"It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger."
This attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be fat and get fatter. That's a lie.
Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in your hands, you just need to use it.
No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking libraries. No, you don't need a "Read More" button hiding most of the content. No, you don't need dynamically loaded clickbait at the bottom of the page. No, you don't need an autoplaying video. No, you don't need load a script to inject text into a copy operation. No, you don't need 87 cookies. No you don't need to load random unvetted code from a third party advertiser. No, you don't need the page text to fade in on scroll. No, you don't need any of that.
The technical worker who codes up the web site and its backend does have a say, but not a lot of it. Product and sales people have a stronger say, because they optimize for the money the web site produces.
Explaining them how much worse the bloat makes the site's experience for the user, showing how many pages are left partially loaded because the user did not have the patience and navigated away, how the competitor's site loads faster, may help convince them to keep the experience reasonably slim.
Asking for web sites that don't have 27 trackers, enormous hero images, a full copy of framework of the week, etc. is like asking for native games under Linux: the money isn't there to justify the added hassle and support costs.
Also as a dev, I don’t really care. It’s not my money on the line, it’s the companies. If the site sucks and users don’t like it, the company loses profits and they will be forced to change.
The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not my problem.
Trouble is that your users are generally in a similar situation, not getting to choose what tools they use. By producing bad software, you’re making their life harder personally.
More often than not I feel these decisions are out of the developers hands.
As a dev, I want to use tree shaking to make my bundles small and optimize to make my website lighthouse score 100 across the board.
What happens? Marketing needs tag manager installed and then proceeds to async load 50 tracking scripts in the background.
Design wants the large hero images because on the high Res devices they use it looks slightly pixelated and when you push back, a quick screenshot to the PM will guarantee the ticket is added to the backlog.
Point being I'm not sure claiming that Devs hold the power is particularly constructive as there is a large portion on non-techies who have their own priorities to push.
I've had the exact situation kisamoto is talking about happen to me countless times, and I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've won the battle over images. Sadly, the folks calling the shots on what images to use and exactly how they need to look do not care that I'm using responsive imagery to serve images to our users with appropriate file sizes, reasonable resolutions, and ensure crops have editor selected focal points.
When I say these folks get upset over slight pixelization, I'm not even talking about pixelization where everyone can tell it's a low quality image. I'm talking about situations where people are upset they can't read an iPhone screen someone is holding in the background when they are viewing it on their 4K display (note: that particular phone isn't the focal point of the shot, nor does it have anything to add to it; it's just someone staged back there to make the shot feel more alive, mind you!).
It's disheartening because I do want to deliver the best experience possible and try to do everything in my power to accomplish it, but sometimes I lose out and folks force their megabyte imagery.
Just see what's on offer at your local thrift shop.
I don't recommend garage sales, however. People tend to overvalue their electronics. I tried to buy a radio that was worth maybe $20 from some guy. He wouldn't part with it for less than $150 because it reminded him of his father. That's nice, but I'm not paying $130 for your memories.
The low... um. One of us is in a bubble. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine. Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade old)
It’s low res relatively as it is roughy the lowest resolution still in use. Mid range laptops these days come with 1080p displays and high end is somewhere at or under 4K
Ah, you're right; if I look on Best Buy and Newegg I can buy new machines below 1080p but they're the very, very bottom of the barrel ($100 Chromebooks and those weird "technically a laptop" off-brand Android... things). Well, here's to a crisper future:) (That apparently arrived while I was distracted)
I don’t know if bubble is the right term here. WXGA (1366x768) is more common and more fubar, as the horizontal may vary between 1360 and 1372.
The point is to feel the pain. By any modern sensibility both resolutions are pretty awful, and experiencing it on a $200 consumer laptop is icing
On the cake. Although I have clients who routinely test applications on ancient 800x600 displays due to legacy constraints.
Even a low-end modern system only takes you so far back in time.
Keep in mind that hardware improves roughly on line with Moore's Law. The gradation from low-end to mid-market might only be a few years of development.
The 10-year-old system is probably going to be much worse than a current low-end buy.
Moore’s law hasn’t been kind to x86 laptops, and the tricks used to speed things up are missing from low end celeron processors and binned SSDs. The cheap hardware and poor touchpads add to the charm.
I would bet that the 10 year old Lenovo would be surprisingly better than the shitty 2021 device.
There's been SSDs, increased cache, increased memory speed, and more cores.
You might want to go back a bit more than 10 years, but yes, even a reasonably high-grade older system in my experience really dogs out on the current Web.
My software engineer teammates get specially approved 4K displays and “engineering” laptops. People who use the apps are often restricted to “business” laptops. Conference rooms still use old projectors that are even lower resolution. We have no control over the displays our customers use.
I’ve been teaching my engineers to use the responsive design tools in their browsers. For UI components that render differently based on @media queries, it’s been helpful to add stories for those breakpoints to our Storybook component library.
When preparing to present to a remote audience, check how the slides will look for people connecting with a phone.
When recording a demo video, try to record at a lower resolution like 720p to save bandwidth and make it easier for people with small screens to watch.
Buy a 5-years old laptop off eBay, yes. In a good working order, but with a slow CPU, little RAM, and a mediocre screen (not even FHD). A thinkpad is a fine choice because they are usually made to last, so it won't keep breaking at you.
While this is good for testing during development, A crappy laptop with a fresh install of windows, will be far less bad than a crappy laptop with a 6 year old full-of-crap windows.
I suggest doing the final test of your your site on:
* A friends old laptop, on their wifi, still logged in as them, and with them clicking the buttons with you watching over their shoulder.
* The same, but a friends old android phone, preferably with 'samsung browser'.
Just go to Walmart or Best Buy or your local equivalent and buy a cheap laptop, something that’s $600 tops and feels like the plastic is just barely held together.
$600 would be a prime dev laptop for me. I use the cheapest, non-chromebook, I can find then throw FreeBSD or Linux on it. I prefer desktops and spend much more money when I build one of those.
Yeah a T-series Thinkpad. We use them at work for dumb terminals for forms, COVID compliance nonsense, and random data entry points. They are surprisingly durable and still pretty solid.
It… what? I don’t know about Facebook, but GitHub is a good deal lighter than YouTube and Twitter. GitHub is one of the extremely few websites developed by a large number of people that aren’t atrociously resource-heavy and JavaScript-dependent.
Fairly impressed that it runs Facebook. Out of all the websites I use, I find Facebook to be the most slow (presumably due to its heavy use of JS). This is despite most other websites I use preforming fine on my personal 2017-era X1 Carbon and work 2017-era MacBook. I'd have thought it would fall off the rails on a 13 year old machine!
Apparently they had whole labs full of banks of machines in many common configurations to test their software. However now the "insiders" get the privilege of doing it for them for free under the guise of shaping the product direction.
Windows Updates are drip fed out to classes of machine so they can limit the damage when they hit a class that inevitably fails because it was never tested before rolling out to production on that hardware.
I appreciate they can never test every configuration but based on what they used to do it's clear they identified a need for this kind of testing in the past so what's changed? Why don't they need to do this testing anymore? Why make your users do it for you, for free, no less.
Did later editions (e.g. 95b) still run on the 386? I remember running 95b on a Pentium 166 MMX with 32MB of RAM and even that was a challenge at times!
I often test my Android apps on a nexus 5. Though its battery is so bad it sometimes shuts off while booting while plugged in, I do wonder if they're still selling batteries for this thing.
I second this! A Raspberry Pi 400 is often my primary web browsing device, while my workstation is busy with other things. There's no reason why a website should overwhelm it.
I believe that most of the "web developers" have absolutely no idea of how to build a website using bare html+css. Actually, I worked with "web developers" that are basically not touching code much, but using all sorts of tools and framework - without fully understand what they are doing. And that's also why website looks like each other more and more. And that's the silent majority of the industry.
There is no way to be a modern web developer without knowing everything you need for raw html/css unless you are talking about square space or basic Wordpress work.
Things like react are purely extra knowledge needed over the top of the basic website building blocks.
ok, html maybe, because html if anything is easier than the one in 90/00s (no more tables, or divs everywhere)
But in my experience 80% react developers could not layout a page with raw css. I am not even talking anything "fancy" like transitions or animations. They just import libs and frameworks and customize a bit.
Back when I was consulting pretty much every customer I visited had people who weren't proficient with the technology they used. The corporate world is particularly prone to this. You would work with a team of ten and find two people were doing the bulk of the work. I doubt this has changed since then.
