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But what if I want a faster horse?

rakhim.exotext.com

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Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#471

Post by tristor »

Suppafly wrote: post #432
tristor wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better. As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built int…

>As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.

Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on.

If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They had front-and-center advertising on the most visited website in the world, with branding from the (at the time) most valuable tech company in the world.

FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the board are constantly working on engine-side performance to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end developers as the JS community continues to churn through hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a very long time and continues to do so, although there isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years: https://arewefastyet.com/

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#472

Post by booleandilemma »

Netflix and Spotify are designed this way because they're subscription services. They need to convince you they always have a lot of new stuff, all the time, so that you don't cancel your subscription.

They don't want you to think they're some static libraries of content. They make their websites like interactive billboards.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#474

Post by btilly »

tristor wrote: post #424
Suppafly wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better. As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built int…

As someone else who lived through those days, I have to disagree.

First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal.

Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.

I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#475

Post by nonameiguess »

abustamam wrote: post #302
feoren wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those two tiers are not really competing with each other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in one group: either they will never watch anything with ads (e.g. me), or they just don't care about seeing ads. The former group will never switch to the ad-supported tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high -- so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that group. Similarly, the latt…

I guess I'm weird because I pay for Netflix/HBO for no ads, but I'm on the ad supported tier for Peacock and Hulu. I guess it's just what I'm used to (I don't expect to see ads on Netflix, but I do expect to see them on Hulu)

I'm on the ad-free tier for Peacock and have honestly considered downgrading because most of what I watch there is live sports, and they have natural breaks in play that the linear broadcast fills with ads, whereas Peacock on the ad-free tier fills with extremely irritating repeating elevator music. It's bad enough that I'd rather see the ads.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#476

Post by techpineapple »

sureIy wrote: post #238
patapong wrote: post #230

I am astonished by how much less delightful software has become. Computers used to feel like a magical tool, that would respond instantly and allow me to perform complicated transformations at the press of a button. Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time, having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically sophisticat…

Is this about software or is it about you? I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I became very keenly aware of its current issues because this is my field.

I think it's about software, just because back then there was a lot less of it. It was easier to navigate when the OS didn't have a million and one features and you just launched an app you wanted to you and could mostly trust that there wasn't going to be an ad or another feature in the way.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#477

Post by mrandish »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #217
cjs_ac wrote: post #16

For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…

What you are describing is explained beautifully in "The Tyranny of the Marginal User" essay that got a lot of commentary on HN previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 . My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the marginal user): > Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick…

I missed that post the first time around... and it's great. Thanks for re-posting it.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#478

Post by squarefoot »

Welcome to the web 3.0 mindset: changing for the sake of changing and having more bullet points on advertising, moving fast and breaking things because the innovation behind a fancy page can't be wrong even when it ruins the experience of most users. Thank you, Open Source, for giving me the tools and freedom of choice I can use to completely ignore or at least make less painful the experience.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#479

Post by lgeorget »

beloch wrote: post #191
_kush wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the cycle I keep seeing: Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting. Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions. Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them. So a new product comes out, started…

To simplify: 1. Innovate. 2. Exploit. You start by innovating a "fast horse". This gains you early adopters who pull in a larger audience. A horse can only be so fast, so continued innovation might lead to something more like a car. This will only cause you to bleed users. Stick to the horse. Instead of continuing to innovate endlessly, you switch to exploitation. Fire the visionaries. They're just a waste of payroll…

> Are they doing something different, or is it just that their customers have to choose them repeatedly?

I guess it's market-related. Your remarks remind me of Behringer. They make products for the music and audio enthusiasts. They have decent quality products at a very fair price that have been around for 10+ years now (like the X32 mixer) and apart from that, they churn out new products all the time (especially remakes of vintage synthesisers) to keep their users coming back and check out what's new.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#480

Post by tonightstoast »

nottorp wrote: post #263
tonightstoast wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews. Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b test it before release thinking "no way that's what users would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.

Who's that and do they work for Netflix? Tbh I don't mind the previews as long as they don't make the UI lag*. I was just pointing out that they don't save bandwidth. * I'm also aware that they're blatant lies and have little connection with what's in the actual movie.

100%. Wasn’t trying to contradict your statement - just giving some additional context.

And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also streams on twitch but I’m not on that site so I can’t say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.

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