be chased out of the room and your reputation destroyed! Utterly unacceptable. But in webdev universe this is somehow seen as a totally normal practice.
- ballenf 3y agoI really could see Apple adopting an approach from FPS games, where the phone applies a click to what was under your finger 1/4 second-ish instead of what's there when the click is recognized. Time-travel clicking. But the real solution is better web page design.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoMy guess for this is that the average user doesn't parse text on pages as fast as more tech-savvy users. That delay is perfectly timed for the average user to grab their attention. For me, I use google so often that I can rapidly parse information without really needing to read much of the text, the link just sort of 'looks' right. I've observed my wife reading google results and she is much slower and more methodical, probably because she doesn't google things 20+ times a day every day like I do. That's how I end up misclicking, because i'm not working at the speed of a normal googler. It is really annoying though, there are some css tweaks you can make using browser extensions to make that disappear if you're so inclined.
- polyvisual 3y agoMy goodness, that accordion needs to removed from their code base immediately. A horrific piece of UI/UX/engineering/whatever.
- rkagerer 3y agoThat one ALWAYS foils me and I hate it and whoever created it.
- Fatnino 3y agoTheir new AI shit on the top of the sesrch results does this. It's slow AF and I'll sometimes have scrolled partway down the page before it farts a huge blob of text up top and pushes stuff I've already scrolled past back down past my finger.
- azemetre 3y agoI'm sure the person who wrote that accordion is quite good at solving leetcode tho! (only half joking)
- JohnFen 3y ago> You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Which, in my mind, means it didn't load instantly. The page isn't loaded until all of the data is displayed.
- timthorn 3y ago> Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time I don't disagree with your example, but optimising for page load time is as old as the graphical Web.
- thesuitonym 3y agoYes, but back in the 90s the dominant idea was load the text as quickly as possible, then all the other junk can come later.
- omoikane 3y agoI thought the thing to optimize for is "largest contentful paint", which is one of the weighted factors used by https://pagespeed.web.dev/ https://pagespeed.web.dev/
- microtonal 3y agoThis drives me crazy, especially because it breaks finding within a page. Eg. if you order food and you already know what you want. Old days: Cmd + f, type what you want. New days: first scroll to the end of the page so that all the contents are actually loaded. Cmd + f, type what you want. Is just a list of dishes, some with small thumbnails, some without any images at all. If you can't load a page with 30 dishes fast enough, you have a serious problem (you could always lazily load the thumbnails if you want to cheat).
- mikecoles 3y agoI miss typing / to search on pages. Ctrl-W still messes me up at times when using a terminal in a browser.
- TechieKid 3y agoYou can search with / on Firefox.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago' will search in URLs, skipping plain text.
- GrinningFool 3y agoUnless you're on github.com, because it rather inconsiderately takes over `/`.
- abdusco 3y agoFirefox lets you use / for search.
- dbtc 3y agovimium / vimium-ff
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoFirefox allows you to use / to start a conventional search. As a bonus, in Firefox if you hit the ' key (apostrophe) you get a search that looks only within hyperlinks and ignores all the un-clickable plain text. Give it a try, sometimes it can be very useful
- porphyra 3y agoAnd when you're about to click on something, something new loads and everything jumps unpredictably and you end up accidentally clicking on the wrong thing lol
- YoukaiCountry 3y agoThis is honestly the worst part of it to me. It happens quite a lot!
- dghughes 3y agoYes, in Windows 50% of my day is fighting with something obscuring my view or taking focus. Something pops up just as I was clicking or pressing Enter. I have to sign into multiple systems in the morning and sometimes it takes four attempts to enter creds for one login because I keep getting interrupted. It's infuriating.
- smegger001 3y agoyou would think they could figured out that programs not directly opened by the user shouldn't be able to steal focus from the program the user is currently interacting with. seems like basic UX/UI failure
- causality0 3y agoYou're talking about people who haven't figured out you should be able to edit the options on the right click menu from a single settings menu and that the task bar should expand and contract dynamically with the number of open windows. Microsoft stopped improving the Windows UI around 2006.
- Aerbil313 3y agoYou’re talking about people who use Macs.
