8 ms·

How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend ze

How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration. This is extremely bad engineering and these engineers should be called out for it. It takes a special kind of person to deliver this and be proud of it. Once they made their millions at Google these engineers will be our landlords, angel investors, you name it. The level of ignorance is unfathomable. Very sad.

PaulHoule 1y ago
What do you expect from an OS that has a trash can for a logo?
jameskilton 1y ago
One of the good things that came out of COVID was Google Docs suddenly getting a whole lot better. Why? Because Google engineers finally had to use their tools like the rest of us do, and found out very quickly that Google Docs on normal consumer internet connections sucked. Google as a company, and in many ways Silicon Valley as a whole, is designed around being a bubble that is ignorant of how the rest of the world actually functions.
- dieortin 1y ago
  Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before COVID.
  - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
    "used Docs internally" is not the same as: > on normal consumer internet connections
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      Oh yeah. One of my pet peeves is that every comms product from Google (say Google Meet) works poorly on a slow internet connection, and slow could be something not bad at all, say 20 Mbps. Zoom, the former Skype, Slack Huddles, Go2Meeting, absolutely every other product has good audio quality and tolerable video quality. With Google products there are dropouts every few seconds so you can't understand what the other people are saying.
      - sojsurf 1y ago
        I have used Google meet exclusively for a number of years, multiple times a day on the cheapest Internet connection I can buy in my area. It is consistently a better experience then Zoom or Teams. The only caveat is that the experience is not good on Firefox. Google meet is the only thing I use Chrome/Brave for.
fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
Probably because they seem to be recreating the cursor on the webpage for that cool effect. Even on a good computer I have some input lag, and going from very low input lag and 120fps cursor to that it feels slightly off. Although I might be imagining it just because it looks different than the normal one...
- ImHereToVote 1y ago
  Browser don't support replacing cursor images natively for obvious reasons. You have to use JavaScript for that.
  - jampekka 1y ago
    CSS supports replacing cursor images natively. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      In this case it looks like they didn't just want an image though, they wanted the cursor to invert the color of whatever part of the web page it's over, and to seamlessly morph into a selection highlight whenever you mouse over certain controls. Seems like that's a lot harder to make performant.
      - freeone3000 1y ago
        You can do that by changing the cursor icon for the elements in question. The CSS rule does support per-element swapping (because of course it does, that’s how a text input has a bar but a button has a pointer).
        jampekka 1y ago
johnisgood 1y ago
This website is awful. It is extremely sluggish, laggy, and annoying. On top of that, I had to wait a significant amount of time for it to load. No thanks. I thought the tab is going to be killed...
Flex247A 1y ago
Leetcode monkeys with little dev experience will do that.
Octoth0rpe 1y ago
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? FWIW, the link is to basically a glorified demo page _of the design_ of material 3, not a real world implementation of that design. So, that page's performance is not at all reflective of what you'd see when using a relatively recent android app that uses flutter's material components (https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material) or one of the many web component libraries that implement MD. The lag you're noticing is also likely entirely due to their weird cursor behavior. If they simply removed that, I suspect the page's performance wouldn't be at all noticeable.
- DarkCrusader2 1y ago
  If the people who came up with this design can not make the demo site performant, site which will be the first impression of your new design language for most, I don't think there is much hope for the rest of us. But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their users.
  - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
    I think the people who implement google's html/js/css for random articles aren't particularly connected to engineers working on android/flutter widget performance, and the MUI developers aren't even google employees (mui/flutter being the main implementations of MD AIUI). I'm not at all concerned.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      Before I got an iOS phone I thought "why do people care about apps?" I mean, there is an app to get me into my gym but with my Android device it would take about 45 seconds to open so I might as well just give them my phone number. It was always faster to go to a web site or go to the public library or do anything other than wait for an app to open.
    - WorldMaker 1y ago
      Every Material UI library I've seen in existence is a bloated wreck full of bugs. The Angular MUI "flagship" has the worst performance I've ever seen of basic things browsers have supported for decades and CSS does very well for like buttons. Some MUI teams find ways to bring all of Angular's bloat to everywhere else, the React library is awful. I've had to use MudBlazor, the attempt to do MUI things in Blazor, and it is truly awful. Maybe Flutter is an exception, congratulations to Flutter I guess. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if so many corporations also hadn't somehow decided that MUI was the next Bootstrap and have been treating it as an underlayer in their Design Systems, most of which aren't actually supposed to look like Material and don't really benefit from being huge additional libraries of CSS and components on top of MUI. I blame Figma for this. I don't know that it is any one specific thing Figma is intentionally doing, but the more design teams use Figma the more they seem to think they "need" a safety blanket of Material UI somewhere in the design stack that they won't actually use correctly or well. As an engineer often tasked with performance work, I hate how much of Material UI's braindead approach to performance reflects on me in ways I can't do anything about "because that is the design system you wanted" (not the design system you needed). I wish Material UI would either get significantly better or just die already.
