3 ms·

Again and again people complain about this. But it remains a fact that essentially nobody actually wants this. Developers certainly like to have their complete

Again and again people complain about this. But it remains a fact that essentially nobody actually wants this. Developers certainly like to have their completely integrated, connected and universal computing platform (the web). And users do not seem to particularly care about performance as long as it is good enough. And that is exactly the standard that is set, software is allowed to be so bad that it doesn't really annoy the user too much. Management doesn't care either, certainly creating good software isn't important when good enough software has already been developed. Sure, I would like things to be different, but until one group decides that a drastic departure is necessary, nothing will change. There are also no real incentives for change, from any perspective.

impossiblefork 3y ago
Do we really though? Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. Much of the modern cloud-based or half-online world is quite unnatural from a user perspective, and where there is no need for monetisation-- for example with OpenOffice, the software can expected to remain a desktop application.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  Certainly there has been almost no pushback. I don't think most users really care for native applications, what they like to see is clicking on something and having it work instantly, web apps deliver that.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I think an overwhelming majority of users aren’t technical enough or well enough versed in UI/UX to be able to put a finger on the frustrations they experience with software, and this is something that’s important to remember when considering complaints coming from a more technically-inclined minority — even if only a small number of techy folks are unhappy, these frustrations likely exist in the larger userbase too even if most users are unable to articulate them. In addition, some percentage undoubtedly perceive these issues but are just too busy to bother with sending in feedback. With all that considered, I believe the extent of pushback that is possible is quite limited as long as the app technically works, but this is far from an accurate indicator of user happiness.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      > I think an overwhelming majority of users aren’t technical enough or well enough versed in UI/UX to be able to put a finger on the frustrations they experience with software They're ok with it because they don't know it could be better. A spinner every 2 minutes? 12 minutes to open slack? They accept it as fact of life until a better software comes in, and now they're wondering why they haven't come across something like this sooner.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        Sadly, I think people are starting to accept, as a fact of life, that software gets worse every time a developer touches it. People dread "upgrades" because it's going to get slower, buggier, the UI is going to change unnecessarily, and there's nothing they can do about it besides try to stay on the previous version, which is often impossible with web software.
- edanm 3y ago
  > Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. This is certainly a big part of it, but it's not the whole story. For one thing, there were ways to achieve those business models with native software too - "web-based=subscription" isn't actually a requirement, or the only way to go. But users in the early 2000s, many of them more technical than users today, rejected this idea. It felt like native apps had to cost money one time, and doing otherwise would be wrong. But with Web, since users understood that it was hosted elsewhere, it "made sense" for it to be a subscription, so users went with it. This also affected the technical things as well. Auto-updating was incredibly frowned upon in the 2000s - you bought it, you got to keep it as-is. So companies had to work very hard to keep multiple versions working all the time. Most of these biases by technical users have gone away. We now have auto-updating subscription native apps, e.g. Photoshop works that way today. But these technical biases drove the usage of the web, because it was so much technically easier for businesses, and allowed much better business models. (And, and this isn't even getting into the whole "installing software was really hard for users" thing!)
  - skydhash 3y ago
    If I bought a license in 2004, then run XP for ten years on the same machine, why should I pay for updates when I don’t need the update? If the license said three years, then I’d know I’d be out of support for the last seven years Everybody knew that updates weren’t free and they’d buy licenses when it was time to move on. But it’s hard to justify moving on when the software is still running fine even on Windows 10.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
Yep. The most successful startup I worked at had a SPA that downloaded 5MB bundle and preloaded a bunch of data. Took nearly 10 seconds to startup. Nobody complained about that. In fact, few people complained about a few portions of the app that had abysmal performance. It often wasn’t until 60 second load times that customers started complaining. They still raved and raved about that software because it solved an extremely valuable problem for them. A job that took literally a week could now be done in minutes. As the space heated up, we needed to improve some things, but most people literally did not care. It would always be stack ranked last in the list.
- trgn 3y ago