- smegger001 3y agodesktop user interfaces on all 3 main operating systems peaked by 2010, at that point everything became aimed at clueless cellphone users.
- asah 3y agojfyi this is not new - we confronted this in 1996 when the web was very young.
- tracker1 3y agoEven more annoying is when ads pop in a second or so later under the cursor position just before you click, taking you to the ad not what you wanted to click.
- jrumbut 3y agoI could kind of understand things moving around back in the 2000s when we were all getting used to AJAX but all these years later can we (at least) have the main navigation links stay still?
- wingworks 3y agoThis is so frustrating. Though I recently come across a rare bread, that I thought stood out on load speed. The BBC of all places. While following the sub disaster I was pleasantly surprised at how quick it always loaded. Nearly always it would load near instant after clicking my bookmark. (Definitely not something that is that common when you live in NZ) Not at all what I expected from a news site. They're usually full of crap and dog slow. This is the specific URL I experienced this with. Though the whole site seems mostly very quick. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 And this is on a 2017 MBP, which some sites are really slow. Nothing crazy like the new silicon CPUs here either.
- simooooo 3y agoIt’s fast but it still resets the scroll to the top about 700ms after it loads on an iPhone
- anthk 3y agoIf you can install Lagrange on Mac, install it and try gemini://gemi.dev Then head to the Newswaffle link and input https://bbc.com https://bbc.com or just scroll down the page to head to the converted site.
- anthk 3y agoSorry I forgot the URL: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- THENATHE 3y agoAdjacent but similar, I am so over all of the animations and corporate bullshit on pages. I run a business making decent and super optimized web pages and people love them. They’re the only website in their town and field that doesn’t take 10 seconds to load and render.
- pdimitar 3y agoCan you link to your website?
- THENATHE 3y agoUnfortunately I don’t have a website for myself and I don’t feel comfortable sharing my client’s websites. I operate purely through word of mouth in my local town, and I don’t have any aspirations to “go big”
- pdimitar 3y agoI realize I didn't formulate my comment well -- the XYZ problem happened. I am interested in your fast loading techniques in general. I also am considering making a bunch of personal / pro websites where I'll use a static generator. Just looking for some inspiration and ideas to steal I suppose. Since it's kinda fresh pursuit for me, I am still looking to gather some links and do proper research. I wasn't looking to deanonymize you, my apologies.
- THENATHE 3y agoOh sure, no worries! As far as my inspiration, I use Craigslist and google as my inspiration. I try to get a sleek and simple look like google pages, but maintain the “old school” functionality and layout ideas of Craigslist . As far as actual development is concerned, I use oracle ARM servers that are grossly overpowered for a webhost, cloudflare nameservers OR CDN, and I keep as much of the development as possible server side with as little JavaScript as I can. An example was a simple blogging system I made. The entire system is set up with a MariaDB table that has “title, date, image url, and content” as the data bits for it, and then each function works on one of two pages: a backend using php session that has all of the functions with get request, and a front end that has all of its content on a page with post requests. There is no JavaScript involved on either page, which means the stuff transmitted over the internet is lesser, the stuff done on the client computer is lesser, and the number of outside calls is lesser. This does make it “less responsive”, but does the blog really need image zoom in on hover and shit like that? I have found the best way to develop for speed and simplicity is to curb the enthusiasm of the client from “looks as good as possible” to “simple, cheap, fast, and robust, while still looking better than average” The final suggestion I have is to develop with security AND accessibility in mind first. If you want to put aria links of all of your stuff, it is much harder to go back later and 1) determine what the link does, and 2) write an aria for it than it is to just include it in the first place. Always follow proper form for mitigating risks like SQL injection and XSS, and do as much as possible on the server before you resort to JS. If you are looking for a couple of sites that I didn’t build, but get the point of what I am trying to do across, check out Smashingmagazine.com Hacker news doesn’t look the best, but it follows the logic set forth, Openai.com (this one surprised me because if you remove a lot of the slightly more interactive elements it is fast as hell) If you have any specific questions, ask away and I’ll do my best
- rasz 3y agoGoogle specifically reengineered YT last year to do exactly that! From loading ready to display html with subsequent clicks ajaxing more html to loading 1MB .js library and 400KB of json on first load with every subsequent click requesting anotehr ~400KB of json to be interpreted.
