5 ms·
> This all changed, of course. Computing power eventually became a secondary draw to user experience. That's partly because broadband exploded, making sheer spe
by currysausage 11y ago
> This all changed, of course. Computing power eventually became a secondary draw to user experience. That's partly because broadband exploded, making sheer speed less of a selling point.
So here I am, with my beefy SSD machine, a 50 Mbit/s connection, a JS engine that is orders of magnitude faster than anything we had a few years ago, HTML5 offline storage, HTTP/2, still waiting >5sec for several Google properties to load, waiting >15sec for CEF-based Spotify to load, knowing that with today's tech, these things could fire up within <100ms.
It's no disaster if I have to wait for a few seconds, but especially for secondary tasks (like looking up an address on Maps or playing a song) which I do en passant while focusing on something else, I find that waiting for only a few seconds can already steal my focus. When I fire up a music app (be it non-Google Spotify, Google Play Music or whatever), it would be great if at least the search form was available immediately. Knowing that it won't, that instead my expensive PC will go sluggish for a few moments, I find myself just avoiding these things increasingly often.
And it's sad to know that Google once was pretty obsessed about reducing these little latencies wherever possible. Today, they develop SPDY and QUIC to save a few ms, then throw web frameworks at me that take whole seconds to load.
It's not that I didn't appreciate beautiful interface design. It's nice to have a mobile OS that arguably looks better than iOS. But it also was pretty awesome to have an almost latency-free experience (and good information design, making efficient use of my screen), even with an old netbook and shaky GPRS internet on the train.
- nchlswu 11y ago> But it also was pretty awesome to have an almost latency-free experience (and good information design, making efficient use of my screen). It's funny. I think most people would agree that the experience you described isn't diametrically opposed to 'good design,' and in fact have the same goals. But, it seems like the modern conception of 'good design' has effectively been reduced to pretty things and interface design. Even if designers wouldn't say that if you asked.
- currysausage 11y ago> that the experience you described isn't diametrically opposed to 'good design,' Yup. The more obsessed we get about "pixel-perfect" interactions, the more insufficient native browser behavior becomes, to the point where e.g. Flipboard just throws it all away and creates a new UI layer using <canvas>. But that's probably not what either of us would call "good design."
- twiceaday 11y agoThis only applies to websites. Modern apps don't just look great they feel great as well.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoAbsolutely the problem. Google+ currently causes Firefox to hang for five to ten seconds. (On my less core-gifted machine, this locks up the entire machine for those five to ten seconds, but in most cases, just ALL my Firefox.)
- tmd83 11y agoAgree so absolutely. Chrome taskbar (on Mac) showing a memory use of 472MB. I think even outlook express was many times lighter than this the last time I used them. Yes its kind of a cross platform mail client but it definitely has lesser feature (in the client side at least) than the desktop clients, is slower and takes many times more memory. What was the point again? Web is good, cross-platform is good, open is good but I don't think the price we pay for this is shameful overbloat.