sgt 1y ago
It's because the developers have extremely fast and graphics accelerated hardware. I can't notice any lag whatsoever on the mouse cursor on my M2 Pro but.. But a lot of folks won't have top end HW.
- belter 1y ago
  I am on a four core also with a (non-recent) NVIDIA graphics card and its laggy...
  - sgt 1y ago
    That's crazy. In many ways we are moving backwards.
- robertoandred 1y ago
  I have no cursor lag and I'm on a 2019 Intel MBP.
  - wltr 1y ago
    I’m on an iPhone, and I see no cursor lag!
    - sgt 1y ago
      Maybe it's a browser issue and not GPU / CPU
      - wltr 1y ago
        I was being sarcastic, but actually I durst to open the link from my iPhone, realising it’s a more powerful computer than most Internet users have.
- DrammBA 1y ago
  m1 pro using firefox, I can notice the cursor not being smooth, and if I move the mouse while scrolling then it lags hard
lucianbr 1y ago
Couldn't agree more. It's basically a page with some pictures in it, and everything in it loaded so late for me that initially I wondered why they left so many large empty spaces in the page. This could work and be fast with tech from at least 20 years ago, probably even more. It's really incredible this is output from a company valued in trillions.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Indeed. Google is the worst at designing around lazy loading. Their UIs in Drive, Youtube Music, and others essentially become unusable once the list gets long. God forbid you don't have a super low latency connection straight to the data center. Even holding open a web socket to fetch "next pages" doesn't cut it in most of the real world. If you're gonna lazy load (which I admit sometimes does make sense) you need to aggressively fetch the next page. If I have 200 files in my Google Drive and they're sorted alphabetically, and I want one that starts with "y", the UX is so unbelievable bad that I sometimes wonder if I'm being pranked. I'll have to wait through a dozen "next page" loads that only load a screen worth of files at a time, and each pause makes me wait a second or two. That really adds up when I just want to scroll to the file. Scrolling through large playlists in Youtube Music is utterly painful nowadays too. Please people, test your UI on low bandwidth connections, high latency connections, and both conditions together. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near this bad. HN performs way, way better than these modern javascript heavy lazy loading apps, and I think there's some important insights in that sitting right there for the taking.
  - roncesvalles 1y ago
    Especially when metadata is so cheap to send over. Even if you have literally thousands of files, there's no reason why they couldn't send it all in a single JSON at first page load. Gzipped it would be nothing.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      And to imagine that Googlers do not know better... sighs.
homebrewer 1y ago
By calling them engineers you're only feeding the ego.
- 05 1y ago
  Any idiot can build a page that loads, but it takes an engineer to build a page that barely loads.
  - mablopoule 1y ago
    Next time I'll be ranting against overengineering, I'll be stealing that :D
GoToRO 1y ago
You are just part of the problem. In which companies do engineers still have the final say? Almost none.
- agos 1y ago
  At almost all the companies I’ve worked with engineers might not have the final say but they’re still on the hook for blatant performance issues
  - GoToRO 1y ago
    Exactly.
kiliancs 1y ago
They also seemingly went out of their way to prevent ctrl/cmd+click on several anchor elements in pages like https://m3.material.io/components https://m3.material.io/components.
- edoceo 1y ago
  Arrreg!! So many of these React (et al) sites, with poorly re-built elements and break the built-in functionality! The A tag works perfect! But no, we need three or four nested divs, components, and many lines of JS to end up with something worse. Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?
  - dcre 1y ago
    If you render an <a> in React (or Angular, which I think they're using here), it's just an <a>! You have to do extra work to fuck it up!
    - agos 1y ago
      Indeed. And all the routing libraries also render <a>s by default
    - wapeoifjaweofji 1y ago
      I'll generally excuse things like laziness and incompetence, because I understand that not everyone is good at their jobs. But this: > You have to do extra work to fuck it up! resonates so hard. I get so angry at people who take extra time out of their day to put so much effort into making things worse. So many things on the internet are fine, but people spend so much on making them worse. Who is this good for? Not me, and likely not the person who wasted their time ruining functional things.
    - eastbound 1y ago
      It doesn’t do the internal navigation. And since React doesn’t have built-in support for pushState (Yes I know React Router, but it really wants a hash router), you really need extra work for an internal router. And therefore, every beginner dev does it manually and slightly inconsistently. So yes, React is absolutely the driver, same as Java is guilty for Guava existing, because it should have been built-in and perfect.
frostyel 1y ago
[dead]
jampekka 1y ago
The expressed goal is emotionally impacting UX. They clearly got strong emotions out of you. Mission accomplished!
- echelon 1y ago
  It's not just a laggy mouse. I scrolled through half a page of a completely black screen. On a high powered machine with lots of bandwidth and low latency. The designers here have lost the plot.
  - Ghoelian 1y ago
    Can't even move the mouse while scrolling lmao
  - riffraff 1y ago
    I'm on mobile and scrolled through most of this waiting for images to load, and wondering why I didn't see any.
  - jchw 1y ago
    Very unusually, everything is working and smooth on Fennec F-Droid for me. Usually it's the opposite but it happens more often these days.
    - jchw 1y ago
      I know you aren't supposed to comment on it, but man, you just never know what will set people off on this site, and god knows they won't tell you. Are people bothered that I chimed in to say "works for me" or that I insinuated Fennec F-Droid is usually less smooth than the Webkit-based mobile browsers? I'll never know for sure. Sometimes with Hacker News, whether a comment is actually well-received feels like a dice roll.
      - nomel 1y ago