- chrisldgk 3y agoThis is called cumulative layout shift (CLS for short) and there’s a push in web dev to work against and around this - it’s recently become part of the performance measurement of googles lighthouse scoring and server side rendering and static site generation metaframeworks like nextjs and Astro allow you to send out the entire static page HTML without having to lazy load any new data.
- ksec 3y agoWe also have tech companies that claims sub 300ms request response time is good enough. I wish people look at StackOverflow and understand how they do everything at under 20ms.
- immibis 3y agoAs a person from New Zealand I am accustomed to every single request taking a minimum of 300ms RTT and sometimes it's shocking when it doesn't.
- Retr0id 3y agoUnfortunately for most users of most software, "losing interest" isn't really an option - they need it to do some job or other.
- jprete 3y agoI get your point, but "losing interest" can also mean losing flow, because the user got interrupted for five seconds instead of instantly taking the next action in their mental plan. When apps have these kinds of interruptions all over the place, that's even worse than just having them at startup.
- dm319 3y agoI was just reading this week about someone trying to get their UHK keyboard to launch an application on Windows by producing a sequence of keys starting with the Windows key. They needed to put in a delay to get this to work, and it reminded me of my frustrations launching programs in Windows as the start menu takes its sweet and variable time. Not least because I know the technology has been focused on getting adverts into the start menu.
- danuker 3y agoIsn't there still the Run dialog, Win+R in newer versions of Windows?
- abwizz 3y agothis is the way. but putting delay between events (not keystrokes) is nevertheless a good practice
- Anthony-G 3y agoThanks. I had forgot about that because the Windows key by itself was fast enough in Windows 7 that I stopped using Win+R.
- mwcampbell 3y agoThere is, but even that's not perfect. I have this stupid habit where I bring up the NVDA screen reader when I want it by typing Windows+R, typing "nvda", and pressing Enter. (I have low vision, and I use a screen reader sometimes, but not all the time.) I know, I really should use a desktop keyboard shortcut instead. Anyway, it's muscle memory, and I do it automatically, without watching for the Run dialog to appear. Only sometimes, the Run dialog doesn't appear fast enough, and maybe the "n" doesn't make it into that dialog's edit box. Or, on one or two embarrasing occasions, the Run dialog didn't grab focus at all, or at least not until way too late, and a message that just said "nvda" made it into a chat window.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoMacOS manages to provide an advanced search launcher experience as fast or faster than the run dialog that requires the perfect exe name. What’s Microsoft’s excuse? Tired of their incompetence being handwaved and a several decades old jank non-solution being held up as acceptable. MS needs more accountability in their teams.
- bee_rider 3y agoOTOH I recall alt-tabbing full screen games (Warcraft 3 on a single core machine is a specific memory) and then sitting back for a while… Office suites have never been good, but office suites in like 2005 seemed to stretch systems to the breaking point. Lots of consumer software has always sucked out of the box, I guess if you are here you were possibly a technically savvy kid at some point, is it possible that you were just more selective about the types of programs you ran when you were using the computer for fun?
- treeman79 3y agoOld text word processors on my 286/386 back in the late 80s / early 90s, ran just fine. Instant everything. Only thing that was truly slow was the scanner.
- kjellsbells 3y agoWordPerfect 5.1 for DOS has entered the chat. I have fond memories of that, but basically the editor was a UI into a linked list with a blue screen. So not comparable to what people are being asked to do with Word and 365 today. My personal beef with Word is that it struggles so much with long documents. Trying to read, say, a 300 page spec from 3GPP is miserable.
- anaisbetts 3y agoMost games don't need to change screen resolutions anymore which is the expensive bit since not only do you have to wait for the hardware to settle, you have to throw out basically everything in GPU memory and reset it all
- atq2119 3y agoAlso, having to throw out basically everything in GPU memory is largely a thing of the past in the first place. I still have this instinctual reluctance to change screen resolution in a game's setting screen, even though 99% of the time it's an instantaneous thing these days.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoThis is what happens when you have a leaning tower of abstractions, with each layer being developed with a philosophy of, "it's good enough". Some performance loss is unavoidable when you're adding layers, but that aforementioned attitude of indifference has a multiplicative effect which dramatically increases losses. By the time you get to the endpoint, the losses snowball into something rather ridiculous.
