2 ms·

> What has happened that our web browsers use 2G of memory and are slow! They are much more complex - ridiculously so - both because of the constant evolution

by mftrhu 3y ago

> What has happened that our web browsers use 2G of memory and are slow! They are much more complex - ridiculously so - both because of the constant evolution of web standards and because of everything they need to do to keep what they execute in its own sandbox. It doesn't help that the actual content being served just keeps on bloating. Think back to the average web page in the early 2000s: it was probably still browsed over a 56k modem, CSS was starting to get support, and if it might have had a few inline images it was still mostly text embedded in plain HTML. Web apps were CGI, JS was used sparingly, and people were still using frames. Those pages were positively anemic when compared to what we sling around nowadays. 1 MB used to be a lot of data, and it just isn't the case anymore. You have layers of abstractions piled up on each other, isolated from the rest of the system as much as possible, slurping in, parsing and rendering multi-megabyte compressed, encrypted blobs. But yes - it is a shame. We are doing so much more to achieve pretty much the same thing, and I keep on asking myself if we really need to.

vbezhenar 3y ago
I can also add mandatory TLS to this list. Back in the day you could receive an entire webpage response in the first TCP packet with data. TLS requires more turn-arounds, especially if webpage uses multiple different domains, and network latency is not going anywhere, it's physics. I had 200 ms latency in 2000, I have 200 ms latency in 2020, I'll have 200 ms latency in 2050, that's just thousands of kilometers to travel.
- toast0 3y ago
  Latencies have gotten better, although not tremendously so. Depending on your last mile tech in 2000 and what you have now, you might have gone fron dialup with first hop round trips of 50-100ms, to something in the neighborhood of 5-25ms with fiber, dsl or cable. Or maybe you were already on dsl or cable and things are about the same. Most of a 200ms round trip is on a long distance route, and fiber routes have improved, as had routing equipment in the data path. If you're outside the US and Europe, there's been a lot more local interconnections too, so routes that used to bounce through US/EU in 2000 don't in 2023. Saving a few ms here and there adds up, but 160 ms instead of 200 ms doesn't feel that much different.

by mftrhu 3y ago

vbezhenar 3y ago

I can also add mandatory TLS to this list. Back in the day you could receive an entire webpage response in the first TCP packet with data. TLS requires more turn-arounds, especially if webpage uses multiple different domains, and network latency is not going anywhere, it's physics. I had 200 ms latency in 2000, I have 200 ms latency in 2020, I'll have 200 ms latency in 2050, that's just thousands of kilometers to travel.

toast0 3y ago
Latencies have gotten better, although not tremendously so. Depending on your last mile tech in 2000 and what you have now, you might have gone fron dialup with first hop round trips of 50-100ms, to something in the neighborhood of 5-25ms with fiber, dsl or cable. Or maybe you were already on dsl or cable and things are about the same. Most of a 200ms round trip is on a long distance route, and fiber routes have improved, as had routing equipment in the data path. If you're outside the US and Europe, there's been a lot more local interconnections too, so routes that used to bounce through US/EU in 2000 don't in 2023. Saving a few ms here and there adds up, but 160 ms instead of 200 ms doesn't feel that much different.