  Startup time of an SPA is meaningless when it's for the sort of app you open once in the morning and then use during the rest of the day. It's a single startup-hit, and the user suffers it in between closing the tabs from the previous day and fiddling with some emails. Doesn't matter it is 10-20 seconds. The problem with the long startup is that it tends to cloud any discussion on performance. Code loading and parsing is basically the biggest bar in the app-perf breakdown of your profiles, and thus spins this narrative that this is the thing to optimize for, because it's the biggest bang. Rather than say, responding to user selections, reducing jitter and sluggishness while scrolling, etc... I'm starting to believe that for a large class of apps, developers should look at it as if they are writing video games: the user will tolerate the spinner before the level, but then it needs to be silky smooth after. And the _smooth after_ requires a whole class of other optimizations; it's striving for a flat memory profile, it's small ad-hoc data transfer, it's formatting data into usable layout at lower levels in the stack, it's lazy loading of content in the background, etc... Those are the areas where web-devs should be looking a (again, this only applies for that sort of SPA; e.g read-only content, blogs and such, should display _fast_).
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Most of my current applications have been opened since the computer booted (11 days ago). Where I'm drawing the line is wasting resources and time while I'm using them. As you said, mostly about user interactions and scrolling because UI is bound to IO for some reason. I remember all the big software taking time to startup (Adobe's, Autodesk's, even Microsoft Office's), but once they do, it was pretty smooth unless you launch that computer/gpu intensive operation. But now, things like Slack causes the computer fan to scream.
metalspoon 3y ago
The blog is flawed. 33MB is likely no problem for the web. It's just that Google Docs devs haven't cared about that size probably because hardly anybody creates a huge doc on their platform. Or maybe his dad created a complicated doc file that G Doc failed to parse. That's different from us devs losing efficiency from our deployment platform.
II2II 3y ago
I suspect a few things are going on here. This is not exactly a new phenomena. People have been complaining about software bloat since at least the mid-1990's. I suspect someone older than myself would gleefully explain that the complaint's went back to the mid-1980's, mid-1970's, etc.. Eventually it gets to the point where only outliers will complain. Everyone else will simply upgrade, put up with the bloat, or stick with old software. Then there is the question of whether the bloat is worth the benefits. If Docs was a simply a clone of Word, few people would have adopted it. Some people use it because it is free, others since they want to work on or access their documents from various devices, yet others want to collaborate on documents seamlessly. If you're getting something out of the bloat, you're less likely to think of it as bloat. We also have to consider that some bloat isn't really bloat. It's easy to point to AppleWorks on the Apple II then bemoan how modern word processes require about five orders of magnitude more resources, while ignoring how resource intensive the niceties are. Want to use proportional fonts that look nice at any size and have them rendered properly on the screen? That's about three orders of magnitude more video memory, additional CPU and use for rendering the text, etc.. I'm using that example since it is something people can actually see. Now consider the things they cannot see (such as working on documents larger than the computer's main memory, the memory required for Unicode fonts, the ability to switch between the working document and research notes, memory protection to prevent an ill behaved application from wiping out all of your work). Yes, bloat exists. On the other hand, a lot of the increased resource use is actually quality of life improvements.
- Anarch157a 3y ago
  What people also forget is that if Windows 11 requires 8GB of RAM while Windows 98 only required 8MB, that's 3 orders of magnitude. If we adjust the size of our modern "bloated" applications using the same scale, an app that today takes 100MB on disk, would be equivalent to a just 100KB in 1998, an Electron app that uses 1GB of memory would be equivalent to one that took only 1MB 30 years ago. Apps today are no more bloated than they were last century, while we gained a lot of functionalities that would have been considered witchcraft in the days of Win98.
somenameforme 3y ago
You're saying two very different things. Nobody actually wants this is not the same as nobody is actually moving forward to achieve this. Performance is something like a tragedy of the commons. Because everybody is just doing what's in their own short term interests, but the long-term consequence is where we are today: you'd need what would literally have been a supercomputer, not that long ago, to run a word processor. It's kind of funny to imagine this parallel world where you send a PC of today back to the 70s. Whichever government got their hands on it would be keeping it ultra classified and hiding it away, like it was some device, too dangerous for the public, that could computationally solve any problem imaginable, create anything imaginable.
VelesDude 3y ago
The area I feel this difference the most is when you use software that didn't fall into this trap. Things like MYOB EXO/CRM, SAP ERP systems have code bases stretching back decades that innovate at a glacial pace. As such it is basically 2000's tech that we are forced to still use and that has turned into its big advantage. It is always fun to put up the task managed on these to see them using 20-30MB of RAM with a large part of that being the current data base loaded in. VLC & Blender are other examples of this.
austinjp 3y ago
I take your point, but people certainly do complain about performance and download sizes, they just do it indirectly by describing the side effects. Only recently my partner asked me why her laptop got so hot. An iPhone user I know said they hate it when their phone got "screen freeze", in other words when it became unresponsive. They didn't describe it in terms of performance or app size, even though those are the underlying problems. Anyone trying to download a large app on a phone with poor signal will get frustrated, and people who live in areas with unreliable internet experience third daily. People on low incomes or living in developing nations can often only use older devices which get clogged up with large, slow apps and become frustrating to use. If you feel that people don't care about performance and download size, you may be asking the wrong people the wrong questions.

