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Browse the web like its 1999

oldweb.today

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Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#121

Post by p_l »

shp0ngle wrote: post #69
p_l wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider typical Medium blog post. If by chance you block certain actions, you'll see it spin ridiculous amount of CPU, trying to sent tracking data all the time over graphql. Some tracking systems injected (often without developer involvement, using so-called tag managers) will send your mouse position and clicks. Through tag managers, you can easily end up loading 50 different scripts, often compiled with attendant…

I guess. The fact is, modern javascript is FAST. And with http3, and compression, you can make things load really REALLY fast. Much faster than in 1994! And you have things like tree shaking where you can make the js tiny. Not speaking about wasm, that’s even faster, or putting things to web workers. Modern CSS is so easy to use. And of course CDNs are nowadays all around the globe. Chrome debugging tools are pretty…

And the core website that the developers actually see while working on it might be just as fast as you imagine!

The developers are not in charge, usually, of what rules will be loaded into a tag manager by the marketing team (which might involve different sets based on URL or various other tracking data). The tag managers themselves and base ad auction and spyware stuff might be pretty performant, too - it's when you hit all those third party ads etc. that you might also see some shitty code.

But when many of those "features" are written assuming all the extra budget for themselves, well, things go bad fast.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#122

Post by dmitriid »

jcelerier wrote: post #105
dmitriid wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit unfair because modern pixel art games are literally nothing like old pixel art games. For one, the resolution has gone from 400x300 to ~3000x1500 and more, and the number of color went from 8 to millions. All those pixels in high-res pixel art have to still be stored somewhere. Even though I still agree that some games do not deserve to be as fat as they are.

The entire Chrono Trigger SNES rom fits in a 1024x1024 PNG image though

It was also 256×224 resolution, 8 bpp colors, max 128 sprites at max 64x64 resolution. And 8-bit music with 8 voices.

Whereas just the light texture for Celeste's dynamic lighting is bigger than the entire Chrono Trigger ROM :) https://medium.com/@NoelFB/remaking-celestes-lighting-3478d6...

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#123

Post by philistine »

majani wrote: post #72
marginalia_nu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically Parkinson's law. If someone is given NASA's resources to move a piece of paper across the room, they will find a way to use a space shuttle to do it and call you oldfashioned for doing it by hand.

Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art platformers are now above 1GB in size https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/... When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge

Your two examples are horrible examples. Celeste is truly a pixel game. It uses pixels as an art style, but spending any time with the game reveals its complexity.

- The resolution of the game is detached from the pixels, allowing them to be squished and squashed. - While it looks like they’re reusing assets, they really aren’t that much. A ton of areas have unique pixel tiles. - The code is complicated and complex; the physics and control are astoundingly advanced. - It has beautiful high resolution drawings of characters and cutscenes. - The music and sound is full fidelity. - Celeste is running on Unity, which is probably the biggest reason for its large size.

That Castlevania game has a 3D main character, with Retina quality textures. Since it’s made for Apple Arcade, it has to support a 4K resolution for Apple TV, meaning all the game’s assets have to look reasonable on a screen at that resolution. The main character alone must weigh a couple megabytes.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#125

Post by SilasX »

vikingerik wrote: post #120
SilasX wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Ticket to Ride is a board game and its video game version on Steam is hundreds of megabytes, yet all it has is 2D images with some scaling and translation effects.

It also has music. I'm not sure how much, but that could account for a couple hundred megabytes if it's many tracks at a fairly high bit rate.

Good point, but it has very little of that as well. Some victory/loss event music and sound effects, and a few short musical tracks.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#126

Post by [deleted] »

tokai wrote: post #75
majani wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art platformers are now above 1GB in size https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/... When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge

I don't see that as a good equivalent. Highres art assets takes up space, there's no beating that. Old snes games and modern 2d'ers are not on the same lvl regarding fidelity.

[deleted]

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#128

Post by kragen »

greggturkington wrote: post #85
kragen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Luu reports that Google penalizes his pages in search rankings because they don't include enough CSS and JS. It's not really half of the websites; it's the half you're being guided to.

Can you link to this please? Intuitively it seems every Core Web Vital would be improved by less code. I found this post [1] but it seems a but outdated and references AMP, which Core Web Vital metrics are supposed to replace (right?). https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

I don't remember when I saw it, and I could be misremembering it.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#129

Post by lenkite »

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…

"JS can be amazing! And I love stuff like Figma (as it's so fast and optimized)"

This actually means that you love C++. But HN crowd will hate that lol.

https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

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