As someone who came up during the late 90s and coded many a page in apps that were barely more than Notepad, I often have the same sentiment. (I get the same feelings about the backend and writing SQL) However, the web then was very simple. I wonder if I was a 24 year old today, trying to get a handle on all the various front-end frameworks, all the security vulnerabilities, and having to target mobile screens and giant 4k displays at the same time, if I wouldn't consider the basics low-hanging fruit to abstract away.
As I suggested in my other comment, how many backend developers don't know SQL? I would also suggest that highly skilled cabinet installers aren't always master carpenters.
There is a hidden feature in Chrome Devtools to apply a CPU slowdown...
Simply head to Devtools > Performance tab > Gear icon > CPU > 6x slowdown.
That isn't a perfect representation of an old laptop (doesn't throttle GPU operations or trigger low memory behaviours), but it's a good start. As a bonus, it makes your fans spin up wildly whenever loading a page!
Lighthouse also emulates slow-ish web on a mobile device. Though I would take its results with a grain of salt: it can show near-perfect green scores for a website that takes 3 seconds to render
Sufficiently deep in menus that I suspect most people here on HN would consider themselves familiar with devtools, yet wouldn't have been aware of this option.
Gmail has nearly 50mb of JavaScript that thrashes I/O so hard that clicking the search bar and typing too soon will cause it to skip letters (because the search bar is probably some Angular-powered abomination).
It is and was a regression from the previous design which was fast even on 3G connections.
It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9 MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried not being poor?
Is that really the previous design, though? I remember being presented with this button before and ended up on an extremely bare bones version of Gmail (like something built for 2G feature phone browsers) that didn't have support for changing mail settings, etc.
They seem to have disabled the option to make that the default view. Or rather, the option is still there but it doesn't do anything, always opening the bloated interface.
Hey now you can make plenty fast Angular apps, there should never be a case where you skip letters, it's all about how you use the tools available. There are dozens of barebones websites that recursively SELECT 1 row at a time from a remote database and that is just as painful.
It's not just performance here: colour grading is really important too.
Many years ago I had a fascinating incident with a client. We were building a custom skin for our product for them, and they had quite a striking brand identity that we tried to match. When we showed them what we had built they complained that it was illegible.
Eventually, after visiting their office, we found that they were all working on cheap Windows laptops attached to horribly configured monitors - and our site really was illegible. We had done our design work on an iMac!
Indeed. Buy a crappy 15 year old LCD TV with HDMI and hook it up. Most of the really cheap Chinese models have terrible gamma that means half the colors look the same.
Yes, do this if you want to actually use the screen properly. But do not do this if you want to test how awful your content looks on other people's setups.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my team worked on optimizations as priority number 1 as we got a lot of new users with terrible configurations who wanted to do a lot more that what ever intended for that same hardware.
I managed to find a crappy laptop to do some testing and work on optimizations, and it wasn't pretty. No development tool would work on it. My recommendation is thus: aim low, but not the lowest. You'll still be able to measure impact of your changes, and you'll be able to collect some data and other measurements about what is slow.
Dev laptop need not be your test laptop. You should still test on that machine even if you can't develop on it. And I have a feeling this test also indicates a lack of optimization in the dev tools as well.
Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and breakdown in bad network environments.
I've used toxiproxy [1] to imitate various network problems (slowness, lost packets, dropping connections, etc). It works pretty well, and is even amenable to running during functional / integration tests.
It's frustrating that this is so easy to do in one click using the browser's in-built developer tools, and yet no dev team spends their time on it (or even know that it exists).
- Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc)
- Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong.
Try letting your local development backend return a 500, timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your frontend handles this in a graceful manner. It should at least give some feedback to the user that the operation failed.
You can emulate a slow internet connection in chrome devtools, though I find the experience not accurate. You can also just add a sleep() call somewhere in your local backend. Maybe inject a sleep() into your acceptance environment, and let the test team work through the scenarios with that sleep() call in place.
I've seen so many frontends that don't catch errors, and just show the spinner indefinitely. Or worse, show nothing at all. This is extremely confusing to less technical people.
> Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong.
The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in full screen. Then Google Meet will forever freeze the shared picture after a couple of minutes without anybody telling so. It's ridiculous that they cannot handle this reasonably, you don't need 30 fps to share a screen of slowly changing text. It's completely user hostile that there is no message for either the sharer or any participant that sharing has frozen and will never recover. This is paid usage of Google Meet.
Having used a range of video conferencing systems, your description of Meet lines up with pretty much every Meet session I've been involved with. I'll meet the same group of people on Zoom another time and it usually works much better on Zoom.
Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc even on high quality fibre connections
Zoom = smooth high-res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor glitches that usually sorts itself out in seconds) even on low quality connections
On 4G, which gives me 20 - 40 Mbit/sec uplink I have no major issues with Google Meet. Sharing terminals with red on black font does not work well. Whether Zoom works better I don't know from own experience. I hardly ever use it because my employer has a Google subscription.
Well, sharing terminals over telcos is backwards anyway. We did that 20 years ago over 56 kbit/s modem lines using VNC. And the compression was lossless, the result pixel perfect.
I can't find a source, but I heard that Google used to purposely slow down their corporate network on some days to force all teams to dogfood test their software on slow networks. Or maybe they just offered an alternate slow Wi-Fi network to make testing easier, not forcing everyone to use a slow network.
But forcing managers to use a slow network would be an effective way to get them to prioritize performance. If using a slow network is a choice, they wouldn't.
Idk about the main network, but they do have a separate "Google-2g" network you can connect to that has degraded performance for testing purposes. Maybe they force people to use it when testing apps?
HN is so full of rich silicon valley assholes, they've never even had to make do with a cheap laptop. They need an article like this to remind them how the proles live.
- Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen.
- Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites which we all love.
- Those who care about performance, but work for people who don't. Since the developer doesn't get to decide what to work on, they can either get cracking on feature #357, work on performance on the sly at the risk of losing their job, or quit. Not much of a choice, really, unless you have some other-worldly lax schedule and minimal oversight. And don't forget, if you are allowed to work on performance the burden is on you to prove how much faster things are with your changes (which can be really hard to show conclusively) and that your N days is worth more than Bob working N days on that sexy ticket #357.
Substitute "security", "UX", or anything else you want for "performance", it works the same way.
It surely loads faster than speed of light, but with all the keyboard navigation missing, it takes 20x more time to go through each email and archive/delete/reply to. Can't have everything, it seems. :/
2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search).
I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something.
A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach.
Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web tabs to check email is annoying.
At work I use the macOS Desktop edition of Outlook for my work O365 account and I've found searching to be pretty good and quite fast. I'm pretty sure it just searches the local cache hence the speed. It's pretty good at suggesting email addresses when I type someones name so I can usually quickly find emails from a certain person just by typing the first characters of their name and pressing return when it finds the correct address.
> A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run
Only if they have a good reason to target you, personally.
But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion mailboxes.
There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom mailserver with a budget of $1.
KMail (on KDE on Linux desktop) search is instant. Pity the Akonadi framework under it needs more love to iron out its bugs. I suffer web GMail only when not at my workstation.
> Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search).
I would actually make the opposite statement, i.e. generally, webmail clients are significantly inferior to desktop clients in most respects: Feature set, responsiveness, flexibility etc. And of course, being potentially somewhat secure, as opposed to guaranteed no-security with webmail.
As for search functionality - I'm not sure you're right, but I'll grant you that some webmail providers, like Google, provide speedy search.
Back when I could use emacs for email, I was quite happy. Unfortunately, I have the advanced protection on in my Gmail account, so I haven't figured how to get that back, yet. App passwords aren't allowed on my account.
I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.
I think you can get most of the benefits of the enhanced protection but setting specific features yourself instead of the one "do everything" flag.
I have 2FA required on regular logins for example, which can be a Yubikey or authenticator app token. At the same time, I have app passwords, used by my emacs-based email setup. Mu4e gives me instant search-based access to my saved email, and pretty good security elsewhere. Is that an option?
It's significantly faster for me on my i3-5010U - 5s for the modern UI and 1s for the HTML UI, unloaded. During startup, or when I'm doing something computationally expensive in the background, that 5s turns into 10s, so that difference becomes even more noticeable.
I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.
I have to use Gmail for work. I've found Gmail to be pretty slow nowdays. From HN comments on other threads I'm not the only one to have noticed this. It even occasionally fails to load and just hangs at the loading screen requiring a refresh and fingers crossed that the second try succeeds in loading my inbox.
When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast and 99% of the time it works on the first try. I also occasionally use Outlook's webmail for work (as I work across different systems with some on Google and some on O365) and even Outlook webmail is generally faster than Gmail despite my main Outlook mailbox being much larger than my less-used Gmail mailboxes (although it is nowhere as fast as FastMail).