impossiblefork 3y ago

Do we really though? Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. Much of the modern cloud-based or half-online world is quite unnatural from a user perspective, and where there is no need for monetisation-- for example with OpenOffice, the software can expected to remain a desktop application.

constantcrying 3y ago
Certainly there has been almost no pushback. I don't think most users really care for native applications, what they like to see is clicking on something and having it work instantly, web apps deliver that.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I think an overwhelming majority of users aren’t technical enough or well enough versed in UI/UX to be able to put a finger on the frustrations they experience with software, and this is something that’s important to remember when considering complaints coming from a more technically-inclined minority — even if only a small number of techy folks are unhappy, these frustrations likely exist in the larger userbase too even if most users are unable to articulate them. In addition, some percentage undoubtedly perceive these issues but are just too busy to bother with sending in feedback. With all that considered, I believe the extent of pushback that is possible is quite limited as long as the app technically works, but this is far from an accurate indicator of user happiness.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    > I think an overwhelming majority of users aren’t technical enough or well enough versed in UI/UX to be able to put a finger on the frustrations they experience with software They're ok with it because they don't know it could be better. A spinner every 2 minutes? 12 minutes to open slack? They accept it as fact of life until a better software comes in, and now they're wondering why they haven't come across something like this sooner.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Sadly, I think people are starting to accept, as a fact of life, that software gets worse every time a developer touches it. People dread "upgrades" because it's going to get slower, buggier, the UI is going to change unnecessarily, and there's nothing they can do about it besides try to stay on the previous version, which is often impossible with web software.
edanm 3y ago
> Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. This is certainly a big part of it, but it's not the whole story. For one thing, there were ways to achieve those business models with native software too - "web-based=subscription" isn't actually a requirement, or the only way to go. But users in the early 2000s, many of them more technical than users today, rejected this idea. It felt like native apps had to cost money one time, and doing otherwise would be wrong. But with Web, since users understood that it was hosted elsewhere, it "made sense" for it to be a subscription, so users went with it. This also affected the technical things as well. Auto-updating was incredibly frowned upon in the 2000s - you bought it, you got to keep it as-is. So companies had to work very hard to keep multiple versions working all the time. Most of these biases by technical users have gone away. We now have auto-updating subscription native apps, e.g. Photoshop works that way today. But these technical biases drove the usage of the web, because it was so much technically easier for businesses, and allowed much better business models. (And, and this isn't even getting into the whole "installing software was really hard for users" thing!)
- skydhash 3y ago
  If I bought a license in 2004, then run XP for ten years on the same machine, why should I pay for updates when I don’t need the update? If the license said three years, then I’d know I’d be out of support for the last seven years Everybody knew that updates weren’t free and they’d buy licenses when it was time to move on. But it’s hard to justify moving on when the software is still running fine even on Windows 10.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

Yep. The most successful startup I worked at had a SPA that downloaded 5MB bundle and preloaded a bunch of data. Took nearly 10 seconds to startup. Nobody complained about that. In fact, few people complained about a few portions of the app that had abysmal performance. It often wasn’t until 60 second load times that customers started complaining. They still raved and raved about that software because it solved an extremely valuable problem for them. A job that took literally a week could now be done in minutes. As the space heated up, we needed to improve some things, but most people literally did not care. It would always be stack ranked last in the list.

trgn 3y ago
Startup time of an SPA is meaningless when it's for the sort of app you open once in the morning and then use during the rest of the day. It's a single startup-hit, and the user suffers it in between closing the tabs from the previous day and fiddling with some emails. Doesn't matter it is 10-20 seconds. The problem with the long startup is that it tends to cloud any discussion on performance. Code loading and parsing is basically the biggest bar in the app-perf breakdown of your profiles, and thus spins this narrative that this is the thing to optimize for, because it's the biggest bang. Rather than say, responding to user selections, reducing jitter and sluggishness while scrolling, etc... I'm starting to believe that for a large class of apps, developers should look at it as if they are writing video games: the user will tolerate the spinner before the level, but then it needs to be silky smooth after. And the _smooth after_ requires a whole class of other optimizations; it's striving for a flat memory profile, it's small ad-hoc data transfer, it's formatting data into usable layout at lower levels in the stack, it's lazy loading of content in the background, etc... Those are the areas where web-devs should be looking a (again, this only applies for that sort of SPA; e.g read-only content, blogs and such, should display _fast_).
- skydhash 3y ago
  Most of my current applications have been opened since the computer booted (11 days ago). Where I'm drawing the line is wasting resources and time while I'm using them. As you said, mostly about user interactions and scrolling because UI is bound to IO for some reason. I remember all the big software taking time to startup (Adobe's, Autodesk's, even Microsoft Office's), but once they do, it was pretty smooth unless you launch that computer/gpu intensive operation. But now, things like Slack causes the computer fan to scream.

