9 ms·

The internet is killing old PC hardware [video]

76 points by hexage1814 2y ago

Rochus 2y ago
> A solution is needed to help those old computers A solution could be to put another layer on top of the internet. This could be done by means of a "presentation proxy", similar to cloud gaming, e.g. based on VNC, where only a VNC client is run on the old computer, and the browser is running on the presentation proxy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- la_oveja 2y ago
  that sounds horrifying, not gonna lie
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  There are solid reasons to put your browser executable and storage other than on your principle desktop in the first place. That still leaves the attack-surface of browser-based activities (do you really want your recreational activities sites interacting with your financial services?), but both gives the option for fresh respawns (OS and/or browser) and physical and network isolation of your local storage and data from your browser. (This presumes hygiene on any browser-based downloads as well, of course.) In general, the idea that we'd want all our data on a globally-accessible network is seeming increasingly unwise to me over time, given both technical and political developments. Late edit: Oh, and Browsh: text-only browser-via-proxy supporting CSS/JS. <https://www.brow.sh/ https://www.brow.sh/> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25129747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25129747>
  - notarealllama 2y ago
    So say we all. My non-tech friends call me paranoid at the basic level of protection I do - separate browsers for everything, and a couple of VMs for e.g. finances. Vlan has always been an important part of LAN security but we're just out here with always on, full Internet access? My home firewall logs show an insane amount of bot / scraping etc.
    - nxobject 2y ago
      It's also a good way of isolating proprietary applications that barf services, applications, and custom ways of keeping user state all over the system – I'm looking at you, Citrix.
- WJW 2y ago
  Instead of using a more powerful computer to be the presentation proxy for a less powerful one, the more obvious solution would be to upgrade to a not-so-old computer directly? Alternatively, don't try to load heavy sites on hardware that is too light for it.
- hexage1814 2y ago
  >presentation proxy I usually I just go to archive.is and read the page there.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Some implementations of this: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-browsing-modern-web-on-vintage-machines/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro... https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/01/web-rendering-proxy-v4-6-released/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/01/web-rendering-proxy-v4-6...
  - Rochus 2y ago
    That's cool, thanks for the hint. Do you know, what frame rate/latency can be achieved with this approach? I've read that the limit of VNC is about 7 fps.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      I couldn't say. Note that the WRP kind of renders in an actual old browser on the local system, so latency will be different there.
eqvinox 2y ago
Indirect point: using an ad blocker protects the environment. Considering it also helps security (loading fewer things = fewer chances at exploits), it should really be the default.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  [dead]
trinix912 2y ago
Well it wouldn't be that way if it were not for all the JavaScript. If we just kept on doing server-side scripting (PHP, CGI/Perl...) and used JS only where absolutely necessary (video players, games...) like in the early 2000s, it would all work fine on 15 year old hardware. But instead we use the browser as an OS and have tons of JS on simple news sites.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  I suspect DOM modelling/rendering also has an impact as I've surfed with JS off, using Firefox on an older (mid-aughts) iMac running Linux ... and can't get much past 2--4 tabs before performance becomes absolutely unacceptable. Instrumentation of browsers to show performance constraints remains poor and/or a Black Art, so I'm somewhat winging this. The same system performs wonderfully with scripts, non-browser based requests (e.g., wget, curl), terminal-mode browsers (usually w3m or lynx), and local applications (mailers, audio ripping / playback, GIMP, word-processing, and of course shell tools, as well as a few occasional games perhaps.
  - h2zizzle 2y ago
    >Instrumentation of browsers to show performance constraints remains poor and/or a Black Art Which makes the loss of all our DEI programs over the past month all the more painful.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      ?
      - h2zizzle 2y ago
        The employment/mentorship pipeline for Black artists seems to have been decimated.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
mahrain 2y ago
Even having a few 'retro' systems up and running, mostly Macs from the early 2000s, I find that what we used to do on them: chatting on Skype or MSN Messenger, listening to shoutcast streams or downloading on Napster, playing Unreal Tournament online etc. are mostly defunct now. What remains are local games, clunky word processors and MP3's on the local network. It turns out to be a largely empty experience unless you really get back into Command and Conquer or Metroid.
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  Marathon rockets of fury networked. Carmegaddon and Must/Pyst. Spaceward Ho! Where were you? {Fires rocket} pathways into darkness. Loderunner, dungeons of doom, Oregon trail
- netsharc 2y ago
  I watched a friend's kid play a game on his offline iPhone. So. many. freaking. ad interruptions! Fucking tragic, I'm glad my childhood gaming wasn't like that... Said childhood gaming, with what feels like a lot of latency: https://www.futrega.org/digger/ https://www.futrega.org/digger/
- SecretDreams 2y ago
  > It turns out to be a largely empty experience unless you really get back into Command and Conquer Sounds like a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