- dumdumchan 3y ago[flagged]
- the_overseer 3y agoIs this missing an /s?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snovv_crash 3y agoIf you disable the virus scanner and write a simple SDL app on Windows it will open instantly as well.
- LanceH 3y agoAlong those lines, I have numerous clients who just want plain Ruby on Rails -- no react front end. They are all business to business, or at least professional users on the end. They just want their data loaded and to work with it. Ruby on Rails may not be the poster child for speediness as things get big or complex, but if you aren't fighting the ORM, it's consistently quick from click to data. Also, RoR is definitely not dead.
- jimt1234 3y agoRecently I re-discovered my old collection of mp3s. I copied them to my laptop and started listening (using VLC). It blew me away how pleasant the experience was, particularly the overall responsiveness, navigating from track-to-track, skipping around in a track, stuff like that. I never really noticed the delays from streaming services until they were gone.
- batiudrami 3y agoSpotify’s trick when it first launched is that search and playback was so fast it almost felt like you had all the music in the world on your hard drive. Unfortunately I cannot think of a single thing that has gotten better about Spotify since I started using it, and a lot which has gotten worse.
- mwcampbell 3y agoDepending on when you started using Spotify, accessibility might have gotten infinitely better. The original Windows app, with its custom GUI toolkit, was completely inaccessible with a screen reader. Then they re-did the UI using Chromium Embedded Framework.
- erwan577 3y agoThe first step to solve a problem is to measure it. Do you know of a windows program that can measure the latency of the UI of other windows apps ? What really drives me mad is the latency of some file selection dialogs for example which can take like 10 seconds.
- hulitu 3y ago> What really drives me mad is the latency of some file selection dialogs for example which can take like 10 seconds. That's why the obfuscated it and now it takes 30 seconds. (Win 10). Unless you want to save on OneDrive.
- viraptor 3y agoYou can get lots of good information from ETW https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/event-tracing-for-windows--etw- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... There's also Dtrace https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/dtrace https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...
- Aerroon 3y agoSome file selection dialog (and explorer) issues come down to the anti-virus. I've had folders on an SSD that took a minute (60 seconds!) to load. After I added it to an exclusion list in Defender it loaded in a second. Another one that can be slow with file dialogs is that sometimes (maybe it has been fixed now) it will try to query whether a networked drive is around on another computer. If it isn't then the call to it can be blocking your file UI. A third problem I've noticed with file selection dialogs and explorer is that the My Computer 'folder' that contains your disks takes a long time to load. Much longer than any sub-folders on any of the drives. I think the problem is largely with explorer.exe. If I browse those folders in a web browser the experience is snappy.
- Dylan16807 3y agoTrying to meet a specific threshold is part of the problem. The better the development hardware, the earlier that threshold is met in testing, which tends to mean optimization effort falls off a cliff. Also that threshold is an entire 400ms. We should expect significantly better than that these days.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoAbout 20 years ago I was evaluating solutions for reporting to see if we could save money switching from Crystal Reports. One reason we stayed with Crystal was they did something they other report engines did not; they made available for display every page as it was rendered. So for a 400 page report, you could start working with it immediately. It took each engine (with a couple exceptions) about the same time to generate the entire report, but for the other engines, you had to wait until they were done. There is speed, then there is the perception of speed. Crystal got this right.
- lenkite 3y agoPeople got too used to the Web - slowly loading stuff - and so began to tolerate native apps also loading slow.
- Gigachad 3y agoBecause the user would rather wait a minute to load Photoshop, than have MS Paint that loads instantly.
- ObscureScience 3y agoNote that modern versions of MS Paint (with few improvements over the original) takes seconds to load on a quad core 3+ghz machine, loaded from an SSD.
- winrid 3y agoIs this just the C# runtime being slow or just lots of abstraction?