        My naive guess is that it's a null hypothesis situation. You not seeing a problem isn't a useful indicator for if there is a problem. More than that, it probably hits too close to home for mostly software devs, with the dreaded "Well it works on my machine."
Raed667 1y ago
[Ticket Closed] resolution: user should buy a macbook pro with at least the M3 processor /s
- cube00 1y ago
  SecOps put CrowdStrike's Falcon and Windows Defender on our Macs so we'd have about 20% CPU left for our actual dev work. That's not an exaggeration, staring at the System Monitor is all you can do when everything is locked up. The Android emulator sucks the remainder with ease. The app performs better on a low end Android burner phone then our dev machines so at least we know our users are having a reasonable experience.
  - Raed667 1y ago
    You just triggered some PTSD... years ago I had to send my CTO a recording of my screen with keyboard input lag on VSCode because CrowdStrike was eating up all my CPU. I asked him if it was a good use of my (expensive) time to wait 30 seconds for characters to appear on my code editor. Luckily he gave me a "special exemption" that allowed me to shut that monstrosity down !
  - marcusb 1y ago
    I had a couple of customers that deployed 7 endpoint security tools of the "hook into processes and inspect everything" variety. The exact mix was customer-specific, but if you're wondering what that looks like: * Stand-alone "best of breed" endpoint DLP * Stand-alone "best of breed" EDR * Process whitelisting tool * NAC posture assessment agent * Three different AV agents This is not even counting their VPN client(s) or the third party disk encryption agent they used. I marveled at how they even got all of the agents to coexist, let alone have enough CPU left for people to do their jobs.
    - pico303 1y ago
      And after all that, your company gets hacked through a misconfigured router.
xinayder 1y ago
The update to Android 15 was TERRIBLE. I updated it the past days, it's literally a bootleg copy of iOS interface. I despise it so much, much more than the move from Material Design to Material You. Everything occupies so much space, there is less information available for you, and important things like changing the music in your lock screen is confined to a tiny space. At least they got the Expressive right in the name now, Material Expressive (HATE).
- sanitycheck 1y ago
  Every update is worse than the last. I did the same, and I'm particularly loving turning bluetooth on or off requiring a swipe and three button presses instead of one. And I thought the quick settings regressed in 14 when they went from icons to huge buttons, but now they've gone for less-huge buttons with always-truncated text in. At least with Windows it alternately gets much worse then a bit better again with each version. Regarding the monstrosity in the link, yes it does make me 'feel things' - things I will refrain from typing out lest they be construed as threatening behaviour.
- microtonal 1y ago
  You can say a lot about Android 15, but I have a Pixel and an iPhone 16 Pro and they do not look alike... at all? Pull down the notifications and quick settings, it does not look remotely like iOS. The same for all the native apps. I wonder if you have Samsung One UI 7 or some other skin. One UI 7 looks a lot more like iOS, but there is little Google can do about that?
  - xinayder 1y ago
    I have One UI 7. Most screenshots I've seen from Android 15 looked like One UI 7, though, so that's the reason for comparison.
    - microtonal 1y ago
      Ah, I see. We also have two One UI devices around the house, it is really different from the Pixel UI or AOSP.
rossant 1y ago
I only came here to rant about how no one should mess with my mouse cursor.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  I'm with you there. People complain about how crap UX is now, and how computer illiterate the general populace has become but I firmly place the blame on forcing the web into an application delivery platform, abandoning all operating system HIG and conventions so that every app is now it's own unique snowflake that breaks conventions. IMO people would struggle less if it was all native apps that followed the OS. You learn your operating system's conventions and shortcuts, and those translate into every app you run - but then marketing people got their hands in things, and suddenly everything had to be branded and unique, and we are worse off for it.
donperignon 1y ago
I wish I could upvote you ten times.
Nickersf 1y ago
Not just the technical aspect here. I read through the page and nothing of any measurable importance was stated. What problems did this solve? What benefits does this bring to users? I guess I was expecting more from Google. The initial Material design system made some good points and addressed some issues for UI design. This just seems unfocused.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  It comes across as AI-generated diarrhea, without any point. Maybe I am just too dumb to recognize talent?
astrolx 1y ago
OMG I thought it was something wrong on my end, privacy add-on or whatnot. Glad to see they just lost it.
xnx 1y ago
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? The lag and that cursor makes it feel like trying to type with mittens on.
ArinaS 1y ago
The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript. As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities than plain HTML and CSS.
sorenjan 1y ago
I have an 8 core CPU and a 10 TFLOP GPU and the cursor on this site lags in Firefox but is noticeable smoother in Edge.
- horsawlarway 1y ago
  It's usable (as in smooth-ish) but still visibly laggy compared to the normal mouse, in Chrome, on my hefty M1 Pro macbook for work. Also... I fucking hate it. I don't want my mouse to stick to buttons, or to change colors constantly. The "emotion" the this site generated for me was "anger". If this is the pitch for the new design system, my journey of not using Material is coming to a middle.
andrepd 1y ago
Why does everything reek of late capitalism? Even design doesn't fail to emanate a distinct "dystopian megacorp" stench.
dmos62 1y ago
These are UX researchers. This is not an engineering project.
twosid3dDice 1y ago
[flagged]
henning 1y ago
Confirmed. It felt OK on my M1 Max laptop but on my 2019 Intel laptop it feels like laggy shit. This is the stuff that makes you want to quit programming and go pick berries in the woods.
AbraKdabra 1y ago
If you try to move the mouse while scrolling the cursor freezes... jfc bring back 2010's Google.
- roskelld 1y ago