I remember the early days of Gmail -- it was a fantastic product in its heyday better than any other webmail client at the time. The quality has sadly dropped a huge amount especially in recent years to the point there are now viable alternatives. FastMail is one such alternative I have been very impressed with. Even Outlook's webmail is worth a look although the UX could do with some work.
It used to be amazing - a pretty full featured mail application, snappy in 2005 on much less sophisticated browser runtimes. It’s relatively a piece of shit now.
Second this, but to elaborate, likely it's because they're using chrome when it runs fast and other browsers when it's not. From my perspective, everything Google does is just an effort to get you stuck in their ecosystem.
Everything about Gmail is very confusing to me; I have no love for Outlook (it's absolutely garbage) but in garbage rankings, Outlook is a bit more functional than Gmail is. Outlook has a more complete business eco-system vision I think than Gmail does, and there is a lot better integration with the other elements of Microsoft's ecosystem than Chrome has. For example, when I attach a Sharepoint/OneDrive doc to an email in Outlook, it offers to let me set the permissions for the recipients automatically. This doesn't make up for Sharepoint/OneDrive's awful permissions handling in general, but this element is convenient at least. (Again, I cannot stress how frustrating it is to even __see__ what permissions someone has for a Sharepoint/OneDrive document as regardless of your screen resolution/browser size, you're confined to a few centimeter width sized window, never mind that sometimes saving just outright refuses to work, and bulk-adding persons is even worse)
Gmail has awful design in many places; I don't like that a simple option like FWD is hidden behind the ... menu. I don't like that selecting an email from the list in gmail results in the menu buttons suddenly expanding. Even worse, the location of the reply button when the menu buttons are contracted is the same as the location of the "Mark as Spam" button when expanded; on browsers that aren't chrome, the display lag is enough that I can move my cursor far faster than the menu buttons expand and what __was__ the reply button location is now the "mark as spam" button location.
I don't like that it takes a good 5+ seconds to load the basic email list on a 100 Mbit connection. I don't like that logging into Gmail logs me into every other Google platform (e.g., YouTube) and I start getting spam about different channels or reminders to "engage" with various channels/social media. I don't like that I have to install a .dpkg for Mac to use Gchat video when other apps (e.g., Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp) are just a regular application that I can remove with drag/drop. I really don't like how "foreign" the Gmail/Google theming is with basically everything on MacOS and even on Android, or how few controls over basic UI functionality I get. (I really struggled to find in the Playstore how to monitor the progress of a download...)
Gmail and Google at large feels like an ecosystem that Google just expects everyone to buy into regardless of the platform/experience, and I truly cannot understand their intended way of handling the UI most of the time. The underlying methods of categorizing/indexing the information of course is fine, but actually interacting with it is frustrating for me compared to every Google product contemporary. As much as I dislike Outlook, I'd rather use it than Gmail. I'd rather use basically any chat program as opposed to GChat/Whatever it's called now (it's still really bad whatever the new product is called). Even Google itself I find myself fighting with Google's preferred results instead of what I'm actually wanting (without uBlock the first results are tons of ad spam that have nothing to do with the searches, and the first few results are usually some SEO'd result).
There is an "okay" experience with google if you go all in on it, but they certainly seem to bank on the idea that you'll do that in order to get access to Google results. The rest of the ecosystem is so clunky that it's really undesirable to use for me.
That hasn't been true for a long time, now. Gmail used to be fast. Nowadays, it takes a long time to load (loading megabytes of JS before even displaying anything other than a big logo), a long time to search and a noticeable amount of time to even display an email after you click on it. I think you might relying on some older memories.
The gmail prototype was made using 20% time. I'd call that "no oversight" as per the third point.
Moreover, when the developer in question demoed his work, the reaction from Brin (famously) was something akin to "there's 400msec delay, fix it". Which puts us clearly in the realm of the second scenario.
In addition it’s easy to forget until you learn a new technology that: first you learn how to solve a problem, then you learn all the ways to solve a problem, finally you learn how to best solve a problem.
This means that you need a good understanding to make performance focused solutions, it can simply be the case that most teams are learning to get there.
In my personal experience, even getting an average web dev to touch a slower Windows machine is mission impossible. The best you can hope is "ewww, this sucks so much and it's ugly, why would anyone do this" and then arrogant walk back to their 3000$+ MacBook to shovel more JS libraries into the website. I've literally not seen a single rockstart javascripter actually willingly try to test things on Windows, much less attempt to use a low/midrange machine to see if their code works well.
I did read it. You still made an untrue generalisation and in the last sentence tried to narrow it down. Why not just wrote like "I live in <your country> and here..."
I mean can you really blame them? I frequently play tech support for many of my family members running Windows 10 without an SSD and it’s like pulling teeth it’s so slow.
Running Windows 10 with an SSD and 8+ GB of RAM is a different story and way better experience.
Especially since IT departments see Windows as the “budget” option for worker drones who don’t need much other than a web browser and Office.
The other side benefit is that Macs are way harder to manage and so IT depts don’t actually bother and you get admin access and told to turn on FileVault instead of the nightmare that is opinionated GPOs.
So when it comes to my option of a MacBook Pro or the cheapest functional Dell Latitude bought in bulk I’m gonna suddenly care a whole lot about testing in Safari.
Apple set themselves up really well as an escape hatch from overbearing IT, not surprised people with the opportunity take it. Devs get the treatments that was previously reserved only for the C suites.
While I agree with the premise, I've seen this mindset get out of hand and stress people out. My anecdote involves a co-worker looking at our Azure metrics at all times of the day and having a mini panic attack when requests drop off or we get a an uptick of a few hundred milliseconds of response time. Most of this is due to scaling out and resolves itself in a short amount of time. Regardless, he's convinced something else is causing it and taking measures that actively make our code worse and less understandable all in the name of "performance".
There is this maxim in that testing something is a great way to make your superiors care about it.
Even filming your site loading on a normal-powered device or a mobile connection and showing them the video may be enough to change their opinions. But yeah, some people won't change, no matter what.
Unpopular opinion: Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free. OTOH, obsessing about performance to the exclusion of usability is equally insane. Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.
Idk how CS or Assembly plays into this. I’m a webdev. Self taught. Your points about metrics and nuance are accurate but I fail to see how those are related to CS as a whole.
If stuff is legitimately slow, we should make it faster. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that imo.
I don't think assembly has any relevance, and the thing with CS that's relevant is almost entirely with complexity theory. This sounds fancy, but it basically boils down to recognizing O(n^2) vs O(n) vs O(n log n), which in practice can be reduced to "use the right datastructure" and "use the right query".
Frankly, I think far more performance problems nowadays lie in things like insane SVG/CSS animations for every possible loading spinner than in developers not knowing their O notations.
The typical CS "curriculum" has a pretty large focus on performance. Most of the assignments given in my university had constraints around time, memory and cpu consumption. Therefore performance was heavily focused on.
This has carried over quite well into my work life. Things like "big O", understanding the mechanics of different kinds of data structures, and their tradeoffs enter all my code. They don't really take up a large part of my active thinking, but I will routinely make decisions that are more performant and try to weigh in readability, "grok"-ability, and if they are common or not.
I find that university forced me to learn the unattractive bits of computing, that if I was self taught I likely would've glossed over and not spent several months on.
Yes, if stuff is legitimately slow, make it faster. But things typically _become slow_, it's a creep. As time progresses, it slows down, now it's slow and you may not have a product manager who thinks _now_ is the time to dedicated resources towards speeding it up.
This is HackerNews. Hating bloated websites is a time-honoured tradition here.
> Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free
It's worth separating these two. Plenty of web developers have computer science degrees, but if they're paid to quickly churn out bloated websites, that's what they'll do.
> Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.
If the aim is to improve the performance of software/websites, what's needed is a userbase that's less forgiving of bloat.
"This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen."
By my reckoning: everybody assumes that this article is for somebody else, and that's the problem. Assuming the problem is either developers who don't care or developers who don't have enough agency to act on it is easy because we can say "I care, and I have agency, so I'm not part of the problem."
Hanlon's razor applies here, but the related incompetence stems from competent people doing things outside their areas of expertise rather than being fundamentally incompetent. The developer discussion focusing almost exclusively on performance reinforces that. We favor our strongest mental models when reasoning about problems— when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But we often contribute to or create things outside our direct areas of expertise, (often reluctantly because we're the last people to touch the code before it hits production.) We might not even 'realize' how far outside they are, though. In my experience, this testing reveals far fewer performance problems than interface design and front-end implementation problems— i.e. touch targets are nearly impossible to use on burner smart phones, sidebars that clobber content or top menu bars that wrap between break points, weird behavior on non-widescreen landscape orientation devices, poor keyboard (and therefore screen reader) navigation, etc.
