Browse the web like its 1999 • Hacker News Board

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#51

Post by undebuggable » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #14

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 current compromise for monetization on the web is advertisiting. The web apps and sites are not optimized for snappiness, responsiveness, user experience. They are optimized for tracking and profiling, the market leading front-end frameworks enable mostly these.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#52

Post by d-d » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

bryans wrote: post #37

This brings me so much joy. It's such a perfect emulation that it actually makes me homesick for the late 90s.

That old Windows interface and the Netscape logo are like a portal to another universe.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#53

Post by 101008 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

Wow, very well done. I am one of those who grow up late 90s / early 2000s browsing internet, forums, blogs, fansites, presonal websites, and from time to time I go back to web.archive to see again the webpages that made me happy during my childhood / teen ages. This is a great complement for that.

Thank you very much whoever did this - my inner self is really thankful.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#54

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#55

Post by crawl_soever » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #14

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…

According to web professionals Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner in the podcast: The Handmade Network Podcast: The Web's Problems & Future, w/ Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner https://handmade.network/podcast/ep/532a3573-490a-45e8-975d-...

The web has grown from something to display documents to a platform for applications. Focus has been placed heavily on optimization of JS jit compilation, but currently browser DOM and CSS layout engines have not cought up leaving a disparity in performance on major browsers.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#56

Post by Volker_W » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:59 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #26

shp0ngle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display? I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable? "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed So where is the…

Best answer that I can give you is: Because many of the ad companies are run by sales people. Seriously, we struggled with an ad/retargeting company, they ran EVERYTHING of a single EC2 instance and they didn’t understand the internet. If/when their service went down the checkout pages of all their clients would timeout. The word async meant nothing to them, but hey better to crash than not track users. They would co…

> They would continuesly lie about their implementation

Really? Could you give more examples?

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#57

Post by Donckele » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #14

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…

You can also say this of software in general including operating systems.

Sure, the hardware and network are a miracle.

My 2 cents is that there is so much software to be written that most programmers are mediocre at what they do and/or their working environment makes it even more difficult to create efficient software systems.

Similar correlations to Government.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#58

Post by antocv » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #14

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…

You did not pay for any page to load fast or to serve you what you are looking for. Every web-request, every click you make with your browser, can deliver you a response which is unknown to you or your browser before-hand. There is no way for you to see what you are buying before buying it if it was possible to buy page-loads.

Say thanks because you are not in the EU and get the cookie and GDPR spam thrown at you as well. Worse than the 1999 popups.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#59

Post by acdha » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

turing_complete wrote: post #30

shp0ngle wrote: post #14

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…

Browsers aren't fast. Computer hardware is.

Browsers are fast, too. Think about all of the hard work which has gone into advanced hardware acceleration, JIT engines, etc. That work deserves respect even if the median front-end developer squanders it with bad decisions.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#60

Post by MatmaRex » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

michalstanko wrote: post #33

ricardobayes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, Safari is the IE of our times. Safari somehow always have rendering issues. I use Firefox as that's closest to standards, I hate bending standard code to fit a garbage browser's special needs.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it an "IE", because those of us who lived through that know it was a completely different experience. But yes, Safari is slow in implementing new features a bit and it does get annoying from time to time. But it's nowhere near the IE hell from ~2000 - 2008.

It totally is. I used to write custom CSS for IE to make drop shadows work (it didn't support the standard syntax). Now I write custom CSS for Safari to make drop shadows work (there's a bug where if you remove the node, its shadow sometimes stays behind).