  Wow, yeah just tested that and it's really bad. I guess it's a strange thing to do, but a good way to test how the cursor hijacking code gets stalled when scroll is active, and I'm guessing they're doing UI updates on scroll so the thread is getting thrashed there. Even just making a circle motion with a mouse produces a lot of stuttering. I just did the same action on HN and it's as smooth as you'd expect on a CPU from 1995 and beyond.
kllrnohj 1y ago
The mouse cursor / general performance complaint is valid but: > spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration. These systems don't exist unless you go out of your way to turn off graphics acceleration. In which case that's kinda on you. It's like ranting about sites requiring javascript. It's just not a realistic expectation to have of anything anymore.
- recursive 1y ago
  > In which case that's kinda on you. What if I turned it off because it makes my machine more stable? Why do I have to choose between crashing and jank?
  - kllrnohj 1y ago
    What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
    - recursive 1y ago
      I don't know. It says ThinkPad on top. It was provided by my employer. Edit: Not directly related, but I turned off DRM support for similar reasons. Web sites keep turning one of my monitors off when that's enabled. Even though I'm not intentionally or perceptibly playing any media. The (well, another) weird thing is the other monitor stays on. They're the same brand and model, using the same cable. Fancy hardware stuff seems to make browsers unstable, and in my experience this has been true for over a decade. I don't care enough about to try to find a root cause. I don't need DRM support or hardware acceleration for anything I intended to do, so I just turn off anything like that.
    - KronisLV 1y ago
      > What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it? Fun fact, for the longest time ever on Windows 10 the Intel Arc drivers for A580 and B580 would crash in Edge if you played some videos on YouTube, it did seem that switching the ANGLE backend or whatever it was called would help, though I got similar issues with VLC when it was using the DirectX based renderer whereas OpenGL renderer didn't have that issue but would make the mouse disappear when in the video window. A lot of it feels like it was solved after moving to Windows 11, though it's still possible to make the PC freeze by either doing encodes in AV1 in DaVinci Resolve (QuickTime H264 or maybe H265 doesn't seem to have the issue) or through Handbrake, if the GPU is at 100% for prolonged periods of time, whereas recording with OBS or playing pretty much any game doesn't have that sort of an issue. Might be a bad media chip or something else, go figure - definitely there's at least two people in the world who might benefit from disabling hardware acceleration in some cases, though. My RX 580 doesn't seem to have the issue, so that's the joys of being an early adopter.
bmicraft 1y ago
Firefox on a mid-range Android phone here and this page didn't even feel particularly heavy to me. Everything loaded before scrolling into view and no stuttering while scrolling whatsoever.
itorcs 1y ago
This comment speaks to me on an almost spiritual level. It highlights the fact that it isn't engineering prowess for people to get these jobs.
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  Yeah it’s kind of weird that “UX” morphed into a non-engineering role. Like, the interface to the user is still part of the software product. It seems like that sort of role would be best executed by the subset of engineers who lean towards visual design, as opposed to the subset of visual designers who lean towards computing.
drob518 1y ago
Ignorance is a key trait for angel investors.
hnuser123456 1y ago
They had to add that 500ms of input latency to feel like you're really using Android.
sneilan1 1y ago
I am on Debian linux with 128 GB of ram running the latest brave browser and the cursor lags for me also.
jonahx 1y ago
I am so happy this is the top comment. My experience was... Skim through sentence after sentence of award-winning inanity like "Expressive design makes you feel something" as my powerful Macbook stumbles and wheezes... Then think: "I like how default scrolling makes me feel!"
KronisLV 1y ago
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration. I have a dual GPU setup with one GPU dedicated to browsers, the cursor still freezes while scrolling and jitters after that and has noticeable lag even when not scrolling across both Chromium based browsers and Firefox on Windows. I'd compare it to a video game with really bad aim acceleration where the mouse just feels sluggish and uncooperative. I like that people are studying what works and what doesn't in UI/UX, but I'm not sure why they have to break the basics in the process of doing that - that is quite distracting from the overall experience and makes it kind of miserable, just as opening a very JS heavy SPA or what have you would.
p4coder 1y ago
Hmm, works just fine on my pixel 6a in chrome.
pen2l 1y ago
I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you? It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to. And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.
- agos 1y ago
  My hot take is that material started with only one goal in mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of the bathroom
- insin 1y ago
  I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own. This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app: https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/ https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/ I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course. The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.
varispeed 1y ago
This is classic enshittification. Make poor software to nudge people into buy new hardware supposedly handling it better. Rinse and repeat. Also shittier software means you can hire cheaper workers to plough on.
taylorallred 1y ago
To be fair, if you try to paint something on a webpage that follows the mouse cursor it's gonna be laggy af even in really simple toy examples. The blame may fall more on browsers.
51Cards 1y ago
I'm not understanding this comment. I'm running this site on my Pixel 5 and on Firefox on a Thinkpad W530 (12+ years old) and it's flying on both. What part is laggy?
simojo 1y ago
As someone who had a landlord that was a google software engineer, I concur.
fHr 1y ago
because they're regarded MBA controlled clowns and engineering is no longer valued but showing some flashy new bs rounded edge design on a button are ffs