- acuozzo 2y ago
  > It turns out to be a largely empty experience I'm pretty heavily involved in SD video restoration and I drive things from "retro" systems mostly because I need 32-bit PCI slots and Windows XP in order to interface with older broadcast engineering hardware. I could shoehorn everything into a more modern system, but what I have suits my needs.
ForOldHack 2y ago
I actually disagree. It allows us to gather collections of retro software.
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  Useful to bring up that archive.org has done an insane amount of curating and preserving old software that would be gone into oblivion otherwise. https://archive.org/details/software https://archive.org/details/software National libraries across the world curate books, documents, and other formats but we as Humanity unfortunately are not very good at preserving the software side of History.
rahen 2y ago
Not only the Internet, but also its technologies. Electron apps bring older computers to their knees, and those apps are becoming ubiquitous (MS Teams, MS VS Code, Whatsapp, Signal...). Sometimes they are even labeled as "lightweight".
- tdy_err 2y ago
  Nobody thinks Electron applications are lightweight. Maybe you have heard someone refer to PWAs as lightweight applications surrogates
  - alpaca128 2y ago
    I’ve seen multiple VS Code users claim it’s lightweight and fast. And to be fair compared to many other Electron apps it is, but many editors still run circles around it.
    - vv_ 2y ago
      > but many editors still run circles around it Could you provide an example?
      - alpaca128 2y ago
        Last time I looked at benchmarks, editors like Sublime, Emacs, gVim etc and even some IDEs had lower input latency. Zed is probably the most comparable editor that’s both faster and more power efficient. Anecdotally on my previous laptop from 2016 it was often laggy and took longer to process a single key input than Vim took to start up and load plugins, and natively compiled editors like Emacs and Sublime tend to be noticeably snappier. Whether that matters to you or not is subjective, but I don’t like editors pretending to be IDEs anyway.
        vv_ 2y ago
        It's not surprising that editors / IDEs supporting less features are going to be faster. For example, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, according to that issue Zed doesn't support Build/Debug actions, which makes it a no-go for embedded development immediately. At that point I'd rather just use nvim with plugins. When I had an old computer that couldn't deal with the indexing done by JetBrain's CLion or Microsoft's Visual Studio Code - I used nvim. It was a pleasant experience, however it lacked support for visual debugging (and please don't talk about GDB TUI as if it is an option). Now that I have a computer that can deal with the indexing, Visual Studio Code is just fine. In fact, it is considerably more lightweight than JetBrain's CLion IDE and is very easy to setup. For example, https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-container https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-..., allows you to setup development inside a container. In practice this allows anyone to quickly pull the repository and start working on the code, including building and debugging without having to worry about setting up toolchains or environment as it'll be done automatically for you.
rembicilious 2y ago
My favorite Firefox plugin is NoScript. There is often an incredible amount of third-party JavaScript running on commercial web sites. NoScript turns all the JavaScript off by default, and then you can whitelist it temporarily (or permanently, your choice) at the per domain level. (I will never whitelist google tag manager, how is it present on every freaking website?) So I visit thing-i-want.com and it doesn’t load because NoScript is currently disabling JS for that domain. No problem, I temporarily enable JS for thing-i-want.com The page refreshes and suddenly NoScript is disabling JS for 10 more domains! That seems excessive, maybe the page doesn’t need ALL of those scripts to function. I will enable that cloudfront domain and that one that has “static content” in the name. Page refreshes. Okay it mostly works now but also NoScript is showing disabled JavaScript from 5 more domains! ..Anyways Sometimes sites are running scripts from 15 or more domains and sometimes they are nested 4 domains deep. It’s absurd and OF COURSE it overwhelms older devices. If you want to use a modern browser on an older device, use a browser with a script blocking plugin
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  NoScript as a antipattern, because it disincentivises browsing new websites. As you observed, for every new website you need to reload the page quite a few times to get it functional.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    It mainly disincentivizes using scummy sites the fetch JavaScript from 20 domains. Sites that just fetch JavaScript from their own domain, not as much.
  - rembicilious 2y ago
    I don’t ever install NoScript on family/friend devices. It just breaks their experience. I have knowledgeable coworkers that won’t use it because it’s not worth the hassle for them. So I agree it is an anti-pattern for typical use cases. But if you’re trying to get the most out of old hardware, it will make some websites more usable.
  - whizzter 2y ago
Sweepi 2y ago
1. Using uBlock Origin and NoScript would help 2. Sorry, but the AMD A4-1200 (2 Cores running at 1.0 (!) GHz, 4W TDP, Single Channel DDR3-1066[1]) was already slow when it was new back in 2013, it was introduced by AMD as a low budget *Tablet* option 3. Regarding Video playback: As mention in the video, forcing Youtube to serve h264 should help, since the iGPU supports h264 decoding [2][3] This also makes me wonder: What does Youtube serve on this old machines? On my old Vega 56 (UVD 7.0 h264/h265/JPEG decoding support), yt runs without issues, but on the displayed HD 8180 (UVD 4.2, h264 decoding support) it doesn't? My current system has a Nvidia 1050 and gets served AV1, which the 1050 also does not support in hardware. My first instinct for yt's "auto" implementation would be to the serve a video in 480p and a codec the users hardware decoders supports, and if the user switches to a higher resolution, to serve it in av1 in order to preserve bandwidth. Maybe Youtube does not have access to the users hardware decoding capabilities, or they want to preserve bandwidth even at low resolutions. [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/a4-1200.c1706 [2] https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index8h2 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#Format_support