I believe this discussion illustrates the importance of thoughtful and skillfully-applied UX principles, where the data would ideally come from real users operating as they normally would... but maybe that's just the nail this particular hammer is hunting for! XD
I agree what testing on crappy hardware is a good thing BUT...........
I think the industry has a problem selling underpowered computers in general. AFAIK it's the non-pros that need the a reasonably powerful computer. Maybe "powerful" is the wrong word but not the crappy $300 windows laptop running on a celeron or whatever the latest.
My dad got some ~$500 HP all in one desktop and it's so underpowered as to be unusable. It takes 4-5 minutes to boot while and launching any app takes what feels like half a minute. Just typing you can feel the machine struggle. You could argue if all software (and the OS) was optimized it might not be underpowered but there is no world where all software is optimized.
It see a similar problem all the time with people giving up an old computer. My friend had some like 2007 Mac and she was thinking of giving it to a friend for their kids. Maybe some hacker kid would find a use for it but for most non-geeks, an old PC won't run current software, the current OS, current browsers with vulnerabilities fixed or modern standards. Zoom, youtube, etc are probably not going to be good experiences on such a machine.
Basically it's my opinion that non-techies should always get a relatively new and reasonably powered machine but sadly they don't have the knowledge to know that so they get led to a crappy underpowered machine and then have a crappy and frustrating experience using it.
I don't have a solution. It's only an observation. In my own family, when they let me buy them a machine, on a scale of 1 to 10 I aim for ~7 in terms of power with say 8-16gig of ram and a reasonably powered processor, at least an i5? not an i3 or N or Celeron.
I will if I want to target that kind of user. Personally I much prefer targeting people who have nice laptops.
Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you’re getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in that case you only have to please the buyer not the user.
So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
I know many successful and high paying individuals who just doesn't care or understand technology enough to have decent hardware. Even if you buy premium hardware, it will get old and slow after a decade.
B2B apps whose customers may be small businesses may be surprised at just how low-grade some of their hardware is. For example, a small mail and parcel store (many of my employer's customers)
Additionally, apps designed to be used in the field by top-tier customers often fail basic requirements. (Funny how many apps and sites fall apart on my iPhone 12 Pro in places where the connection drops down to LTE)
Big businesses too. In job 2 my employer provides services to pharma, medical and biosciences corps and our users are almost invariably using terrible hardware despite being senior scientists heading up labs.
I'd come to the realisation a while ago that, deliberate or otherwise, limiting website usability or accessability to recent / high-performance kit is quite possibly an effective market-segementation tool in a space in which physical location (e.g., an up-market high-street address) is not a viable differentiator.
CPU cores, cpu frequency, available memory, disk read/write speed all affect performance too.
CPU cores and available memory can be limited via a VM. CPU frequency, and disk speeds can't. 5200RPM disk vs SSD/NVME is a HUGE difference. If it's swapping often on a 5200RPM, that's a significant slowdown.
It's not only about poor network connection but also poor CPU / RAM, having a website visually lag / taking multiple frames to render is not a great experience and having a top of the line desktop can make you easily not aware of those issue.
There is something very pleasing about everything running smoothly without any hiccups.
Please. I beg you to buy a 2GB of transfer cell plan from a cheap carrier and try your sites via tethering. If you can only load your SPA a couple of times before your line gets disconnected, you've fucked up your design.
I had plans with 35GB of transfer and the modern web meant I was having to restart my plan every single week. Some of us live in Internet deserts where there is no hope of getting a wired connection (downtown Chicago in my case).
I do care about crappy network and load times. But there's some laptop that have worse performances than three years old tablets, and there seems to be no end to what scummy companies sell at low end.
At some point down the crappy pit, there's a line where it's no longer my problem.
It's not that hard to write optimized software if you know what you're doing. Problem is, developers these days routinely prioritize their own experience over their user's. They would add a huge library just to use one function from it. They would put multiple abstraction layers they don't understand on top of their platform just so their code is "beautiful". They would use their platform in a suboptimal way (for example, moving a DOM element using position instead of transform). And so on.
I mean, I know a guy who recently got into frontend development with react. I did the backend for an app he was building. I had to explain him what an XMLHttpRequest is so he could send me one. It just blows my mind that there are people who legit write code with some framework but don't know the basics of the language they're writing in and/or the platform the whole thing runs on.
What do you even mean? A website has no business to have minimum system requirements. It's a hypertext document with some optional macros here and there.
I can use websites to videoconferencing. Streaming considered video and audio comes with non trivial loads.
I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games.
This isn't 1995 and we're way past indulging user lazy choices which have us a decade of internet explorer nightmares. Web is much more than that, and one need to know where to draw the line where their products minimum requirement lies.
> I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games.
You sure can, but you probably shouldn't. These use cases are much better served by native apps. Shoehorning hypertext documents with macros into being applications will never come close to writing proper applications, in terms of both UX and performance.
I really wish we would undo many of the "advancements" of the web technology. This scope creep needs to stop, yesterday.
I wish there to be an answer to a simple question: when is a web browser finished?
What you talking about? App delivery trough browser is what enabled the low cost zero friction startup world you see today, and we're all better for it.
we've been there, 1 in 20 household could afford to tech up, and even less could spare for anything but the most essential software. acquiring a cad or photoshop license was a significant percentage of yearly earning, and renting platforms was unheard of.
Heh, buying software for personal use? Maybe I'm too Russian to understand that. We pirate everything for personal use. Only companies pay for licenses. And allegedly, Adobe and such were fine with that, up until shareholders decided they need to monetize more aggressively to "grow".
There's an argument for rampant consumption as a toxic buying pattern. If we are upgrading our systems just to use bloated webpages - webpages that offer nothing of substance over webpages circa 20 years ago, then it is worth asking what we are really gaining.
In any transaction it is important to distinguish between what is being sold, what is actually delivered and the utility provided.
I use Cheap Acers for $150 they seem to run Windows 10 slow enough to be a craptop. They also run Linux just fine because Linux has less of an overhead. In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS.
I have one I bought new for $300 on Amazon in the summer. It's my main Visual Studio development PC. I have it hooked up with a second monitor. Honestly, it runs everything perfectly under Windows 10. The only upgrade I performed was to add some extra RAM.
> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries.
> Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician pointed out that the dramatic rise in hospital cases was because people were surviving injuries that previously would have killed them—before the introduction of steel the British Army used felt or leather as headwear material.
I've seen this same story except with warplanes during the War. Story goes that an allied air force tried to improve the percentage of planes that would return from a bombing raid, so they inspected returning planes, found the places where they had holes in them and added extra layers of steel to those areas for the next bomb run; but this had no improvement on the percentage of planes that returned.
That is until a "statistician" realized that all of the places on the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes returning from a raid.
Does anyone know the true source of these stories?
Regardless, it really opened my eyes to how changing your perspective on the cause of the problem can help find the best solution, and to this day I still think of this story when solving a problem.
Aaaaaactually... in the postscript he sort of walks back everything. But since the article has mathematical and educational merit on its own, I guess he maintained it.
"My indignation at how the internet dealt with Wald's work was overblown. Stephen Stigler (son of George, and a statistician at the University of Chicago) called my attention to a note by W. Allen Wallis himself in which he mentions Wald's work explicitly in connection with survivorship bias. Wallis' original article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association was followed by two very brief comments and then by a further 'rejoinder' of a bit more than one page. Towards the end of it he says, "The military was inclined to provide protection for those parts that on returning planes showed the most hits. Wald assumed, on good evidence, that hits in combat were uniformly distributed over the planes. It follows that hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to be found on returning planes than hits on the less vulnerable parts, since planes receiving hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to return to provide data. From these premises, he devised methods for estimating vulnerability of various parts."
Amazing article btw. Thanks. This is what makes HN so unique.
We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never heard from, to understand what problems they had that we weren't solving, to get them energised enough to report to us. It's been very successful, engagement has gone up significantly.
Yes there is a large set of venn diagrams we weren't connecting that it gives us pretty easy access to greater coverage. The harder part becomes messaging and marketing as we target more use cases.
Good old email segmenting. It's become a real powerhouse for us. Figure out what groups of people you have, talk with a few to figure out what they want, build it and target those who match. We're not a startup however so this is more of a scale up strategy or if you already have access to a large number of users who trust you and want just send your emails to spam.
