7 ms·

It's really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb

It's really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.

mikestorrent 8mo ago
Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 <table> by now. Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be. We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?
- kgwxd 8mo ago
  > the web was a mistake; It's not "the web" or HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. That's all instant in vanilla form. Any media in today's quality will of course take time to download but, once cached, is also instant. None of the UX "requires" the crap that makes it slow, certainly not thousands of lines to make a table sortable and filterable. I could do that in IE6 without breaking a sweat. It's way easier, and faster, now. It's just people being lazy in how they do it, Apparetnly now just accepting whatever claude gave them as "best in show".
- NullPrefix 8mo ago
  Back in PHP days you had an incentive to care about performance, because it's your servers that are overloaded. With frontend there's no such issue, because it's not your hardware that is being loaded
- m-schuetz 8mo ago
  > Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
  - dsego 8mo ago
    There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.
    - qsera 8mo ago
      I am not sure, it seems that cross platform Applciations are possible using something like python3/gtk/qt etc.
      - okanat 8mo ago
        Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers. The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-native UI in its reason of existence. Cross platform tries to unify the UX while native UI tries to differentiate the UX. Native UI wants unique incompatible behavior. So the cross platform UI frameworks that try to use the actual OS components always end up with terrible visual bugs due to unifying things that don't want to be unified. Or worse many "cross platform" UI frameworks try to mimic the its developer's favorite OS. I have seen way too many Android apps that has "cross platform" frameworks that draw iOS UI elements. The best way to do cross platform applications with a GUI (I specifically avoid cross platform UI) is defining a yet another platform above a very basic common layer. This is what Web had done. What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web and this is why Electron works so well for applications deployed in multiple OSes.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  > Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?
  - fsflover 8mo ago
    It works with free software GNU/Linux repos.
    - pjc50 8mo ago
      ? On iOS?
      - fsflover 8mo ago
        In general.
- miroljub 8mo ago
  > Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? We had Flash for exactly that purpose. For all its flaws, it was our best hope. A shame Apple and later Adobe decided to kill it in favor of HTML5. The second best bet was Java Applets, but the technology came too early and was dead before it could fly off. Some may mention WebAssembly, but I just don't see that as a viable alternative to the web mess that we already have.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    The death of Flash was squarely the fault of Adobe's neglect. Apple simply refused to tolerate their garbage.
- prmph 8mo ago
  Nah, some fixes to HTML would go a long way to address these issues. I agree we need in built-in controls, reasonably sophisticated, properly style-able with CSS. We also need typed JS in the browser, etc
- yread 8mo ago
  > sortable-and-filterable table Just use jquery and this plugin, 7kB minified: https://github.com/myspace-nu/jquery.fancyTable/blob/master/dist/fancyTable.min.js https://github.com/myspace-nu/jquery.fancyTable/blob/master/...
  - BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
    That would be the thousands of lines of JS that they are complaining about. Except if it depends on jquery, that's even more lines.
    - yread 8mo ago
      ? It's 294 lines unminified
- dzonga 8mo ago
  the web is great as an application platform. what's not great are the complexity merchants, due to money & other incentives etc that ship to the web. there's better web frameworks that are lighter, faster than react - but due to hype etc you know how that goes
- intrasight 8mo ago
  > The web was a mistake I wouldn't say that. The web had done way more good than harm overall. What I would say is that embedding the internet (and its tracking and spyware and dark patterns that have gain prominence) into every single application that we use is what is at fault. The web browser that we built in 1990 was all on-premise obviously. And it had a very different architecture than HTTP. There were two processes. One used TCP/IP to mirror the plant computers model into memory on the workstation. The other painted the infographics and handled the user navigating to different screens. The two processes used shared memory to communicate. It was my first job out of university.
  - Henchman21 8mo ago
    The Internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the surveillance we endure for those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries. You know, or something.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  Was doing sortable-and-filterable tables in the browser without a server round-trip 20 years ago using XML/XSLT and not thousands of lines of JS but something on the order of dozens.
  - intrasight 8mo ago
    So true. I still do that in an enterprise app that I wrote. I know that Chrome pulling the plug on XSLT in the browser is imminent - so how are you refactoring?
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  These feel like all the things a proper "Web 3.0" should have solved. We have decades of lessons learned that we could apply with a soft reboot to how we envision the web. Instead it's just piling on a dozen layers of dependencies. Webassembly feels like the only real glimmer of what the "next generation" could have been like.
guidedlight 8mo ago
You are describing Wirth’s Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
pphysch 8mo ago
Resources have certainly been squandered, but there are also a lot of apples vs. oranges comparisons that overlook advances in UX/DX and security.
Rohansi 8mo ago
> Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds. It's not though, is it? Even browsers are capable of painting most pages at over 60 FPS. It's all the other crappy code making everything janky.
HerbManic 8mo ago
When I use my work PC under Win 11, I endlessly notic all the lag on basically everything. Click and email in outlook at it takes 3 seconds to draw in... thats a good 12 billion cycles on a single core to do that. Multiply that by hundreds/thousands of events across all events on the system and I wonder how many trillions of cycles are wasted on bloat everyday. My 17 year old core 2 duo should not feel faster on a lean linux distro than modern hardware and yet it does. Wild to see and somewhat depressing. I see old videos (Computer chronicles a good example) of what could be done on a 486 for instance. While you can see the difference in overall experience, it isnt that extreme of a difference, the 486 being released 37 years ago...
ryanjshaw 8mo ago
And in 1990 people were complaining about the same thing [1]. [1] Why Aren’t Operating Systems Getting Faster As Fast as Hardware? https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/osfaster.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/osfaster.pdf
turnoffimagesss 8mo ago
I turn off images and it is way faster. If you couple that with local DNS overwrites, it is even faster. The tech is there on desktop at least.