- miunau 2y ago
  I was using a netbook with a comparable CPU as a work machine around that time. Using the web with it wasn't fun back then either, on Windows or Linux. I don't think there's any point in time when these underpowered processors would've been fine to use for browsing mainstream sites.
- vel0city 2y ago
  While watching the video you can right click and choose "Stats for nerds". This opens an overlay in the top left corner showing a lot of detailed information about the video including video and audio codecs.
axpvms 2y ago
It seems to hold up pretty well for an 11 year old netbook which was quite underpowered even when it came out. The equivalent would be someone in 2014 making a video about how their Pentium IV setup from 2003 is killed by the modern internet. And actually that's a bit unfair, as Pentium IV was a premium product while this netbook was not.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  By 2003 you could buy Half-Life on Steam. What are these webpages exposed in this video supposed to do¹? Display some text, pictures and maybe some videos. How does it feels it term of complexity and hardware requirement compared to a 1998 FPS which achieved impressive gamer-experience breakthrough incorporated into a customer grade product? Does it seems more fair as a comparison? Now, obviously you can’t expect all webdeveloper interns out there to reach the level of Valve engineers in 1998, sure. But the frameworks they are asked to use should give them the sober way as the easy path, and let more complex achievements still accessible in the remaining computational resources. ¹ As opposed to something using WebGL or other fancy things incorporated in contemporary browsers.
ironblood 2y ago
Language severs as well. I had a desktop bought around 2015, with 16GB DDR3 RAM. That was quite a lot back to that time. For some reason, I used it for a while, and I needed an isolated develop environment, so I installed Debian server with Qemu/KVM, and assigned 4G RAM to it. It looked okay when starting neovim, taking about a few hundred MB, but when starting `tsc`, especially two or three seperate projects, the RAM was not enough any more. Lua language server also needs a lot of RAM.
barotalomey 2y ago
We discussing random ragebait videos now? I swear, this site is nothing like it used to.
- notarealllama 2y ago
  Agreed. Been around long enough to see u/sers from another site change the culture here subtly. There was an interesting FB engineering post here about cost benefits to using a QLC storage layer... No comments. I feel like a lot of technical people nowadays don't even appreciate that we get FAANG engineering blogs and talking about hardware. Maybe I'm just jaded from having worked in a data center.
  - DANmode 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html also, rhetorical: did you comment in the FB engineering post?
dredmorbius 2y ago
I've had very similar experiences myself. For most local applications, or simple over-the-Web fetches via curl, wget, etc., mid-aughts hardware or earlier often suffices. Amongst my hobbies are occasional large-scale scraping of websites. I'd done a significant amount of this circa 2018-19 on a mid-aughts iMac running Linux. One observation was that fetching content was considerably faster than processing it locally, not in a browser but using the html-xml-utils package on Debian. That is, DOM structures, even when simply parsed and extracted, provide a significant challenge to older hardware. I had the option of expanding RAM, and of swapping in a solid-state drive, both of which I suspect would have helped markedly (swapping was a major factor in slowness), though how much I'm not sure. I'll also note as I have for years that this behaviour serves advertisers and merchants as a market segmentation technique. That is, by making sites unusable on older kit, in a world where physical / real-estate based market segmentation isn't possible, is an effective way of selecting for those with discretionary income to buy modern devices. Whom we presume have greater discretionary income / higher conversion rates as well. (Multiple network round-trip requirements is also a way to penalise those making access from distant locations, as those 100--300 ms delays add up with time, particularly for non-parallelisable fetches.) I'm not arguing that all site devs have this in mind, but at the level which counts, specifically within major advertisers (Google, Facebook) and merchants (Amazon) this could well be an official policy which, by nature of their positions (ad brokers, browser developers, merchants, hardware suppliers) gets rippled throughout the industry. In the case of Apple, moving people to newer kit is their principle revenue model as well.
xacky 2y ago
Don't forget Cloudflare tagging old browsers as "bots".
sim7c00 2y ago
The system’s been hijacked. The craft of real engineering—building sharp, efficient, elegant systems—is buried under layers of corporate sludge. It’s not about progress anymore; it’s about control. Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much. I’m running 24 threads at 5GHz, sipping data through a GB pipe, and somehow, sites still crawl. Apps hesitate like they need divine intervention just to start. Five billion instructions just to boot up? My 5GB/s NVMe too sluggish for a few megabytes of binary? What the hell happened? The internet isn’t just bloated—it’s an executioner. It’s strangling new hardware, and the old hardware? That’s been dead for years. Sure, you can run a current through a corpse and watch it twitch, but that doesn’t mean it’s alive.