This makes sense. The sort of users that leave any kind of feedback or even hang around long enough for you to gather statistics are those who think the product is pretty good, but there are just these small issues that they hope will get fixed. The users who think your product is complete crap try it, stop using it very early and never leave feedback or statistics for you to analyze.
Way back in the day I was a lone IT guy in a distributor/wholesaler, and part of that was creating line of business apps to do some real heavy lifting, extending existing ones, and creating utilities to tie other apps together. In a tiny company of maybe 40 people, where even an underpaid IT guy was still an extravagance (but was adding huge value).
Periodically I'd ask to shadow someone for a day or two. At some points, even asking if I could do their task and have them watch me to confirm I was doing it correctly.
What you would learn from this was amazing. All sorts of inefficiencies that people would quietly accept, because it was still way better than the previous state.
Then a week or two later I'd roll out the update, and get huge thank yous from accounting, or sales, or the warehouse because I completely trivialized some previous common task. What used to take 45 seconds now takes 2 because all the work is done for them 99.9% of the time and they just need to confirm it's correct (or correct the odd edge case). The computer became this increasingly magical tool they loved more and more.
The number of hacks and workarounds that users will come up with without complaining to the dev team is always astounding. One time I shadowed someone who was using one of our internal tools that spit out pdfs, and at some point along the line he realized he wanted something extra included on them but didn't think to contact the dev team. As part of his daily work flow, he was taking data from one of the program's temp files and editing the pdf to add it. He had apparently been doing this for about a year. When I saw this, I spent 10 minutes updating the report template to add it and ended up receiving thank you emails from people I'd never talked to.
I always feel these stories are nonsense, they no one can be that stupid. Then I think about the people I’ve dealt with over past 20 years. And I fully believe these scenarios.
> That is until a "statistician" realized that all of the places on the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes returning from a raid.
This is highly likely to be grade A BS because it would be quite obvious to literally everyone flying an aircraft. It only make sense because the reader are not given a full minute to think about this.
Taking the train over the Rockies they tell a story about Westinghouse[1] inverting the logic on the pneumatic brakes. When first introduced they failed open, meaning the train could move. This was convenient on the flats, but if the train was stopped on a grade and the pressure failed... down the hill you go. So Westinghouse made them fail closed: no pressure, no rolling down the hill. IIRC it saved lives.
> You can run Linux from a Windows subsystem to run most development tooling.
To be honest, this feels like the author never used "craptop".
WSL even with quad-core hasewell laptop and 8GB is pushing it. It's better to RDP / develop on one machine and run on another.
Having said that,
It's important to test on low speced always. Even not for website (we test our cpp code on some 2009 machines)
However, there maybe another darkside of the story.
Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game.
I think it's also somewhat fitting in this case: the industry only focuses on making money out of the people who can or potentially can afford the service, and left out those who can't. The user-end requirement is just an implicit barrier that allows companies to generate rainbow farts.
No, I'm not criticizing those companies that actually employed such dark patterns. After all, everyone wants money. However, these kind of practice can be costly as well in the form of 1) bad UX for paying users, and 2) higher cost of bandwidth (for both the user and the company).
I imagine the problem with game development is that, for 99.95% of the game development cycle, you are creating only internal builds for fellow developers on workstations.
And this is game development, the industry famous for over-scoping everything because it's a winner take all economy. Followed by death-marches to implement said over-scopes.
Doing anything special for quartile 1 of the standard distribution goes out the window.
Realistically I just think this pattern is true of every domain.
95% of software is made up of throwaway prototypes, where thoroughly thought out engineering isn't necessary because the business case demands minimum viable product for very good reasons.
Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.
This.
My kids Play minecraft on the Amazon Kids tablets.
They startet with a older Version with only 1.5GB of RAM and the game kind of worked good enough for them to enjoy it.
It worked for many years and only had Problems with large Outdoor areas.
Now they use the newer 3GB kids Version and it works really well.
I am very happy to not needing to buy them 400€ tablets for this game.
(Btw, i developed medical dicom viewer for large CT and MRI data, on a 10yrs old dell Laptop. The viewer was always fast on customer machines. If it would not work on my machine, i tunded the Software until it does ;) )
There were tons and tons of similar games to mine craft with low system requirements. Also minecraft was originally written in Java ao it has the same issues as above.
The difference is that Minecraft and Roblox were phenomenally successful and demonstrate the addressable market exists. Making games for a low-spec is one thing. Making games that people with low-spec computers want to play is another.
There always were, there just wasn't the payment infrastructure to hoover up our parents' money in the 90s. I had to behave at computer shows and talk nicely to the adults about building computers before I was bought a video game (or make my parents drive me to a game store). Also they weren't full of micro-transactions.
If there had been ways to buy games online + digital downloads, I would genuinely have feared for my parents' pocketbooks.
I grew up in the 80s and would regularly get magazines on the weekly grocery shop with the demo cassette on them. The argument isn’t that videogames only just started to exist and that kids only just started to play them.
It’s not really comparable because there wasn’t the ubiquity or range of compute power there is now. Modern games tend to nestle at the top of it as the parent comment suggests. There is a whole market of people that want to play games that have bad hardware. And my point is that there was a sea change about a decade ago in that respect that the wider industry is only just catching up to.
Notably, this is one reason why WoW managed to hit such a wide audience and become so successful. The art design made the game look amazing, but the hardware requirements were so low you could run it on a potato. Its contemporary, Everquest 2, managed to look uglier while being much harder to run.
Yea, the way this worked out for me as a kid was that I needed all the money I got to upgrade my PC and wouldn't have any left over for buying games so I just pirated these games.
Anyway, without numbers that's just a theory and might not hold. Anecdotally a lot of people are worrying about whether they can play games on their budget build. And they would rather buy games than spend a ton on a faster PC. And I believe consoles sell for a similar reason: they are cheap. It's the actual games that console gamers pay decent money for.
(Of course the PC game market is now extremely saturated and there are deep discounts & giveaways constantly somewhere)
> 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game.
I wonder if they had any kind of proof of this. I would think that there are plenty of kids who could get their parents to pay five bucks for the game, but not 500 bucks to buy a fancy new computer.
Willingness and ability to pay for one thing doesn't mean willingness to pay for other things. There are plenty of cheapskate rich people and people who consider themselves poor on six figure salaries.
Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud.
We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers.
When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I would try it: dial up and crawl, overnight, and surf around on the train to work the next day.
I was the only person on the team to actually do this.
I could understand that; after a 12-hour day of intense times at the office, the last thing most of us wanted was more of it, as soon as we got home.
A year later, I was at an ad agency. Big clients, national brands. Everyone there used the very latest Macintosh machines. Those could be like $8000 each. Beautiful work in Photoshop, then stuffed into a web browser.
They had a room with a few PCs, but nobody went in there.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.
That's like 10% of the comment - I feel like some point was trying to be made with the dialup caching product but it went over my head.
Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
Thats the same point. When everyone professional is using 8000$ Macs or PC workstations but you customers are on C64s and Amigas, you would like to run some tests on those machines as well.
My point did get muddled there in telling a story.
It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks.
And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue.
The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us.
Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.
1999. I had 10 Mb/s at work and 56 kB/s at home which is about 200 times slower, same difference between a 1 GB/s fiber and a 5.6 Mb/s ADSL.
I used the same laptop and had very different experiences. Sites like the current HN worked much better at home. Large images didn't load fast there. Of course developers didn't create very large JPEGs or 10 MB JavaScript files back then but we had the same kind of problems, scaled down to smaller sizes.
I my experience, those who don't care about performance almost always happen to be bad developers. Interviewed with plenty of those.
I've worked with machines so underpowered you can notice execution time difference between minified and non-minified code. And where CSS animations are considerably slower than GIFs. Oh yeah.
Right now I am with people who are pretty good at architecture but kind of suck at the pieces that power their designs. It's an ego problem. Big one at that
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadThis attitude seems common, that websites are just going to be fat and get fatter. That's a lie.
Not if you, as a web developer, stop the bloat. The power is in your hands, you just need to use it.
No, you don't need that 8 MB hero image. No, you don't need that bloated framework. No, you don't need those 37 tracking libraries. No, you don't need a "Read More" button hiding most of the content. No, you don't need dynamically loaded clickbait at the bottom of the page. No, you don't need an autoplaying video. No, you don't need load a script to inject text into a copy operation. No, you don't need 87 cookies. No you don't need to load random unvetted code from a third party advertiser. No, you don't need the page text to fade in on scroll. No, you don't need any of that.