metalspoon 3y ago

The blog is flawed. 33MB is likely no problem for the web. It's just that Google Docs devs haven't cared about that size probably because hardly anybody creates a huge doc on their platform. Or maybe his dad created a complicated doc file that G Doc failed to parse. That's different from us devs losing efficiency from our deployment platform.

II2II 3y ago

I suspect a few things are going on here. This is not exactly a new phenomena. People have been complaining about software bloat since at least the mid-1990's. I suspect someone older than myself would gleefully explain that the complaint's went back to the mid-1980's, mid-1970's, etc.. Eventually it gets to the point where only outliers will complain. Everyone else will simply upgrade, put up with the bloat, or stick with old software. Then there is the question of whether the bloat is worth the benefits. If Docs was a simply a clone of Word, few people would have adopted it. Some people use it because it is free, others since they want to work on or access their documents from various devices, yet others want to collaborate on documents seamlessly. If you're getting something out of the bloat, you're less likely to think of it as bloat. We also have to consider that some bloat isn't really bloat. It's easy to point to AppleWorks on the Apple II then bemoan how modern word processes require about five orders of magnitude more resources, while ignoring how resource intensive the niceties are. Want to use proportional fonts that look nice at any size and have them rendered properly on the screen? That's about three orders of magnitude more video memory, additional CPU and use for rendering the text, etc.. I'm using that example since it is something people can actually see. Now consider the things they cannot see (such as working on documents larger than the computer's main memory, the memory required for Unicode fonts, the ability to switch between the working document and research notes, memory protection to prevent an ill behaved application from wiping out all of your work). Yes, bloat exists. On the other hand, a lot of the increased resource use is actually quality of life improvements.

Anarch157a 3y ago
What people also forget is that if Windows 11 requires 8GB of RAM while Windows 98 only required 8MB, that's 3 orders of magnitude. If we adjust the size of our modern "bloated" applications using the same scale, an app that today takes 100MB on disk, would be equivalent to a just 100KB in 1998, an Electron app that uses 1GB of memory would be equivalent to one that took only 1MB 30 years ago. Apps today are no more bloated than they were last century, while we gained a lot of functionalities that would have been considered witchcraft in the days of Win98.

somenameforme 3y ago

You're saying two very different things. Nobody actually wants this is not the same as nobody is actually moving forward to achieve this. Performance is something like a tragedy of the commons. Because everybody is just doing what's in their own short term interests, but the long-term consequence is where we are today: you'd need what would literally have been a supercomputer, not that long ago, to run a word processor. It's kind of funny to imagine this parallel world where you send a PC of today back to the 70s. Whichever government got their hands on it would be keeping it ultra classified and hiding it away, like it was some device, too dangerous for the public, that could computationally solve any problem imaginable, create anything imaginable.

VelesDude 3y ago

The area I feel this difference the most is when you use software that didn't fall into this trap. Things like MYOB EXO/CRM, SAP ERP systems have code bases stretching back decades that innovate at a glacial pace. As such it is basically 2000's tech that we are forced to still use and that has turned into its big advantage. It is always fun to put up the task managed on these to see them using 20-30MB of RAM with a large part of that being the current data base loaded in. VLC & Blender are other examples of this.

austinjp 3y ago

I take your point, but people certainly do complain about performance and download sizes, they just do it indirectly by describing the side effects. Only recently my partner asked me why her laptop got so hot. An iPhone user I know said they hate it when their phone got "screen freeze", in other words when it became unresponsive. They didn't describe it in terms of performance or app size, even though those are the underlying problems. Anyone trying to download a large app on a phone with poor signal will get frustrated, and people who live in areas with unreliable internet experience third daily. People on low incomes or living in developing nations can often only use older devices which get clogged up with large, slow apps and become frustrating to use. If you feel that people don't care about performance and download size, you may be asking the wrong people the wrong questions.