- ObscureScience 3y agoI would not say that the C# runtime is slow, but it is a JIT compiler that is not optimizing for start-up (as far as I know), and it is "doing a lot of work" at runtime to achieve the eventual performance it is capable of. Start-up time is not the most important property for a lot of services, but for user applications it's pretty high up there, so if the underlying runtime is not optimizing for that this shows a disconnect in the choice of technology stack. I'm quite impressed of both .NET and OpenJDK in some metrics, but it is often not resource efficient, which is something I do value. One example of an application that works as I would expect others to do is MuPDF, Being able to open 20MB+ PDFs in 1/10 seconds on a 10 years+ old laptop. By the way, does anyone know why Debian launches LibreOffice so much quicker than Ubuntu, Fedora or Archlinux (or any other distro I've tested with)? In Debian its 1-2 seconds, and the others 5-10 seconds. I mean it could be included extensions or how they are configured, but I'm honestly interested.
- winrid 3y agoMaybe you're using the older Java based libreoffice on the other machines? It was mostly rewritten in C++.
- deepspace 3y agoI keep harping on Visual Studio, but I learned programming with Borland Turbo Pascal (and later Turbo C/C++) on a 4.77MHz machine with 512k memory. It was orders of magnitude more responsive than VS on my current 16 core 3.5GHz 128GB machine. The only exceptions are: 1) the actual build, which is faster on the modern machine, but only for a large number of source files and 2) reading and writing files - a floppy disk cannot beat an nvme drive of course.
- simooooo 3y agoIt was also doing about 3 magnitudes less work
- anonymoushn 3y agoWhat is this supposed to mean?
- agumonkey 3y agoReminds me of my hp48 calc, which original system was often .. sluggish, but with enough input buffer and predictability (stack + RPL) meant that it was actually beneficial since it forced you to learn things by heart and anticipate more, and the pauses would serve as thinking time for your brain. A rare kind of slow and laggy turning out to be fun. Also impressive how our brain is sensitive to all of this.. no matter how impressive a current OS / web browser / jitted js is.. I dearly miss the past eras "behavior".
- AlecSchueler 3y agoWe're so glued to our screens now that our threshold for losing interest is far higher. We'll check our phone while waiting for a desktop app to open rather than walking away and finding another activity.
- zadler 3y agoThe one I can’t stand is keyboard input lag when a paragraph gets large. Happens in seemingly every app except vim.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoI’ve been sharing videos like this for a month or two I have a 2015 MacBook Air I abandoned recently for being so painfully slow to use that I had almost not touched it for months. I have an iPad Air 2 that is basically unusable at this point. Both are 2-3 orders of magnitudes faster than those old computers that work instantly. But windows and web apps are super slow now too Think of all the landfills and wasted work hours earning the money needed to fill those landfills. The heavy and rare metals This is proof that if computers were 10x faster, they would run slower than ours today, because in the past we’ve seen that be true over and over. The software companies will just make heavier and heavier programs and operating systems until we have gained nothing but a significant amount of co2 emissions
- accrual 3y agoAren't those devices also running non-contemporary OSs? I wonder if installing the factory OS would make them seem fast again, albeit at the cost of 8 years of software updates.
- Aerbil313 3y agoThis is only true as the software industry keeps piling abstractions on top of abstractions, as Moore’s law allows it. But we’re reaching the end of the Moore and already feeling the effects of it, for example Javascript frameworks priding themselves on performance instead of features. Give it some time for the industry to finally mature.
- cstrahan 3y ago> What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it. What is worse than that: not being able to predict if inputs will be buffered or dropped during unresponsiveness. I kind of look like an idiot when I keep clicking/typing away on someone else’s computer while things are frozen, thinking “oh, it’ll catch up in a bit”, and then 5 seconds later I have to work harder to fix the chaos: some keystrokes at the beginning made it through, then only every other one, then the next couple hundred got dropped, but the next 100 came through fine, and interspersed everywhere there are bizarre runs of duplicated keys, as if I had held the letter aaaaaaaaaaaaaa down continuously. Everyone’s mix of hardware, OS, text editor, text editor plugins, etc makes this behavior highly variable, and hard to guess if it makes sense to keep typing or just wait out the frequent 1-5 second lockups.
- eternityforest 3y agoAndroid is almost as responsive as things like that. Linux is good, sometimes, windows seems better. 1GB programs are rarely instant but that's usually just the price for very complex functionality if it's too interconnected to load parts of it on demand.