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  Single threaded code / problems are unlikely to get faster with more cores. Foundational limitations still exist
  - NegatioN 2y ago
    Although that in itself is a true statement, there is sooo much performance left on the table everywhere.
  - sim7c00 2y ago
    going from 1ghz to 5ghz should make single threads go a little faster ? IO might be a bottle neck on spinning rust, but we've come far from those days too..
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    It's obviously less dramatic than running across a dozen cores at once, but per-core performance has continued to improve over time
- fsflover 2y ago
  > Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much. This is nothing else than enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
zokier 2y ago
I don't think the problem here is the age of the system, but that it was extremely crappy system even at it's time. It's 4 watt pre-Zen AMD CPU running at 1GHz. It's a CPU intended for tablets, and even for that it's bottom of the barrel. Something like i7-4770K from the same year (2013-2014), which I recall being very popular at the time, is over order of magnitude faster. The CPU here is more comparable to CPUs from almost decade prior, the venerable Thinkpad T61 would probably perform better.
- ninalanyon 2y ago
  It used to be possible and practical to do real work on much less capable hardware. Making the difficult stuff possible really should not have made the ordinary easy stuff that we already had so much more difficult. We used to browse the web with 486s and megabytes of RAM. If all I'm doing is reading a newspaper I shouldn't need giga bytes of RAM.
  - zokier 2y ago
    At the same time, at no point of history of computing has 10 year old PC been as useful and usable as it is today, if the PC was half-decent to begin with Using 2015 PC in 2025 is far less painful than using 1995 PC in 2005.
- akgerber 2y ago
  My desktop is from 2012, so 13 years old so far, but is still very capable at any task I throw at it. It was originally a high-end workstation, but by 2020 was worth so little that I got it for free from someone moving out of town. Last year, upgrading the CPU to the top of the line part that fit the motherboard socket cost $17 (versus an original MSRP of $2300), and upgrading it to 128GB of RAM cost $40. When even top-of-the-line older hardware is nearly free, it makes little sense to optimize for bottom-of-the-line older hardware. It does very well on any modern internet task, as well as playing modern video games with a few-year-old used graphics card.
  - zokier 2y ago
psychoslave 2y ago
So, not the internet, but some very popular websites.
cowboylowrez 2y ago
I have slow, limitted internet. I'm now blacklisting sites in my hosts file that suck up internet. Some I can't of course, I find it particularily funny that my bank has my browser ping spotify for instance. As others have said its just enshittification all around.
agumonkey 2y ago
we need a small web curated list, i often use indivious instances to avoid youtube cpu load, we can trim the fat
everdrive 2y ago
Block javascript, denounce javascript, avoid sites which make use of javascript.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Modern CSS is pretty heavy, too, now that we’ve turned it into a shitty Flash knock-off.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    Yep. Somewhere I was browsing had a dark mode theme done by using a full page invert and hue rotate but had to exempt the images from that transform. It was about as slow as you might imagine a per-pixel transform (or two) would be.
everdrive 2y ago
My father in-law did web development for years, but has been retired for a while. I mentioned this to him briefly, and he said pretty nonchalantly “yeah, we were always pressured to push everything to the client to improve response times.” I’m sure there’s more to it than just that, but it was all very simple to him.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
I actually got an old iMac G3 connected to the internet and browsing the web. The previous owner had internet explorer on it, which seems to work better than netscape, though neither support HTTPS. I was able to download files to it using a locally hosted HTTP server on my PC, but browsing the internet with anything resembling javascript was out of the question
bee_rider 2y ago
> I mean it's not literally killing old PC hardware, but it is meaning old PCs are now becoming worthless e-waste (aka dead) because they can't browse websites like YouTube and playback videos... The internet is not designed for older hardware anymore, so it doesn't really matter what operating system you put on it, normal websites are now so multi-media rich and advert packed, that older hardware is going to struggle Hah, posted as a comment to a YouTube video. I know you have to go where your audience is. But like, block ads, block most JavaScript, don’t go on YouTube, and the internet is much better. This shoves you off into a smaller sub-sector of the internet. But if you are somebody who is nostalgic for the era when the internet didn’t suck so bad, it was quite a bit smaller back then too.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zkmon 2y ago
A new release of software or technology is not adapted for its new features. New technologies help to create new security vulnerabilities which in turn force new release of the tech. It's a vicious circle where tech and hacks play a catch-up game. Old PC hardware is like Mayans or uncontacted tribe from an island. They can't tolerate getting exposed to the new world of internet. Also, companies don't want to invest in supporting multiple versions at any point in time, and can't afford reputation risk by not forcing upgrades. My company let's the employees to request for and get a software installed, but can hardly allow them to use the features! The Risk & compliance department wouldn't like anyone to work or use any software properly. Any moving thing is a risk.