In case you forgot, https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Explaining them how much worse the bloat makes the site's experience for the user, showing how many pages are left partially loaded because the user did not have the patience and navigated away, how the competitor's site loads faster, may help convince them to keep the experience reasonably slim.
Asking for web sites that don't have 27 trackers, enormous hero images, a full copy of framework of the week, etc. is like asking for native games under Linux: the money isn't there to justify the added hassle and support costs.
The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not my problem.
Users of the features we develop are the ones that produce bad websites.
As a dev, I want to use tree shaking to make my bundles small and optimize to make my website lighthouse score 100 across the board.
What happens? Marketing needs tag manager installed and then proceeds to async load 50 tracking scripts in the background.
Design wants the large hero images because on the high Res devices they use it looks slightly pixelated and when you push back, a quick screenshot to the PM will guarantee the ticket is added to the backlog.
Point being I'm not sure claiming that Devs hold the power is particularly constructive as there is a large portion on non-techies who have their own priorities to push.
No?
When I say these folks get upset over slight pixelization, I'm not even talking about pixelization where everyone can tell it's a low quality image. I'm talking about situations where people are upset they can't read an iPhone screen someone is holding in the background when they are viewing it on their 4K display (note: that particular phone isn't the focal point of the shot, nor does it have anything to add to it; it's just someone staged back there to make the shot feel more alive, mind you!).
It's disheartening because I do want to deliver the best experience possible and try to do everything in my power to accomplish it, but sometimes I lose out and folks force their megabyte imagery.
There’s also mystery JS that slows down everything and breaks random parts of our app - that’s your Chrome extensions :)
I don't recommend garage sales, however. People tend to overvalue their electronics. I tried to buy a radio that was worth maybe $20 from some guy. He wouldn't part with it for less than $150 because it reminded him of his father. That's nice, but I'm not paying $130 for your memories.
Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.
The low... um. One of us is in a bubble. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine. Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade old)
The point is to feel the pain. By any modern sensibility both resolutions are pretty awful, and experiencing it on a $200 consumer laptop is icing On the cake. Although I have clients who routinely test applications on ancient 800x600 displays due to legacy constraints.
Keep in mind that hardware improves roughly on line with Moore's Law. The gradation from low-end to mid-market might only be a few years of development.
The 10-year-old system is probably going to be much worse than a current low-end buy.
Moore’s law hasn’t been kind to x86 laptops, and the tricks used to speed things up are missing from low end celeron processors and binned SSDs. The cheap hardware and poor touchpads add to the charm.
I would bet that the 10 year old Lenovo would be surprisingly better than the shitty 2021 device.
There's been SSDs, increased cache, increased memory speed, and more cores.
You might want to go back a bit more than 10 years, but yes, even a reasonably high-grade older system in my experience really dogs out on the current Web.
My software engineer teammates get specially approved 4K displays and “engineering” laptops. People who use the apps are often restricted to “business” laptops. Conference rooms still use old projectors that are even lower resolution. We have no control over the displays our customers use.
I’ve been teaching my engineers to use the responsive design tools in their browsers. For UI components that render differently based on @media queries, it’s been helpful to add stories for those breakpoints to our Storybook component library.
When recording a demo video, try to record at a lower resolution like 720p to save bandwidth and make it easier for people with small screens to watch.
I suggest doing the final test of your your site on:
* A friends old laptop, on their wifi, still logged in as them, and with them clicking the buttons with you watching over their shoulder.
* The same, but a friends old android phone, preferably with 'samsung browser'.
It's something like 13 years old, and ~$60.
It can run almost every website that hasn't been web-dev'ed into oblivion.
It balks at anything with memory leaks and inefficient CPU/GPU load.
It can run YouTube/Facebook/Twitter (surprisingly, for the last).
It can't run https://github.com/
It… what? I don’t know about Facebook, but GitHub is a good deal lighter than YouTube and Twitter. GitHub is one of the extremely few websites developed by a large number of people that aren’t atrociously resource-heavy and JavaScript-dependent.
It cannot run it at all, because of all the graphics nonsense going on.
Windows Updates are drip fed out to classes of machine so they can limit the damage when they hit a class that inevitably fails because it was never tested before rolling out to production on that hardware.
I appreciate they can never test every configuration but based on what they used to do it's clear they identified a need for this kind of testing in the past so what's changed? Why don't they need to do this testing anymore? Why make your users do it for you, for free, no less.
I think you answered your own question.
And in the end, it ran -- just about -- on those specs.
Things like react are purely extra knowledge needed over the top of the basic website building blocks.
But in my experience 80% react developers could not layout a page with raw css. I am not even talking anything "fancy" like transitions or animations. They just import libs and frameworks and customize a bit.
[1]https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/
I mean that isn't acceptable to me either.
Simply head to Devtools > Performance tab > Gear icon > CPU > 6x slowdown.
That isn't a perfect representation of an old laptop (doesn't throttle GPU operations or trigger low memory behaviours), but it's a good start. As a bonus, it makes your fans spin up wildly whenever loading a page!
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode/#cpu
It is and was a regression from the previous design which was fast even on 3G connections.
It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9 MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried not being poor?
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
Many years ago I had a fascinating incident with a client. We were building a custom skin for our product for them, and they had quite a striking brand identity that we tried to match. When we showed them what we had built they complained that it was illegible.
Eventually, after visiting their office, we found that they were all working on cheap Windows laptops attached to horribly configured monitors - and our site really was illegible. We had done our design work on an iMac!
I managed to find a crappy laptop to do some testing and work on optimizations, and it wasn't pretty. No development tool would work on it. My recommendation is thus: aim low, but not the lowest. You'll still be able to measure impact of your changes, and you'll be able to collect some data and other measurements about what is slow.
[1]: https://github.com/shopify/toxiproxy
On windows I used clumsy that was much more realistic. On some tablets, I used my microwave oven or my feets to walk away from the Wi-Fi.
2 rules:
- Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc)
- Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong.
Try letting your local development backend return a 500, timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your frontend handles this in a graceful manner. It should at least give some feedback to the user that the operation failed.
You can emulate a slow internet connection in chrome devtools, though I find the experience not accurate. You can also just add a sleep() call somewhere in your local backend. Maybe inject a sleep() into your acceptance environment, and let the test team work through the scenarios with that sleep() call in place.
I've seen so many frontends that don't catch errors, and just show the spinner indefinitely. Or worse, show nothing at all. This is extremely confusing to less technical people.
The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in full screen. Then Google Meet will forever freeze the shared picture after a couple of minutes without anybody telling so. It's ridiculous that they cannot handle this reasonably, you don't need 30 fps to share a screen of slowly changing text. It's completely user hostile that there is no message for either the sharer or any participant that sharing has frozen and will never recover. This is paid usage of Google Meet.
Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc even on high quality fibre connections Zoom = smooth high-res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor glitches that usually sorts itself out in seconds) even on low quality connections
The difference is like night and day, no joke...
Well, sharing terminals over telcos is backwards anyway. We did that 20 years ago over 56 kbit/s modem lines using VNC. And the compression was lossless, the result pixel perfect.
But forcing managers to use a slow network would be an effective way to get them to prioritize performance. If using a slow network is a choice, they wouldn't.
I have gigabit internet and powerful desktop, with enough ram... But still they don't develop for my 1440p screen, but some crappy tablets...
- Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen.
- Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites which we all love.
- Those who care about performance, but work for people who don't. Since the developer doesn't get to decide what to work on, they can either get cracking on feature #357, work on performance on the sly at the risk of losing their job, or quit. Not much of a choice, really, unless you have some other-worldly lax schedule and minimal oversight. And don't forget, if you are allowed to work on performance the burden is on you to prove how much faster things are with your changes (which can be really hard to show conclusively) and that your N days is worth more than Bob working N days on that sexy ticket #357.
Substitute "security", "UX", or anything else you want for "performance", it works the same way.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something.
A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach.
Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web tabs to check email is annoying.
Only if they have a good reason to target you, personally.
But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion mailboxes.
There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom mailserver with a budget of $1.
https://mimestream.com/
I’m sure it’s something about my configurations but every time I mess around to figure it out it doesn’t work.
Generally my use of email is “look at stuff from right now” or “look at stuff from 6+ months ago”
(Here “wrong” means “does not find the email I am looking for”. Usually a failure mode of just not showing much of anything)
I would actually make the opposite statement, i.e. generally, webmail clients are significantly inferior to desktop clients in most respects: Feature set, responsiveness, flexibility etc. And of course, being potentially somewhat secure, as opposed to guaranteed no-security with webmail.