mikestorrent 8mo ago

Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 <table> by now. Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be. We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

kgwxd 8mo ago
> the web was a mistake; It's not "the web" or HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. That's all instant in vanilla form. Any media in today's quality will of course take time to download but, once cached, is also instant. None of the UX "requires" the crap that makes it slow, certainly not thousands of lines to make a table sortable and filterable. I could do that in IE6 without breaking a sweat. It's way easier, and faster, now. It's just people being lazy in how they do it, Apparetnly now just accepting whatever claude gave them as "best in show".
NullPrefix 8mo ago
Back in PHP days you had an incentive to care about performance, because it's your servers that are overloaded. With frontend there's no such issue, because it's not your hardware that is being loaded
m-schuetz 8mo ago
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
- dsego 8mo ago
  There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.
  - qsera 8mo ago
    I am not sure, it seems that cross platform Applciations are possible using something like python3/gtk/qt etc.
    - okanat 8mo ago
      Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers. The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-native UI in its reason of existence. Cross platform tries to unify the UX while native UI tries to differentiate the UX. Native UI wants unique incompatible behavior. So the cross platform UI frameworks that try to use the actual OS components always end up with terrible visual bugs due to unifying things that don't want to be unified. Or worse many "cross platform" UI frameworks try to mimic the its developer's favorite OS. I have seen way too many Android apps that has "cross platform" frameworks that draw iOS UI elements. The best way to do cross platform applications with a GUI (I specifically avoid cross platform UI) is defining a yet another platform above a very basic common layer. This is what Web had done. What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web and this is why Electron works so well for applications deployed in multiple OSes.
pjc50 8mo ago
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?
- fsflover 8mo ago
  It works with free software GNU/Linux repos.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    ? On iOS?
    - fsflover 8mo ago
      In general.
miroljub 8mo ago
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? We had Flash for exactly that purpose. For all its flaws, it was our best hope. A shame Apple and later Adobe decided to kill it in favor of HTML5. The second best bet was Java Applets, but the technology came too early and was dead before it could fly off. Some may mention WebAssembly, but I just don't see that as a viable alternative to the web mess that we already have.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  The death of Flash was squarely the fault of Adobe's neglect. Apple simply refused to tolerate their garbage.
prmph 8mo ago
Nah, some fixes to HTML would go a long way to address these issues. I agree we need in built-in controls, reasonably sophisticated, properly style-able with CSS. We also need typed JS in the browser, etc
yread 8mo ago
> sortable-and-filterable table Just use jquery and this plugin, 7kB minified: https://github.com/myspace-nu/jquery.fancyTable/blob/master/dist/fancyTable.min.js https://github.com/myspace-nu/jquery.fancyTable/blob/master/...
- BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
  That would be the thousands of lines of JS that they are complaining about. Except if it depends on jquery, that's even more lines.
  - yread 8mo ago
    ? It's 294 lines unminified
dzonga 8mo ago
the web is great as an application platform. what's not great are the complexity merchants, due to money & other incentives etc that ship to the web. there's better web frameworks that are lighter, faster than react - but due to hype etc you know how that goes
intrasight 8mo ago
> The web was a mistake I wouldn't say that. The web had done way more good than harm overall. What I would say is that embedding the internet (and its tracking and spyware and dark patterns that have gain prominence) into every single application that we use is what is at fault. The web browser that we built in 1990 was all on-premise obviously. And it had a very different architecture than HTTP. There were two processes. One used TCP/IP to mirror the plant computers model into memory on the workstation. The other painted the infographics and handled the user navigating to different screens. The two processes used shared memory to communicate. It was my first job out of university.
- Henchman21 8mo ago
  The Internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the surveillance we endure for those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries. You know, or something.
SoftTalker 8mo ago
Was doing sortable-and-filterable tables in the browser without a server round-trip 20 years ago using XML/XSLT and not thousands of lines of JS but something on the order of dozens.
- intrasight 8mo ago
  So true. I still do that in an enterprise app that I wrote. I know that Chrome pulling the plug on XSLT in the browser is imminent - so how are you refactoring?
johnnyanmac 8mo ago
These feel like all the things a proper "Web 3.0" should have solved. We have decades of lessons learned that we could apply with a soft reboot to how we envision the web. Instead it's just piling on a dozen layers of dependencies. Webassembly feels like the only real glimmer of what the "next generation" could have been like.

guidedlight 8mo ago

You are describing Wirth’s Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

pphysch 8mo ago

Resources have certainly been squandered, but there are also a lot of apples vs. oranges comparisons that overlook advances in UX/DX and security.

Rohansi 8mo ago

> Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds. It's not though, is it? Even browsers are capable of painting most pages at over 60 FPS. It's all the other crappy code making everything janky.

HerbManic 8mo ago

When I use my work PC under Win 11, I endlessly notic all the lag on basically everything. Click and email in outlook at it takes 3 seconds to draw in... thats a good 12 billion cycles on a single core to do that. Multiply that by hundreds/thousands of events across all events on the system and I wonder how many trillions of cycles are wasted on bloat everyday. My 17 year old core 2 duo should not feel faster on a lean linux distro than modern hardware and yet it does. Wild to see and somewhat depressing. I see old videos (Computer chronicles a good example) of what could be done on a 486 for instance. While you can see the difference in overall experience, it isnt that extreme of a difference, the 486 being released 37 years ago...

ryanjshaw 8mo ago

And in 1990 people were complaining about the same thing [1]. [1] Why Aren’t Operating Systems Getting Faster As Fast as Hardware? https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/osfaster.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/osfaster.pdf

turnoffimagesss 8mo ago

I turn off images and it is way faster. If you couple that with local DNS overwrites, it is even faster. The tech is there on desktop at least.