76 points by hexage1814 2y ago

> A solution is needed to help those old computers A solution could be to put another layer on top of the internet. This could be done by means of a "presentation proxy", similar to cloud gaming, e.g. based on VNC, where only a VNC client is run on the old computer, and the browser is running on the presentation proxy.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
la_oveja 2y ago
that sounds horrifying, not gonna lie
dredmorbius 2y ago
There are solid reasons to put your browser executable and storage other than on your principle desktop in the first place. That still leaves the attack-surface of browser-based activities (do you really want your recreational activities sites interacting with your financial services?), but both gives the option for fresh respawns (OS and/or browser) and physical and network isolation of your local storage and data from your browser. (This presumes hygiene on any browser-based downloads as well, of course.) In general, the idea that we'd want all our data on a globally-accessible network is seeming increasingly unwise to me over time, given both technical and political developments. Late edit: Oh, and Browsh: text-only browser-via-proxy supporting CSS/JS. <https://www.brow.sh/ https://www.brow.sh/> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25129747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25129747>
- notarealllama 2y ago
  So say we all. My non-tech friends call me paranoid at the basic level of protection I do - separate browsers for everything, and a couple of VMs for e.g. finances. Vlan has always been an important part of LAN security but we're just out here with always on, full Internet access? My home firewall logs show an insane amount of bot / scraping etc.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    It's also a good way of isolating proprietary applications that barf services, applications, and custom ways of keeping user state all over the system – I'm looking at you, Citrix.
WJW 2y ago
Instead of using a more powerful computer to be the presentation proxy for a less powerful one, the more obvious solution would be to upgrade to a not-so-old computer directly? Alternatively, don't try to load heavy sites on hardware that is too light for it.
hexage1814 2y ago
>presentation proxy I usually I just go to archive.is and read the page there.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Some implementations of this: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-browsing-modern-web-on-vintage-machines/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro... https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/01/web-rendering-proxy-v4-6-released/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/01/web-rendering-proxy-v4-6...
- Rochus 2y ago
  That's cool, thanks for the hint. Do you know, what frame rate/latency can be achieved with this approach? I've read that the limit of VNC is about 7 fps.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    I couldn't say. Note that the WRP kind of renders in an actual old browser on the local system, so latency will be different there.

eqvinox 2y ago

Indirect point: using an ad blocker protects the environment. Considering it also helps security (loading fewer things = fewer chances at exploits), it should really be the default.

throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]

trinix912 2y ago

Well it wouldn't be that way if it were not for all the JavaScript. If we just kept on doing server-side scripting (PHP, CGI/Perl...) and used JS only where absolutely necessary (video players, games...) like in the early 2000s, it would all work fine on 15 year old hardware. But instead we use the browser as an OS and have tons of JS on simple news sites.

dredmorbius 2y ago
I suspect DOM modelling/rendering also has an impact as I've surfed with JS off, using Firefox on an older (mid-aughts) iMac running Linux ... and can't get much past 2--4 tabs before performance becomes absolutely unacceptable. Instrumentation of browsers to show performance constraints remains poor and/or a Black Art, so I'm somewhat winging this. The same system performs wonderfully with scripts, non-browser based requests (e.g., wget, curl), terminal-mode browsers (usually w3m or lynx), and local applications (mailers, audio ripping / playback, GIMP, word-processing, and of course shell tools, as well as a few occasional games perhaps.
- h2zizzle 2y ago
  >Instrumentation of browsers to show performance constraints remains poor and/or a Black Art Which makes the loss of all our DEI programs over the past month all the more painful.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    ?
    - h2zizzle 2y ago
      The employment/mentorship pipeline for Black artists seems to have been decimated.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago

mahrain 2y ago

Even having a few 'retro' systems up and running, mostly Macs from the early 2000s, I find that what we used to do on them: chatting on Skype or MSN Messenger, listening to shoutcast streams or downloading on Napster, playing Unreal Tournament online etc. are mostly defunct now. What remains are local games, clunky word processors and MP3's on the local network. It turns out to be a largely empty experience unless you really get back into Command and Conquer or Metroid.

ForOldHack 2y ago
Marathon rockets of fury networked. Carmegaddon and Must/Pyst. Spaceward Ho! Where were you? {Fires rocket} pathways into darkness. Loderunner, dungeons of doom, Oregon trail
netsharc 2y ago
I watched a friend's kid play a game on his offline iPhone. So. many. freaking. ad interruptions! Fucking tragic, I'm glad my childhood gaming wasn't like that... Said childhood gaming, with what feels like a lot of latency: https://www.futrega.org/digger/ https://www.futrega.org/digger/
SecretDreams 2y ago
> It turns out to be a largely empty experience unless you really get back into Command and Conquer Sounds like a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
acuozzo 2y ago
> It turns out to be a largely empty experience I'm pretty heavily involved in SD video restoration and I drive things from "retro" systems mostly because I need 32-bit PCI slots and Windows XP in order to interface with older broadcast engineering hardware. I could shoehorn everything into a more modern system, but what I have suits my needs.