PaulHoule 1y ago

What do you expect from an OS that has a trash can for a logo?

jameskilton 1y ago

One of the good things that came out of COVID was Google Docs suddenly getting a whole lot better. Why? Because Google engineers finally had to use their tools like the rest of us do, and found out very quickly that Google Docs on normal consumer internet connections sucked. Google as a company, and in many ways Silicon Valley as a whole, is designed around being a bubble that is ignorant of how the rest of the world actually functions.

dieortin 1y ago
Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before COVID.
- Octoth0rpe 1y ago
  "used Docs internally" is not the same as: > on normal consumer internet connections
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    Oh yeah. One of my pet peeves is that every comms product from Google (say Google Meet) works poorly on a slow internet connection, and slow could be something not bad at all, say 20 Mbps. Zoom, the former Skype, Slack Huddles, Go2Meeting, absolutely every other product has good audio quality and tolerable video quality. With Google products there are dropouts every few seconds so you can't understand what the other people are saying.
    - sojsurf 1y ago
      I have used Google meet exclusively for a number of years, multiple times a day on the cheapest Internet connection I can buy in my area. It is consistently a better experience then Zoom or Teams. The only caveat is that the experience is not good on Firefox. Google meet is the only thing I use Chrome/Brave for.

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago

Probably because they seem to be recreating the cursor on the webpage for that cool effect. Even on a good computer I have some input lag, and going from very low input lag and 120fps cursor to that it feels slightly off. Although I might be imagining it just because it looks different than the normal one...

ImHereToVote 1y ago
Browser don't support replacing cursor images natively for obvious reasons. You have to use JavaScript for that.
- jampekka 1y ago
  CSS supports replacing cursor images natively. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    In this case it looks like they didn't just want an image though, they wanted the cursor to invert the color of whatever part of the web page it's over, and to seamlessly morph into a selection highlight whenever you mouse over certain controls. Seems like that's a lot harder to make performant.
    - freeone3000 1y ago
      You can do that by changing the cursor icon for the elements in question. The CSS rule does support per-element swapping (because of course it does, that’s how a text input has a bar but a button has a pointer).
      - jampekka 1y ago

johnisgood 1y ago

This website is awful. It is extremely sluggish, laggy, and annoying. On top of that, I had to wait a significant amount of time for it to load. No thanks. I thought the tab is going to be killed...

Flex247A 1y ago

Leetcode monkeys with little dev experience will do that.

Octoth0rpe 1y ago

> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? FWIW, the link is to basically a glorified demo page _of the design_ of material 3, not a real world implementation of that design. So, that page's performance is not at all reflective of what you'd see when using a relatively recent android app that uses flutter's material components (https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material) or one of the many web component libraries that implement MD. The lag you're noticing is also likely entirely due to their weird cursor behavior. If they simply removed that, I suspect the page's performance wouldn't be at all noticeable.

DarkCrusader2 1y ago
If the people who came up with this design can not make the demo site performant, site which will be the first impression of your new design language for most, I don't think there is much hope for the rest of us. But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their users.
- Octoth0rpe 1y ago
  I think the people who implement google's html/js/css for random articles aren't particularly connected to engineers working on android/flutter widget performance, and the MUI developers aren't even google employees (mui/flutter being the main implementations of MD AIUI). I'm not at all concerned.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    Before I got an iOS phone I thought "why do people care about apps?" I mean, there is an app to get me into my gym but with my Android device it would take about 45 seconds to open so I might as well just give them my phone number. It was always faster to go to a web site or go to the public library or do anything other than wait for an app to open.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Every Material UI library I've seen in existence is a bloated wreck full of bugs. The Angular MUI "flagship" has the worst performance I've ever seen of basic things browsers have supported for decades and CSS does very well for like buttons. Some MUI teams find ways to bring all of Angular's bloat to everywhere else, the React library is awful. I've had to use MudBlazor, the attempt to do MUI things in Blazor, and it is truly awful. Maybe Flutter is an exception, congratulations to Flutter I guess. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if so many corporations also hadn't somehow decided that MUI was the next Bootstrap and have been treating it as an underlayer in their Design Systems, most of which aren't actually supposed to look like Material and don't really benefit from being huge additional libraries of CSS and components on top of MUI. I blame Figma for this. I don't know that it is any one specific thing Figma is intentionally doing, but the more design teams use Figma the more they seem to think they "need" a safety blanket of Material UI somewhere in the design stack that they won't actually use correctly or well. As an engineer often tasked with performance work, I hate how much of Material UI's braindead approach to performance reflects on me in ways I can't do anything about "because that is the design system you wanted" (not the design system you needed). I wish Material UI would either get significantly better or just die already.

sgt 1y ago

It's because the developers have extremely fast and graphics accelerated hardware. I can't notice any lag whatsoever on the mouse cursor on my M2 Pro but.. But a lot of folks won't have top end HW.

