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The browser's main thread is expensive

kciter.so

91–100 of 169 posts

Re: The browser's main thread is expensive

#91
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a joke of challenge, there is still no browser 3D game that is a match to Infinity Blade, that Apple used to demo OpenGL ES 3.0 hardware in 2011. Anyone serious about 3D gaming on the Web has to do streaming.

https://playcanv.as/p/MflWvdTW/ This isn't new at all, just one of the first things I found by googling "webgl demo." WebGPU of course goes even further. I think the real gap is just that people by-and-large aren't building real games on top of Safari. It's more lucrative to use the app store with its low-friction payment system.

At the same level, as a commercial game, not a tech demo scene.

Re: The browser's main thread is expensive

#93
post #80

FYI: This isn't a browser-only thing. All platforms (Windows, Mac, ios, android) typically have a single-threaded UI.

For responsiveness that’s what you want, context switches add quite a lot of jitter and perceived slowness’s, making your app feel slow despite running at 120 fps.

Re: The browser's main thread is expensive

#95

Good article and I wish this was much better known. The issue is though that it's too focused on interactivity. In reality, 90%++ of slow sites are not slow because of interactivity really, they are slow because they ship enormous react/nextjs bundles and have extremely heavy hydration work to do. _so many_ sites have bundles >10MB that need to be downloaded, parsed and hydrated. I've even seen (many) sites which hav…

I challenge you to browse the web one week on this laptop part of the current top 10 Amazon best sellers on a gigabit fiber connection and tell me if you still think that this is the problem: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Everyday-Processor-Microsoft-Porta...

Try it yourself on a gigabit internet. Put CPU throttling in devtools to 10x slowdown (assuming you have a fast computer) and see how fast it is even with super fast internet.

Re: The browser's main thread is expensive

#97
post #66

Good article and I wish this was much better known. The issue is though that it's too focused on interactivity. In reality, 90%++ of slow sites are not slow because of interactivity really, they are slow because they ship enormous react/nextjs bundles and have extremely heavy hydration work to do. _so many_ sites have bundles >10MB that need to be downloaded, parsed and hydrated. I've even seen (many) sites which hav…

99% of the time those sites could be plain HTML and CSS, but apparently new generations don't even know how to do that, out of programming bootcamps.

>99% of the time those sites could be plain HTML and CSS, but apparently new generations don't even know how to do that, out of programming bootcamps.

That is because the latest framework always fixes everything that wasn't broken before.

Re: The browser's main thread is expensive

#98

I agree with most of the article, but would clarify the following: > For the screen to look smooth, frames have to be drawn at the display’s refresh rate. On the most common 60Hz display, that means 60 frames per second, or about 16.6 milliseconds per frame. It isn't absolutely necessary to match the display refresh rate. With a 144Hz monitor, 72FPS is going to look smooth for the vast majority of the people, and eve…

[deleted]

Re: The browser's main thread is expensive

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What signs of slop are people seeing here? Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction to encountering lots of text? I’ve worked in the field for a long time and see a carefully written, correct, calm article. No obvious AÍ tells in wording or sentence construction. It is a bit long - might have been inspired by ciechanow.ski

"and there’s a reason for that" "The code isn’t slow. It just happens to be the code that’s holding the main thread." "dealing with the main thread becomes the important part" "What to remember for now is that holding the main thread for a long time is the same thing as freezing the screen." "One thing not to misread here is" I realize the author may not write native English, but this is not translation slop, it's AI…

I think you're overindexing here. There are no obvious traces of AI in those full paragraphs (and I read thousands of lines of AI generated text daily). These are not the usual tells, just decent writing.

It reads pretty much like every well-written technical article used to, ten years ago; and scores a 0% likelihood of being AI generated in Quillbot.

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