ForOldHack 2y ago

I actually disagree. It allows us to gather collections of retro software.

DoingIsLearning 2y ago
Useful to bring up that archive.org has done an insane amount of curating and preserving old software that would be gone into oblivion otherwise. https://archive.org/details/software https://archive.org/details/software National libraries across the world curate books, documents, and other formats but we as Humanity unfortunately are not very good at preserving the software side of History.

rahen 2y ago

Not only the Internet, but also its technologies. Electron apps bring older computers to their knees, and those apps are becoming ubiquitous (MS Teams, MS VS Code, Whatsapp, Signal...). Sometimes they are even labeled as "lightweight".

tdy_err 2y ago
Nobody thinks Electron applications are lightweight. Maybe you have heard someone refer to PWAs as lightweight applications surrogates
- alpaca128 2y ago
  I’ve seen multiple VS Code users claim it’s lightweight and fast. And to be fair compared to many other Electron apps it is, but many editors still run circles around it.
  - vv_ 2y ago
    > but many editors still run circles around it Could you provide an example?
    - alpaca128 2y ago
      Last time I looked at benchmarks, editors like Sublime, Emacs, gVim etc and even some IDEs had lower input latency. Zed is probably the most comparable editor that’s both faster and more power efficient. Anecdotally on my previous laptop from 2016 it was often laggy and took longer to process a single key input than Vim took to start up and load plugins, and natively compiled editors like Emacs and Sublime tend to be noticeably snappier. Whether that matters to you or not is subjective, but I don’t like editors pretending to be IDEs anyway.
      - vv_ 2y ago
        It's not surprising that editors / IDEs supporting less features are going to be faster. For example, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, according to that issue Zed doesn't support Build/Debug actions, which makes it a no-go for embedded development immediately. At that point I'd rather just use nvim with plugins. When I had an old computer that couldn't deal with the indexing done by JetBrain's CLion or Microsoft's Visual Studio Code - I used nvim. It was a pleasant experience, however it lacked support for visual debugging (and please don't talk about GDB TUI as if it is an option). Now that I have a computer that can deal with the indexing, Visual Studio Code is just fine. In fact, it is considerably more lightweight than JetBrain's CLion IDE and is very easy to setup. For example, https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-container https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-..., allows you to setup development inside a container. In practice this allows anyone to quickly pull the repository and start working on the code, including building and debugging without having to worry about setting up toolchains or environment as it'll be done automatically for you.

rembicilious 2y ago

My favorite Firefox plugin is NoScript. There is often an incredible amount of third-party JavaScript running on commercial web sites. NoScript turns all the JavaScript off by default, and then you can whitelist it temporarily (or permanently, your choice) at the per domain level. (I will never whitelist google tag manager, how is it present on every freaking website?) So I visit thing-i-want.com and it doesn’t load because NoScript is currently disabling JS for that domain. No problem, I temporarily enable JS for thing-i-want.com The page refreshes and suddenly NoScript is disabling JS for 10 more domains! That seems excessive, maybe the page doesn’t need ALL of those scripts to function. I will enable that cloudfront domain and that one that has “static content” in the name. Page refreshes. Okay it mostly works now but also NoScript is showing disabled JavaScript from 5 more domains! ..Anyways Sometimes sites are running scripts from 15 or more domains and sometimes they are nested 4 domains deep. It’s absurd and OF COURSE it overwhelms older devices. If you want to use a modern browser on an older device, use a browser with a script blocking plugin

nolist_policy 2y ago
NoScript as a antipattern, because it disincentivises browsing new websites. As you observed, for every new website you need to reload the page quite a few times to get it functional.
- kazinator 2y ago
  It mainly disincentivizes using scummy sites the fetch JavaScript from 20 domains. Sites that just fetch JavaScript from their own domain, not as much.
- rembicilious 2y ago
  I don’t ever install NoScript on family/friend devices. It just breaks their experience. I have knowledgeable coworkers that won’t use it because it’s not worth the hassle for them. So I agree it is an anti-pattern for typical use cases. But if you’re trying to get the most out of old hardware, it will make some websites more usable.
- whizzter 2y ago

Sweepi 2y ago

1. Using uBlock Origin and NoScript would help 2. Sorry, but the AMD A4-1200 (2 Cores running at 1.0 (!) GHz, 4W TDP, Single Channel DDR3-1066[1]) was already slow when it was new back in 2013, it was introduced by AMD as a low budget *Tablet* option 3. Regarding Video playback: As mention in the video, forcing Youtube to serve h264 should help, since the iGPU supports h264 decoding [2][3] This also makes me wonder: What does Youtube serve on this old machines? On my old Vega 56 (UVD 7.0 h264/h265/JPEG decoding support), yt runs without issues, but on the displayed HD 8180 (UVD 4.2, h264 decoding support) it doesn't? My current system has a Nvidia 1050 and gets served AV1, which the 1050 also does not support in hardware. My first instinct for yt's "auto" implementation would be to the serve a video in 480p and a codec the users hardware decoders supports, and if the user switches to a higher resolution, to serve it in av1 in order to preserve bandwidth. Maybe Youtube does not have access to the users hardware decoding capabilities, or they want to preserve bandwidth even at low resolutions. [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/a4-1200.c1706 [2] https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index8h2 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#Format_support