belter 1y ago
I am on a four core also with a (non-recent) NVIDIA graphics card and its laggy...
- sgt 1y ago
  That's crazy. In many ways we are moving backwards.
robertoandred 1y ago
I have no cursor lag and I'm on a 2019 Intel MBP.
- wltr 1y ago
  I’m on an iPhone, and I see no cursor lag!
  - sgt 1y ago
    Maybe it's a browser issue and not GPU / CPU
    - wltr 1y ago
      I was being sarcastic, but actually I durst to open the link from my iPhone, realising it’s a more powerful computer than most Internet users have.
DrammBA 1y ago
m1 pro using firefox, I can notice the cursor not being smooth, and if I move the mouse while scrolling then it lags hard

lucianbr 1y ago

Couldn't agree more. It's basically a page with some pictures in it, and everything in it loaded so late for me that initially I wondered why they left so many large empty spaces in the page. This could work and be fast with tech from at least 20 years ago, probably even more. It's really incredible this is output from a company valued in trillions.

freedomben 1y ago
Indeed. Google is the worst at designing around lazy loading. Their UIs in Drive, Youtube Music, and others essentially become unusable once the list gets long. God forbid you don't have a super low latency connection straight to the data center. Even holding open a web socket to fetch "next pages" doesn't cut it in most of the real world. If you're gonna lazy load (which I admit sometimes does make sense) you need to aggressively fetch the next page. If I have 200 files in my Google Drive and they're sorted alphabetically, and I want one that starts with "y", the UX is so unbelievable bad that I sometimes wonder if I'm being pranked. I'll have to wait through a dozen "next page" loads that only load a screen worth of files at a time, and each pause makes me wait a second or two. That really adds up when I just want to scroll to the file. Scrolling through large playlists in Youtube Music is utterly painful nowadays too. Please people, test your UI on low bandwidth connections, high latency connections, and both conditions together. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near this bad. HN performs way, way better than these modern javascript heavy lazy loading apps, and I think there's some important insights in that sitting right there for the taking.
- roncesvalles 1y ago
  Especially when metadata is so cheap to send over. Even if you have literally thousands of files, there's no reason why they couldn't send it all in a single JSON at first page load. Gzipped it would be nothing.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    And to imagine that Googlers do not know better... sighs.

homebrewer 1y ago

By calling them engineers you're only feeding the ego.

05 1y ago
Any idiot can build a page that loads, but it takes an engineer to build a page that barely loads.
- mablopoule 1y ago
  Next time I'll be ranting against overengineering, I'll be stealing that :D

GoToRO 1y ago

You are just part of the problem. In which companies do engineers still have the final say? Almost none.

agos 1y ago
At almost all the companies I’ve worked with engineers might not have the final say but they’re still on the hook for blatant performance issues
- GoToRO 1y ago
  Exactly.

kiliancs 1y ago

They also seemingly went out of their way to prevent ctrl/cmd+click on several anchor elements in pages like https://m3.material.io/components https://m3.material.io/components.

edoceo 1y ago
Arrreg!! So many of these React (et al) sites, with poorly re-built elements and break the built-in functionality! The A tag works perfect! But no, we need three or four nested divs, components, and many lines of JS to end up with something worse. Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?
- dcre 1y ago
  If you render an <a> in React (or Angular, which I think they're using here), it's just an <a>! You have to do extra work to fuck it up!
  - agos 1y ago
    Indeed. And all the routing libraries also render <a>s by default
  - wapeoifjaweofji 1y ago
    I'll generally excuse things like laziness and incompetence, because I understand that not everyone is good at their jobs. But this: > You have to do extra work to fuck it up! resonates so hard. I get so angry at people who take extra time out of their day to put so much effort into making things worse. So many things on the internet are fine, but people spend so much on making them worse. Who is this good for? Not me, and likely not the person who wasted their time ruining functional things.
  - eastbound 1y ago
    It doesn’t do the internal navigation. And since React doesn’t have built-in support for pushState (Yes I know React Router, but it really wants a hash router), you really need extra work for an internal router. And therefore, every beginner dev does it manually and slightly inconsistently. So yes, React is absolutely the driver, same as Java is guilty for Guava existing, because it should have been built-in and perfect.

frostyel 1y ago

[dead]

jampekka 1y ago

The expressed goal is emotionally impacting UX. They clearly got strong emotions out of you. Mission accomplished!

echelon 1y ago
It's not just a laggy mouse. I scrolled through half a page of a completely black screen. On a high powered machine with lots of bandwidth and low latency. The designers here have lost the plot.
- Ghoelian 1y ago
  Can't even move the mouse while scrolling lmao
- riffraff 1y ago
  I'm on mobile and scrolled through most of this waiting for images to load, and wondering why I didn't see any.
- jchw 1y ago
  Very unusually, everything is working and smooth on Fennec F-Droid for me. Usually it's the opposite but it happens more often these days.
  - jchw 1y ago
    I know you aren't supposed to comment on it, but man, you just never know what will set people off on this site, and god knows they won't tell you. Are people bothered that I chimed in to say "works for me" or that I insinuated Fennec F-Droid is usually less smooth than the Webkit-based mobile browsers? I'll never know for sure. Sometimes with Hacker News, whether a comment is actually well-received feels like a dice roll.
    - nomel 1y ago
      My naive guess is that it's a null hypothesis situation. You not seeing a problem isn't a useful indicator for if there is a problem. More than that, it probably hits too close to home for mostly software devs, with the dreaded "Well it works on my machine."

