The Bullshit Web • Hacker News Board

It's not just publishers. My current org uses SalesForce and it's frustratingly slow. Opening a single record takes several seconds as every single interface element is generated dynamically and then populated, seemingly one at a time.

When it's finally done loading, you click on a dropdown, and then the dropdown just shows you a loading spinner, as your client asks the server what should be populated in the dropdown menu. And of course it takes another second. Clicking virtually anything, including back (which should be instantaneous on a proper webapp), will present you with yet another loading spinner and a multi-second delay.

I understand the benefits of building webapps this way, but the benefits primarily accrue to the developers of the app and not to the customer.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#16

Post by tenaciousDaniel » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

I agree with the spirit of the article, in that we should be striving for a leaner web.

But last year I had to build an iOS SDK. As an SDK, we wanted it to be as small as humanly possible. It came out to around 12mb, which is obviously too large. So I tried removing literally everything but one file, and it came out to 10mb. So an iOS package, compiled, with only one class, comes out to 10 megabytes.

Yes, the web can improve, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it's as dire as some make it out to be.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#17

Post by mikeabraham » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

Amen to every word except this sentence. "Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place."

No developer I know, web or otherwise, wants to do any of this, and all of them are religious in their use of ad blockers and autoplay stoppers.

This is the kind of stuff developers are forced to do with guns to their heads by the PMs and marketing teams that actually determine the user experience.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#18

Post by zerb » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#19

Post by fermuch » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

edhelas wrote: post #3

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

I'd be saying "Yeah!" along with you, but that client is also a video chat and audio calling app, not just text and images. There's bloatware out there, and this may even qualify, but it isn't just text chat. (Why would you use the desktop client for text chat anyway?)

Skype also has audio and video, with custom codecs even, and p2p, yet it wasn't even close to using the very real 1gb of ram slack consumes

(I'm talking about the old desktop client, not the new electron based one)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#20

Post by waivek » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

This static website seems to be down.

Archive link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/...