As for search functionality - I'm not sure you're right, but I'll grant you that some webmail providers, like Google, provide speedy search.
I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.
Well, Google has your email, to read and use and pass on, so I'm not quite sure what this "advanced protection" can mean.
I have 2FA required on regular logins for example, which can be a Yubikey or authenticator app token. At the same time, I have app passwords, used by my emacs-based email setup. Mu4e gives me instant search-based access to my saved email, and pretty good security elsewhere. Is that an option?
When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast and 99% of the time it works on the first try. I also occasionally use Outlook's webmail for work (as I work across different systems with some on Google and some on O365) and even Outlook webmail is generally faster than Gmail despite my main Outlook mailbox being much larger than my less-used Gmail mailboxes (although it is nowhere as fast as FastMail).
I remember the early days of Gmail -- it was a fantastic product in its heyday better than any other webmail client at the time. The quality has sadly dropped a huge amount especially in recent years to the point there are now viable alternatives. FastMail is one such alternative I have been very impressed with. Even Outlook's webmail is worth a look although the UX could do with some work.
I cannot understand all thr praise people give it, is it simply brand loyalty?
Everything about Gmail is very confusing to me; I have no love for Outlook (it's absolutely garbage) but in garbage rankings, Outlook is a bit more functional than Gmail is. Outlook has a more complete business eco-system vision I think than Gmail does, and there is a lot better integration with the other elements of Microsoft's ecosystem than Chrome has. For example, when I attach a Sharepoint/OneDrive doc to an email in Outlook, it offers to let me set the permissions for the recipients automatically. This doesn't make up for Sharepoint/OneDrive's awful permissions handling in general, but this element is convenient at least. (Again, I cannot stress how frustrating it is to even __see__ what permissions someone has for a Sharepoint/OneDrive document as regardless of your screen resolution/browser size, you're confined to a few centimeter width sized window, never mind that sometimes saving just outright refuses to work, and bulk-adding persons is even worse)
Gmail has awful design in many places; I don't like that a simple option like FWD is hidden behind the ... menu. I don't like that selecting an email from the list in gmail results in the menu buttons suddenly expanding. Even worse, the location of the reply button when the menu buttons are contracted is the same as the location of the "Mark as Spam" button when expanded; on browsers that aren't chrome, the display lag is enough that I can move my cursor far faster than the menu buttons expand and what __was__ the reply button location is now the "mark as spam" button location.
I don't like that it takes a good 5+ seconds to load the basic email list on a 100 Mbit connection. I don't like that logging into Gmail logs me into every other Google platform (e.g., YouTube) and I start getting spam about different channels or reminders to "engage" with various channels/social media. I don't like that I have to install a .dpkg for Mac to use Gchat video when other apps (e.g., Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp) are just a regular application that I can remove with drag/drop. I really don't like how "foreign" the Gmail/Google theming is with basically everything on MacOS and even on Android, or how few controls over basic UI functionality I get. (I really struggled to find in the Playstore how to monitor the progress of a download...)
Gmail and Google at large feels like an ecosystem that Google just expects everyone to buy into regardless of the platform/experience, and I truly cannot understand their intended way of handling the UI most of the time. The underlying methods of categorizing/indexing the information of course is fine, but actually interacting with it is frustrating for me compared to every Google product contemporary. As much as I dislike Outlook, I'd rather use it than Gmail. I'd rather use basically any chat program as opposed to GChat/Whatever it's called now (it's still really bad whatever the new product is called). Even Google itself I find myself fighting with Google's preferred results instead of what I'm actually wanting (without uBlock the first results are tons of ad spam that have nothing to do with the searches, and the first few results are usually some SEO'd result).
There is an "okay" experience with google if you go all in on it, but they certainly seem to bank on the idea that you'll do that in order to get access to Google results. The rest of the ecosystem is so clunky that it's really undesirable to use for me.
It is comical how long it takes to load on my internet connection. Has gotten better, but that is on my connection side.
My favorite crazy moment lately is just how long it takes to bring up the computer new window on a fresh page load.
It used to be great, mind. Not sure what I'm getting with the additional load times.
Moreover, when the developer in question demoed his work, the reaction from Brin (famously) was something akin to "there's 400msec delay, fix it". Which puts us clearly in the realm of the second scenario.
unless faang companies suddenly make it trendy again to care about low fidelity experience.
In addition it’s easy to forget until you learn a new technology that: first you learn how to solve a problem, then you learn all the ways to solve a problem, finally you learn how to best solve a problem.
This means that you need a good understanding to make performance focused solutions, it can simply be the case that most teams are learning to get there.
And the only Apple gear will be iPhones and iPads used by upper management.
Yes, I am also aware there are plenty of cases that aren't like that specially for the fortunate ones living on tier 1 EU countries.
That's not my experience at all. I would not make such a generalizations for Europe which includes very different cultures / work environments.
We can also start discussing formal logic regarding how to properly express generalization.
Running Windows 10 with an SSD and 8+ GB of RAM is a different story and way better experience.
The other side benefit is that Macs are way harder to manage and so IT depts don’t actually bother and you get admin access and told to turn on FileVault instead of the nightmare that is opinionated GPOs.
So when it comes to my option of a MacBook Pro or the cheapest functional Dell Latitude bought in bulk I’m gonna suddenly care a whole lot about testing in Safari.
Apple set themselves up really well as an escape hatch from overbearing IT, not surprised people with the opportunity take it. Devs get the treatments that was previously reserved only for the C suites.
Even filming your site loading on a normal-powered device or a mobile connection and showing them the video may be enough to change their opinions. But yeah, some people won't change, no matter what.
If stuff is legitimately slow, we should make it faster. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that imo.
This has carried over quite well into my work life. Things like "big O", understanding the mechanics of different kinds of data structures, and their tradeoffs enter all my code. They don't really take up a large part of my active thinking, but I will routinely make decisions that are more performant and try to weigh in readability, "grok"-ability, and if they are common or not.
I find that university forced me to learn the unattractive bits of computing, that if I was self taught I likely would've glossed over and not spent several months on.
Yes, if stuff is legitimately slow, make it faster. But things typically _become slow_, it's a creep. As time progresses, it slows down, now it's slow and you may not have a product manager who thinks _now_ is the time to dedicated resources towards speeding it up.
This is HackerNews. Hating bloated websites is a time-honoured tradition here.
> Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free
It's worth separating these two. Plenty of web developers have computer science degrees, but if they're paid to quickly churn out bloated websites, that's what they'll do.
> Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.
If the aim is to improve the performance of software/websites, what's needed is a userbase that's less forgiving of bloat.
By my reckoning: everybody assumes that this article is for somebody else, and that's the problem. Assuming the problem is either developers who don't care or developers who don't have enough agency to act on it is easy because we can say "I care, and I have agency, so I'm not part of the problem."
Hanlon's razor applies here, but the related incompetence stems from competent people doing things outside their areas of expertise rather than being fundamentally incompetent. The developer discussion focusing almost exclusively on performance reinforces that. We favor our strongest mental models when reasoning about problems— when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But we often contribute to or create things outside our direct areas of expertise, (often reluctantly because we're the last people to touch the code before it hits production.) We might not even 'realize' how far outside they are, though. In my experience, this testing reveals far fewer performance problems than interface design and front-end implementation problems— i.e. touch targets are nearly impossible to use on burner smart phones, sidebars that clobber content or top menu bars that wrap between break points, weird behavior on non-widescreen landscape orientation devices, poor keyboard (and therefore screen reader) navigation, etc.
I believe this discussion illustrates the importance of thoughtful and skillfully-applied UX principles, where the data would ideally come from real users operating as they normally would... but maybe that's just the nail this particular hammer is hunting for! XD
I think the industry has a problem selling underpowered computers in general. AFAIK it's the non-pros that need the a reasonably powerful computer. Maybe "powerful" is the wrong word but not the crappy $300 windows laptop running on a celeron or whatever the latest.
My dad got some ~$500 HP all in one desktop and it's so underpowered as to be unusable. It takes 4-5 minutes to boot while and launching any app takes what feels like half a minute. Just typing you can feel the machine struggle. You could argue if all software (and the OS) was optimized it might not be underpowered but there is no world where all software is optimized.
It see a similar problem all the time with people giving up an old computer. My friend had some like 2007 Mac and she was thinking of giving it to a friend for their kids. Maybe some hacker kid would find a use for it but for most non-geeks, an old PC won't run current software, the current OS, current browsers with vulnerabilities fixed or modern standards. Zoom, youtube, etc are probably not going to be good experiences on such a machine.
