I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#41

Post by tshaddox » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

notjustanymike wrote: post #26

antirez wrote: post #4

Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV of understanding what different people think in the programming community. Some will say that critiques are only from old people, in the style "when I was young we had only zeroes! You now have ones and zeroes". Others say that the web is slow because of ADs…

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

I definitely agree with the music survivor bias thing. This is also very noticeable in the “computer generated imagery in movies looks artificial” meme: you just didn’t notice all the extremely effective and convincing CGI.

But I’m curious, what are the examples of great websites “back in the day” that have stood the test of time and would be considered good web development today?

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#42

Post by jasonpeacock » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

Search for "Facebook Lite", it's their lightweight frontend for lower-bandwidth connections.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#43

Post by jkelleyrtp » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

Easier to start an ISP and give away free internet than to rewrite Facebook.com to be more performant

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#44

Post by softwaredoug » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

Has it failed? Or is the current state that people prefer “native” apps to this kind of rich interactivity with long lived state? And instead the browser is a place that feels like it’s going to load a somewhat interactive document. The front end work here is often seen as grunt work on top of backend services and not a discipline in its own right.

So instead the awesome front end dev has switched from making something like Slack or VS Code work great in Chrome to building it in something like Electron for native experiences.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#45

Post by throwawayfire » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

notjustanymike wrote: post #26

antirez wrote: post #4

Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV of understanding what different people think in the programming community. Some will say that critiques are only from old people, in the style "when I was young we had only zeroes! You now have ones and zeroes". Others say that the web is slow because of ADs…

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias.

Not "just" survival bias.

I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000.

As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers.

Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot 100 Top 20 this week contains 3 tracks by Justin Bieber, 2 by the Weeknd, and 2 by Drake. That would have been unheard of.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#46

Post by daniellarusso » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

This came up with my remote team recently.

A coworker and myself had the worst internet speeds in the company, but he recently got FTTH.

I went to replicate a bug, by clicking on a button quickly and excessively, and was able to add 5 duplicate entries into the DB.

The frontend dev could not replicate it until I suggested using the Chrome dev tools to simulate a slower connection.

I have Frontier DSL.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#47

Post by tazjin » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

HN seems to be pretty split on this issue. I concur with the linked tweet. Using the web beyond very simple pages like HN feels like wading through garbage.

Everything is slow, laggy, loads ridiculous amounts of stuff (I live in a country where traffic is very expensive at the moment, so this becomes more noticeable). Things are also flaky and need reloading whenever they get into broken states. The only way I use the web now is with uMatrix blocking everything, and then whitelisting stuff that pages want to run piecemeal. It's still terrible.

The larger a company is, the less usable its web stuff is also. Google Chat for example is unusable in very active rooms.

I hope that frameworks like Hotwire make server-side rendering "cool" again and that we can get out of this tar pit.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#48

Post by ergot_vacation » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

Nothing has "failed" on a technical level. I'm sure if a company hired a bunch of highly experienced devs and said "build us the fastest, most user-friendly site ever, everything else is secondary!" you'd get an amazing site.

You get what you optimize for. User experience is not being optimized for. The ability to prey on users via ads, dark patterns, info harvesting, tracking and even malware is. This in turn happened because people discovered that, mostly, there are only two ways to make significant money online: 1. Be the first to deliver a revolutionary service everyone loves in just the right form for it to catch on. 2. Gather a bunch of users via some shiny object and then exploit the hell out of them.

For obvious reasons, #2 caught on, dominated the web, and will continue to do so until various regulations slow it down.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#49

Post by csmiller » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

I believe Twitter uses React? Although it’s possible that Twitter successfully served you Twitter-Lite while FB may have mistakenly sent the full version.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#50

Post by bombcar » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #41

notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

I definitely agree with the music survivor bias thing. This is also very noticeable in the “computer generated imagery in movies looks artificial” meme: you just didn’t notice all the extremely effective and convincing CGI. But I’m curious, what are the examples of great websites “back in the day” that have stood the test of time and would be considered good web development today?

Wikipedia and Zombo.com haven’t changed much.