miunau 2y ago
I was using a netbook with a comparable CPU as a work machine around that time. Using the web with it wasn't fun back then either, on Windows or Linux. I don't think there's any point in time when these underpowered processors would've been fine to use for browsing mainstream sites.
vel0city 2y ago
While watching the video you can right click and choose "Stats for nerds". This opens an overlay in the top left corner showing a lot of detailed information about the video including video and audio codecs.

axpvms 2y ago

It seems to hold up pretty well for an 11 year old netbook which was quite underpowered even when it came out. The equivalent would be someone in 2014 making a video about how their Pentium IV setup from 2003 is killed by the modern internet. And actually that's a bit unfair, as Pentium IV was a premium product while this netbook was not.

psychoslave 2y ago
By 2003 you could buy Half-Life on Steam. What are these webpages exposed in this video supposed to do¹? Display some text, pictures and maybe some videos. How does it feels it term of complexity and hardware requirement compared to a 1998 FPS which achieved impressive gamer-experience breakthrough incorporated into a customer grade product? Does it seems more fair as a comparison? Now, obviously you can’t expect all webdeveloper interns out there to reach the level of Valve engineers in 1998, sure. But the frameworks they are asked to use should give them the sober way as the easy path, and let more complex achievements still accessible in the remaining computational resources. ¹ As opposed to something using WebGL or other fancy things incorporated in contemporary browsers.

ironblood 2y ago

Language severs as well. I had a desktop bought around 2015, with 16GB DDR3 RAM. That was quite a lot back to that time. For some reason, I used it for a while, and I needed an isolated develop environment, so I installed Debian server with Qemu/KVM, and assigned 4G RAM to it. It looked okay when starting neovim, taking about a few hundred MB, but when starting `tsc`, especially two or three seperate projects, the RAM was not enough any more. Lua language server also needs a lot of RAM.

barotalomey 2y ago

We discussing random ragebait videos now? I swear, this site is nothing like it used to.

notarealllama 2y ago
Agreed. Been around long enough to see u/sers from another site change the culture here subtly. There was an interesting FB engineering post here about cost benefits to using a QLC storage layer... No comments. I feel like a lot of technical people nowadays don't even appreciate that we get FAANG engineering blogs and talking about hardware. Maybe I'm just jaded from having worked in a data center.
- DANmode 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html also, rhetorical: did you comment in the FB engineering post?

dredmorbius 2y ago

I've had very similar experiences myself. For most local applications, or simple over-the-Web fetches via curl, wget, etc., mid-aughts hardware or earlier often suffices. Amongst my hobbies are occasional large-scale scraping of websites. I'd done a significant amount of this circa 2018-19 on a mid-aughts iMac running Linux. One observation was that fetching content was considerably faster than processing it locally, not in a browser but using the html-xml-utils package on Debian. That is, DOM structures, even when simply parsed and extracted, provide a significant challenge to older hardware. I had the option of expanding RAM, and of swapping in a solid-state drive, both of which I suspect would have helped markedly (swapping was a major factor in slowness), though how much I'm not sure. I'll also note as I have for years that this behaviour serves advertisers and merchants as a market segmentation technique. That is, by making sites unusable on older kit, in a world where physical / real-estate based market segmentation isn't possible, is an effective way of selecting for those with discretionary income to buy modern devices. Whom we presume have greater discretionary income / higher conversion rates as well. (Multiple network round-trip requirements is also a way to penalise those making access from distant locations, as those 100--300 ms delays add up with time, particularly for non-parallelisable fetches.) I'm not arguing that all site devs have this in mind, but at the level which counts, specifically within major advertisers (Google, Facebook) and merchants (Amazon) this could well be an official policy which, by nature of their positions (ad brokers, browser developers, merchants, hardware suppliers) gets rippled throughout the industry. In the case of Apple, moving people to newer kit is their principle revenue model as well.

xacky 2y ago

Don't forget Cloudflare tagging old browsers as "bots".

sim7c00 2y ago

The system’s been hijacked. The craft of real engineering—building sharp, efficient, elegant systems—is buried under layers of corporate sludge. It’s not about progress anymore; it’s about control. Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much. I’m running 24 threads at 5GHz, sipping data through a GB pipe, and somehow, sites still crawl. Apps hesitate like they need divine intervention just to start. Five billion instructions just to boot up? My 5GB/s NVMe too sluggish for a few megabytes of binary? What the hell happened? The internet isn’t just bloated—it’s an executioner. It’s strangling new hardware, and the old hardware? That’s been dead for years. Sure, you can run a current through a corpse and watch it twitch, but that doesn’t mean it’s alive.