Basically it's my opinion that non-techies should always get a relatively new and reasonably powered machine but sadly they don't have the knowledge to know that so they get led to a crappy underpowered machine and then have a crappy and frustrating experience using it.
I don't have a solution. It's only an observation. In my own family, when they let me buy them a machine, on a scale of 1 to 10 I aim for ~7 in terms of power with say 8-16gig of ram and a reasonably powered processor, at least an i5? not an i3 or N or Celeron.
Poor people are frequently low LTV customers unless you’re getting paid by someone else (say the government) and even in that case you only have to please the buyer not the user.
So maybe if I was building like payday loans or something.
Additionally, apps designed to be used in the field by top-tier customers often fail basic requirements. (Funny how many apps and sites fall apart on my iPhone 12 Pro in places where the connection drops down to LTE)
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410503
I'm not a fan of this, mind. Just aware that it's a possibility. And you're giving voice to that as a deliberate choice.
CPU cores and available memory can be limited via a VM. CPU frequency, and disk speeds can't. 5200RPM disk vs SSD/NVME is a HUGE difference. If it's swapping often on a 5200RPM, that's a significant slowdown.
There is something very pleasing about everything running smoothly without any hiccups.
I had plans with 35GB of transfer and the modern web meant I was having to restart my plan every single week. Some of us live in Internet deserts where there is no hope of getting a wired connection (downtown Chicago in my case).
I do care about crappy network and load times. But there's some laptop that have worse performances than three years old tablets, and there seems to be no end to what scummy companies sell at low end.
At some point down the crappy pit, there's a line where it's no longer my problem.
I mean, I know a guy who recently got into frontend development with react. I did the backend for an app he was building. I had to explain him what an XMLHttpRequest is so he could send me one. It just blows my mind that there are people who legit write code with some framework but don't know the basics of the language they're writing in and/or the platform the whole thing runs on.
I can use websites to videoconferencing. Streaming considered video and audio comes with non trivial loads.
I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games.
This isn't 1995 and we're way past indulging user lazy choices which have us a decade of internet explorer nightmares. Web is much more than that, and one need to know where to draw the line where their products minimum requirement lies.
> I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games.
You sure can, but you probably shouldn't. These use cases are much better served by native apps. Shoehorning hypertext documents with macros into being applications will never come close to writing proper applications, in terms of both UX and performance.
I really wish we would undo many of the "advancements" of the web technology. This scope creep needs to stop, yesterday.
I wish there to be an answer to a simple question: when is a web browser finished?
you say you do, but you don't.
There's an argument for rampant consumption as a toxic buying pattern. If we are upgrading our systems just to use bloated webpages - webpages that offer nothing of substance over webpages circa 20 years ago, then it is worth asking what we are really gaining.
In any transaction it is important to distinguish between what is being sold, what is actually delivered and the utility provided.
> In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS.
My coleague has an Acer laptop with i9 processor, RTX 3080 and 64GB RAM running on Raid NVMEs. It's screamingly fast.
> Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician pointed out that the dramatic rise in hospital cases was because people were surviving injuries that previously would have killed them—before the introduction of steel the British Army used felt or leather as headwear material.
I've seen this same story except with warplanes during the War. Story goes that an allied air force tried to improve the percentage of planes that would return from a bombing raid, so they inspected returning planes, found the places where they had holes in them and added extra layers of steel to those areas for the next bomb run; but this had no improvement on the percentage of planes that returned.
That is until a "statistician" realized that all of the places on the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes returning from a raid.
Does anyone know the true source of these stories?
Regardless, it really opened my eyes to how changing your perspective on the cause of the problem can help find the best solution, and to this day I still think of this story when solving a problem.
(But yes, Abraham Wald is the statistician that the story is about.)
"My indignation at how the internet dealt with Wald's work was overblown. Stephen Stigler (son of George, and a statistician at the University of Chicago) called my attention to a note by W. Allen Wallis himself in which he mentions Wald's work explicitly in connection with survivorship bias. Wallis' original article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association was followed by two very brief comments and then by a further 'rejoinder' of a bit more than one page. Towards the end of it he says, "The military was inclined to provide protection for those parts that on returning planes showed the most hits. Wald assumed, on good evidence, that hits in combat were uniformly distributed over the planes. It follows that hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to be found on returning planes than hits on the less vulnerable parts, since planes receiving hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to return to provide data. From these premises, he devised methods for estimating vulnerability of various parts."
Amazing article btw. Thanks. This is what makes HN so unique.
Periodically I'd ask to shadow someone for a day or two. At some points, even asking if I could do their task and have them watch me to confirm I was doing it correctly.
What you would learn from this was amazing. All sorts of inefficiencies that people would quietly accept, because it was still way better than the previous state.
Then a week or two later I'd roll out the update, and get huge thank yous from accounting, or sales, or the warehouse because I completely trivialized some previous common task. What used to take 45 seconds now takes 2 because all the work is done for them 99.9% of the time and they just need to confirm it's correct (or correct the odd edge case). The computer became this increasingly magical tool they loved more and more.
So yes, find a user and shadow them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
This is highly likely to be grade A BS because it would be quite obvious to literally everyone flying an aircraft. It only make sense because the reader are not given a full minute to think about this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Westinghouse
once they sliced it geographically, they found that the increase was all in places like siberia where previously the site was unusable
https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
To be honest, this feels like the author never used "craptop". WSL even with quad-core hasewell laptop and 8GB is pushing it. It's better to RDP / develop on one machine and run on another.
Having said that, It's important to test on low speced always. Even not for website (we test our cpp code on some 2009 machines)
Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game.
I think it's also somewhat fitting in this case: the industry only focuses on making money out of the people who can or potentially can afford the service, and left out those who can't. The user-end requirement is just an implicit barrier that allows companies to generate rainbow farts.
No, I'm not criticizing those companies that actually employed such dark patterns. After all, everyone wants money. However, these kind of practice can be costly as well in the form of 1) bad UX for paying users, and 2) higher cost of bandwidth (for both the user and the company).
And this is game development, the industry famous for over-scoping everything because it's a winner take all economy. Followed by death-marches to implement said over-scopes.
Doing anything special for quartile 1 of the standard distribution goes out the window.
Realistically I just think this pattern is true of every domain.
95% of software is made up of throwaway prototypes, where thoroughly thought out engineering isn't necessary because the business case demands minimum viable product for very good reasons.
(Btw, i developed medical dicom viewer for large CT and MRI data, on a 10yrs old dell Laptop. The viewer was always fast on customer machines. If it would not work on my machine, i tunded the Software until it does ;) )
If there had been ways to buy games online + digital downloads, I would genuinely have feared for my parents' pocketbooks.
It’s not really comparable because there wasn’t the ubiquity or range of compute power there is now. Modern games tend to nestle at the top of it as the parent comment suggests. There is a whole market of people that want to play games that have bad hardware. And my point is that there was a sea change about a decade ago in that respect that the wider industry is only just catching up to.
Anyway, without numbers that's just a theory and might not hold. Anecdotally a lot of people are worrying about whether they can play games on their budget build. And they would rather buy games than spend a ton on a faster PC. And I believe consoles sell for a similar reason: they are cheap. It's the actual games that console gamers pay decent money for.
(Of course the PC game market is now extremely saturated and there are deep discounts & giveaways constantly somewhere)
I wonder if they had any kind of proof of this. I would think that there are plenty of kids who could get their parents to pay five bucks for the game, but not 500 bucks to buy a fancy new computer.
Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud.
We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers.
When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I would try it: dial up and crawl, overnight, and surf around on the train to work the next day.
I was the only person on the team to actually do this.
I could understand that; after a 12-hour day of intense times at the office, the last thing most of us wanted was more of it, as soon as we got home.
A year later, I was at an ad agency. Big clients, national brands. Everyone there used the very latest Macintosh machines. Those could be like $8000 each. Beautiful work in Photoshop, then stuffed into a web browser.
They had a room with a few PCs, but nobody went in there.
Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks.
And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue.
The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us.
Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.
I used the same laptop and had very different experiences. Sites like the current HN worked much better at home. Large images didn't load fast there. Of course developers didn't create very large JPEGs or 10 MB JavaScript files back then but we had the same kind of problems, scaled down to smaller sizes.
I've worked with machines so underpowered you can notice execution time difference between minified and non-minified code. And where CSS animations are considerably slower than GIFs. Oh yeah.
Right now I am with people who are pretty good at architecture but kind of suck at the pieces that power their designs. It's an ego problem. Big one at that