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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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

#52

I don't think that web is slow, unless you're running seriously underpowered computer. That's not the case for me. Web is not as fast as it could be. And that's because customer does not want to pay for fastest website in the world. It should be fast enough and then features matter. You can spend year making your website load in 0.1 second while your competitor will implement important features and his 2-second loadi…

reddit.com is a slow and flickering mess even on my gaming PC. It's the worst example that comes to mind though. But if that same PC can run incredibly complex open world games while simulating (for instance) an aircraft complete with the cockpit and displays driven by emulated onboard computers at 60+ fps, it's not too much to ask the same from a webpage that "just" needs to do text layout and display a couple of im…

I am curious what the traffic breakdown for reddit is via the ‘old’ subdomain compared to the ‘www’ subdomain?

Personally I will navigate away from the new site and only use the old domain.

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

#53
post #17

In what way are current websites not usable?

A lot of websites:

- reimplement browser features and do a bad job of it

- are unnecessarily slow

- try to stop being slow by breaking even more stuff

Some examples I’ve come across within the last week:

- Twitter pages randomly failing to load until the next hard refresh, probably because of service workers somehow (which are unnecessary for user experience improvement since HTTP cache exists and I don’t have notifications enabled)

- Twitter’s offscreen tweets not being searchable with browser find because they were optimized out of existence – and I want to do this in the first place because it decided to refresh itself while I was in the middle of reading

- YouTube application state getting out of sync with browser history that it overrides when I navigate Back too fast for it – the URL stops matching what’s playing and the navigation doesn’t take place

- GitHub’s reimplementation of browser navigation reimplementing a loading indicator but not the stop button (I think I’ve also gotten it out of sync before)

- Form state not being restorable across history navigation because the fields didn’t exist when the page loaded

- Reddit’s redesign is so unusably sluggish that I don’t stay on it long enough to run into any other problems

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

#54

I don't think that web is slow, unless you're running seriously underpowered computer. That's not the case for me. Web is not as fast as it could be. And that's because customer does not want to pay for fastest website in the world. It should be fast enough and then features matter. You can spend year making your website load in 0.1 second while your competitor will implement important features and his 2-second loadi…

All of that is true until it isn’t. Ask all the stock trading apps how Robinhood out-UXed them. When the out-user-experienceing happens, you pretty much will lose your entire business if you don’t undertake a paradigm shift. Stay ahead of the curve a bit.

I think it was more like ‘here is a free margin account with options enabled and no commission fees’ went alot further than the UI.

Also, the UX was implicated as the cause of a suicide, so that is not good.

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

#55

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

not saying that you’re wrong, but do you have the same constraints as the “crappy” websites?

there is definitely an explosion of tooling, frameworks, etc, but past some obvious things, IMHO most websites are crippled by business people (that will likely not be using the website) make all sorts of technical decisions what must go in and how it’s supposed to work (ads and tracking crap is one of the things that jumps up).

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

#56

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…

You can bypass the speed restrictions by decreasing the TTL on your machine by 1 [0], I tested it and it worked perfectly.

[0] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/226580/how-is-ve...

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

#57
This isn't a development failure. Content businesses have been struggling to turn a profit online for years and we're at an inflection point now. Some sites are opting for squeezing revenue from every spare pixel and bombarding social media with clickbait. The rest are going to start pushing subscriptions really hard. And there's going to be a widening gulf between the two.

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

#58

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…

Funny, I just went through a similar experience and had to tether off a Verizon connection for almost two weeks.

I certainly felt the pain of a slow connection too and felt frustrated at how badly this affected the experience on so many sites.

Here’s an idea: web developers should test their sites on the slowest connection speed still commonly available (ie 3G) and make sure the experience is still acceptable. I know that webpagetest [1] allows you to do this and the results are illuminating.

[1]: https://www.webpagetest.org/

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

#59
post #6

Counterexample: Figma.

Could you elaborate?

I don't like Figma very much, but I think that's because I prefer typing code into text files. So, probably not for reasons pertinent to this discussions. Anyway, I'm interested in why you would consider it good.

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

#60

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…

After minification and compression, React is about 100kb and can be cached for a long time.

With all the images, videos on social media etc. it seems rather small in terms of bandwidth.

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