high_na_euv 2y ago
Single threaded code / problems are unlikely to get faster with more cores. Foundational limitations still exist
- NegatioN 2y ago
  Although that in itself is a true statement, there is sooo much performance left on the table everywhere.
- sim7c00 2y ago
  going from 1ghz to 5ghz should make single threads go a little faster ? IO might be a bottle neck on spinning rust, but we've come far from those days too..
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  It's obviously less dramatic than running across a dozen cores at once, but per-core performance has continued to improve over time
fsflover 2y ago
> Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much. This is nothing else than enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

zokier 2y ago

I don't think the problem here is the age of the system, but that it was extremely crappy system even at it's time. It's 4 watt pre-Zen AMD CPU running at 1GHz. It's a CPU intended for tablets, and even for that it's bottom of the barrel. Something like i7-4770K from the same year (2013-2014), which I recall being very popular at the time, is over order of magnitude faster. The CPU here is more comparable to CPUs from almost decade prior, the venerable Thinkpad T61 would probably perform better.

ninalanyon 2y ago
It used to be possible and practical to do real work on much less capable hardware. Making the difficult stuff possible really should not have made the ordinary easy stuff that we already had so much more difficult. We used to browse the web with 486s and megabytes of RAM. If all I'm doing is reading a newspaper I shouldn't need giga bytes of RAM.
- zokier 2y ago
  At the same time, at no point of history of computing has 10 year old PC been as useful and usable as it is today, if the PC was half-decent to begin with Using 2015 PC in 2025 is far less painful than using 1995 PC in 2005.
akgerber 2y ago
My desktop is from 2012, so 13 years old so far, but is still very capable at any task I throw at it. It was originally a high-end workstation, but by 2020 was worth so little that I got it for free from someone moving out of town. Last year, upgrading the CPU to the top of the line part that fit the motherboard socket cost $17 (versus an original MSRP of $2300), and upgrading it to 128GB of RAM cost $40. When even top-of-the-line older hardware is nearly free, it makes little sense to optimize for bottom-of-the-line older hardware. It does very well on any modern internet task, as well as playing modern video games with a few-year-old used graphics card.
- zokier 2y ago

psychoslave 2y ago

So, not the internet, but some very popular websites.

cowboylowrez 2y ago

I have slow, limitted internet. I'm now blacklisting sites in my hosts file that suck up internet. Some I can't of course, I find it particularily funny that my bank has my browser ping spotify for instance. As others have said its just enshittification all around.

agumonkey 2y ago

we need a small web curated list, i often use indivious instances to avoid youtube cpu load, we can trim the fat

everdrive 2y ago

Block javascript, denounce javascript, avoid sites which make use of javascript.

alabastervlog 2y ago
Modern CSS is pretty heavy, too, now that we’ve turned it into a shitty Flash knock-off.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  Yep. Somewhere I was browsing had a dark mode theme done by using a full page invert and hue rotate but had to exempt the images from that transform. It was about as slow as you might imagine a per-pixel transform (or two) would be.

everdrive 2y ago

My father in-law did web development for years, but has been retired for a while. I mentioned this to him briefly, and he said pretty nonchalantly “yeah, we were always pressured to push everything to the client to improve response times.” I’m sure there’s more to it than just that, but it was all very simple to him.

shortrounddev2 2y ago

I actually got an old iMac G3 connected to the internet and browsing the web. The previous owner had internet explorer on it, which seems to work better than netscape, though neither support HTTPS. I was able to download files to it using a locally hosted HTTP server on my PC, but browsing the internet with anything resembling javascript was out of the question

bee_rider 2y ago

> I mean it's not literally killing old PC hardware, but it is meaning old PCs are now becoming worthless e-waste (aka dead) because they can't browse websites like YouTube and playback videos... The internet is not designed for older hardware anymore, so it doesn't really matter what operating system you put on it, normal websites are now so multi-media rich and advert packed, that older hardware is going to struggle Hah, posted as a comment to a YouTube video. I know you have to go where your audience is. But like, block ads, block most JavaScript, don’t go on YouTube, and the internet is much better. This shoves you off into a smaller sub-sector of the internet. But if you are somebody who is nostalgic for the era when the internet didn’t suck so bad, it was quite a bit smaller back then too.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zkmon 2y ago

A new release of software or technology is not adapted for its new features. New technologies help to create new security vulnerabilities which in turn force new release of the tech. It's a vicious circle where tech and hacks play a catch-up game. Old PC hardware is like Mayans or uncontacted tribe from an island. They can't tolerate getting exposed to the new world of internet. Also, companies don't want to invest in supporting multiple versions at any point in time, and can't afford reputation risk by not forcing upgrades. My company let's the employees to request for and get a software installed, but can hardly allow them to use the features! The Risk & compliance department wouldn't like anyone to work or use any software properly. Any moving thing is a risk.