Raed667 1y ago

[Ticket Closed] resolution: user should buy a macbook pro with at least the M3 processor /s

cube00 1y ago
SecOps put CrowdStrike's Falcon and Windows Defender on our Macs so we'd have about 20% CPU left for our actual dev work. That's not an exaggeration, staring at the System Monitor is all you can do when everything is locked up. The Android emulator sucks the remainder with ease. The app performs better on a low end Android burner phone then our dev machines so at least we know our users are having a reasonable experience.
- Raed667 1y ago
  You just triggered some PTSD... years ago I had to send my CTO a recording of my screen with keyboard input lag on VSCode because CrowdStrike was eating up all my CPU. I asked him if it was a good use of my (expensive) time to wait 30 seconds for characters to appear on my code editor. Luckily he gave me a "special exemption" that allowed me to shut that monstrosity down !
- marcusb 1y ago
  I had a couple of customers that deployed 7 endpoint security tools of the "hook into processes and inspect everything" variety. The exact mix was customer-specific, but if you're wondering what that looks like: * Stand-alone "best of breed" endpoint DLP * Stand-alone "best of breed" EDR * Process whitelisting tool * NAC posture assessment agent * Three different AV agents This is not even counting their VPN client(s) or the third party disk encryption agent they used. I marveled at how they even got all of the agents to coexist, let alone have enough CPU left for people to do their jobs.
  - pico303 1y ago
    And after all that, your company gets hacked through a misconfigured router.

xinayder 1y ago

The update to Android 15 was TERRIBLE. I updated it the past days, it's literally a bootleg copy of iOS interface. I despise it so much, much more than the move from Material Design to Material You. Everything occupies so much space, there is less information available for you, and important things like changing the music in your lock screen is confined to a tiny space. At least they got the Expressive right in the name now, Material Expressive (HATE).

sanitycheck 1y ago
Every update is worse than the last. I did the same, and I'm particularly loving turning bluetooth on or off requiring a swipe and three button presses instead of one. And I thought the quick settings regressed in 14 when they went from icons to huge buttons, but now they've gone for less-huge buttons with always-truncated text in. At least with Windows it alternately gets much worse then a bit better again with each version. Regarding the monstrosity in the link, yes it does make me 'feel things' - things I will refrain from typing out lest they be construed as threatening behaviour.
microtonal 1y ago
You can say a lot about Android 15, but I have a Pixel and an iPhone 16 Pro and they do not look alike... at all? Pull down the notifications and quick settings, it does not look remotely like iOS. The same for all the native apps. I wonder if you have Samsung One UI 7 or some other skin. One UI 7 looks a lot more like iOS, but there is little Google can do about that?
- xinayder 1y ago
  I have One UI 7. Most screenshots I've seen from Android 15 looked like One UI 7, though, so that's the reason for comparison.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    Ah, I see. We also have two One UI devices around the house, it is really different from the Pixel UI or AOSP.

rossant 1y ago

I only came here to rant about how no one should mess with my mouse cursor.

thewebguyd 1y ago
I'm with you there. People complain about how crap UX is now, and how computer illiterate the general populace has become but I firmly place the blame on forcing the web into an application delivery platform, abandoning all operating system HIG and conventions so that every app is now it's own unique snowflake that breaks conventions. IMO people would struggle less if it was all native apps that followed the OS. You learn your operating system's conventions and shortcuts, and those translate into every app you run - but then marketing people got their hands in things, and suddenly everything had to be branded and unique, and we are worse off for it.

donperignon 1y ago

I wish I could upvote you ten times.

Nickersf 1y ago

Not just the technical aspect here. I read through the page and nothing of any measurable importance was stated. What problems did this solve? What benefits does this bring to users? I guess I was expecting more from Google. The initial Material design system made some good points and addressed some issues for UI design. This just seems unfocused.

johnisgood 1y ago
It comes across as AI-generated diarrhea, without any point. Maybe I am just too dumb to recognize talent?

astrolx 1y ago

OMG I thought it was something wrong on my end, privacy add-on or whatnot. Glad to see they just lost it.

xnx 1y ago

> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? The lag and that cursor makes it feel like trying to type with mittens on.

ArinaS 1y ago

The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript. As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities than plain HTML and CSS.

sorenjan 1y ago

I have an 8 core CPU and a 10 TFLOP GPU and the cursor on this site lags in Firefox but is noticeable smoother in Edge.

horsawlarway 1y ago
It's usable (as in smooth-ish) but still visibly laggy compared to the normal mouse, in Chrome, on my hefty M1 Pro macbook for work. Also... I fucking hate it. I don't want my mouse to stick to buttons, or to change colors constantly. The "emotion" the this site generated for me was "anger". If this is the pitch for the new design system, my journey of not using Material is coming to a middle.

andrepd 1y ago

Why does everything reek of late capitalism? Even design doesn't fail to emanate a distinct "dystopian megacorp" stench.

dmos62 1y ago

These are UX researchers. This is not an engineering project.

twosid3dDice 1y ago

[flagged]

henning 1y ago

Confirmed. It felt OK on my M1 Max laptop but on my 2019 Intel laptop it feels like laggy shit. This is the stuff that makes you want to quit programming and go pick berries in the woods.

