11–20 of 136 posts
Active Desktop is what got me into doing websites originally.
Fond memories of early 90's internet.
Did anybody here ever use the ISDN data ports in payphones in Japan? I remember seeing them here and there in 1998 (IIRC). At the time I wondered about popping over to one and getting on the web just to see how it would work. ISDN was serious biz to my mind at that time, compared to rural USA dialup.
I remember reading about T1 lines and being blown away at how fast that was
Those times were full of patience. I don't miss that but definitely the people across different forums and pseudo online-dating chats.
Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse.
So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish?
GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load.
I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do that? Why do elements randomly jump around for the first 2 minutes? what is the problem there?)
I don't want to just blindly blame JS. Look at this page! JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized). But why does the average experience suck so much?
I remember trying to download IE4 when it was released, and it kept failing after about 20mins, eventually it worked and 30mins later I had it :D Active Desktop is what got me into doing websites originally. Fond memories of early 90's internet.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question.
As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.
This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…
The problem is modern design, basically. We've invented server-rendered pages, then started rendering everything client side with frameworks like React, then we've started pre-rendering React on the server and completing content in the client, and now the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way around again to technologies like Flutter that just render an application in a canvas shudder.
People want interactivity, and developers want that interactivity to be consistent across their website. To do so, they need to recreate and emulate everything the browser does. In the case of React and other JS frameworks, that even includes constructing fake DOMs. Back buttons get overridden, links get turned into buttons that do custom routing, you name it and there's a layer of Javascript you can download to avoid having to do the hard work.
This is partially because of how demanding people have become. They expect any proper web page to be like Facebook. People, especially customers, want features, and they want them fast. Big companies that have their own developers are pushing their users towards their apps, sometimes intentionally sabotaging their website (looking at you, Reddit) to force people to download their invasive, native code.
Websites have become applications, and applications are inherently taxing on most systems. Google tried to combat this in their own, misguided way with AMP. If it wasn't for their stupid caching architecture, I'd be a fan of AMP because of the speed it can provide compared to "modern" web pages.
I don't think any of this will change unless we convince web developers to stop relying on all of these "modern" technologies and just write proper web pages. From the reactions here on HN, there are two groups of people in this debate: the people like us, who lament how slow the web has become, and the people who will never give up their fancy frameworks because of the productivity it allows them, and will never give in to the web Luddites who want to take away their fancy cross-platform tools that run just fine on their $2000 M1 Macs.
There are also a lot of web developers out there that are just shit, but we can't help those.
great stuff although altavista.com site doesn't work very well I automatically used that as my first choice of website to use
Wow, it really does feel like using an old browser.
(Safari Version 15.2 (17612.3.6.1.6))
"Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox to use this emulator. " Wow, it really does feel like using an old browser. (Safari Version 15.2 (17612.3.6.1.6))