AbraKdabra 1y ago

If you try to move the mouse while scrolling the cursor freezes... jfc bring back 2010's Google.

roskelld 1y ago
Wow, yeah just tested that and it's really bad. I guess it's a strange thing to do, but a good way to test how the cursor hijacking code gets stalled when scroll is active, and I'm guessing they're doing UI updates on scroll so the thread is getting thrashed there. Even just making a circle motion with a mouse produces a lot of stuttering. I just did the same action on HN and it's as smooth as you'd expect on a CPU from 1995 and beyond.

kllrnohj 1y ago

The mouse cursor / general performance complaint is valid but: > spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration. These systems don't exist unless you go out of your way to turn off graphics acceleration. In which case that's kinda on you. It's like ranting about sites requiring javascript. It's just not a realistic expectation to have of anything anymore.

recursive 1y ago
> In which case that's kinda on you. What if I turned it off because it makes my machine more stable? Why do I have to choose between crashing and jank?
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
  - recursive 1y ago
    I don't know. It says ThinkPad on top. It was provided by my employer. Edit: Not directly related, but I turned off DRM support for similar reasons. Web sites keep turning one of my monitors off when that's enabled. Even though I'm not intentionally or perceptibly playing any media. The (well, another) weird thing is the other monitor stays on. They're the same brand and model, using the same cable. Fancy hardware stuff seems to make browsers unstable, and in my experience this has been true for over a decade. I don't care enough about to try to find a root cause. I don't need DRM support or hardware acceleration for anything I intended to do, so I just turn off anything like that.
  - KronisLV 1y ago
    > What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it? Fun fact, for the longest time ever on Windows 10 the Intel Arc drivers for A580 and B580 would crash in Edge if you played some videos on YouTube, it did seem that switching the ANGLE backend or whatever it was called would help, though I got similar issues with VLC when it was using the DirectX based renderer whereas OpenGL renderer didn't have that issue but would make the mouse disappear when in the video window. A lot of it feels like it was solved after moving to Windows 11, though it's still possible to make the PC freeze by either doing encodes in AV1 in DaVinci Resolve (QuickTime H264 or maybe H265 doesn't seem to have the issue) or through Handbrake, if the GPU is at 100% for prolonged periods of time, whereas recording with OBS or playing pretty much any game doesn't have that sort of an issue. Might be a bad media chip or something else, go figure - definitely there's at least two people in the world who might benefit from disabling hardware acceleration in some cases, though. My RX 580 doesn't seem to have the issue, so that's the joys of being an early adopter.

bmicraft 1y ago

Firefox on a mid-range Android phone here and this page didn't even feel particularly heavy to me. Everything loaded before scrolling into view and no stuttering while scrolling whatsoever.

itorcs 1y ago

This comment speaks to me on an almost spiritual level. It highlights the fact that it isn't engineering prowess for people to get these jobs.

pfannkuchen 1y ago
Yeah it’s kind of weird that “UX” morphed into a non-engineering role. Like, the interface to the user is still part of the software product. It seems like that sort of role would be best executed by the subset of engineers who lean towards visual design, as opposed to the subset of visual designers who lean towards computing.

drob518 1y ago

Ignorance is a key trait for angel investors.

hnuser123456 1y ago

They had to add that 500ms of input latency to feel like you're really using Android.

sneilan1 1y ago

I am on Debian linux with 128 GB of ram running the latest brave browser and the cursor lags for me also.

jonahx 1y ago

I am so happy this is the top comment. My experience was... Skim through sentence after sentence of award-winning inanity like "Expressive design makes you feel something" as my powerful Macbook stumbles and wheezes... Then think: "I like how default scrolling makes me feel!"

KronisLV 1y ago

> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration. I have a dual GPU setup with one GPU dedicated to browsers, the cursor still freezes while scrolling and jitters after that and has noticeable lag even when not scrolling across both Chromium based browsers and Firefox on Windows. I'd compare it to a video game with really bad aim acceleration where the mouse just feels sluggish and uncooperative. I like that people are studying what works and what doesn't in UI/UX, but I'm not sure why they have to break the basics in the process of doing that - that is quite distracting from the overall experience and makes it kind of miserable, just as opening a very JS heavy SPA or what have you would.

p4coder 1y ago

Hmm, works just fine on my pixel 6a in chrome.

pen2l 1y ago

I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you? It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to. And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.

agos 1y ago
My hot take is that material started with only one goal in mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of the bathroom
insin 1y ago
I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own. This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app: https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/ https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/ I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course. The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.

varispeed 1y ago

This is classic enshittification. Make poor software to nudge people into buy new hardware supposedly handling it better. Rinse and repeat. Also shittier software means you can hire cheaper workers to plough on.

taylorallred 1y ago

To be fair, if you try to paint something on a webpage that follows the mouse cursor it's gonna be laggy af even in really simple toy examples. The blame may fall more on browsers.

51Cards 1y ago

I'm not understanding this comment. I'm running this site on my Pixel 5 and on Firefox on a Thinkpad W530 (12+ years old) and it's flying on both. What part is laggy?

simojo 1y ago

As someone who had a landlord that was a google software engineer, I concur.

fHr 1y ago

because they're regarded MBA controlled clowns and engineering is no longer valued but showing some flashy new bs rounded edge design on a button are ffs