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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#171

Post by usr1106 »

kiwijamo wrote: post #159
usr1106 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in ful…

Having used a range of video conferencing systems, your description of Meet lines up with pretty much every Meet session I've been involved with. I'll meet the same group of people on Zoom another time and it usually works much better on Zoom. Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc even on high quality fibre connections Zoom = smooth high-res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor…

On 4G, which gives me 20 - 40 Mbit/sec uplink I have no major issues with Google Meet. Sharing terminals with red on black font does not work well. Whether Zoom works better I don't know from own experience. I hardly ever use it because my employer has a Google subscription.

Well, sharing terminals over telcos is backwards anyway. We did that 20 years ago over 56 kbit/s modem lines using VNC. And the compression was lossless, the result pixel perfect.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#172

Post by fc_throwaway »

rtpg wrote: post #138
einpoklum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.

Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Sig…

> A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run

Only if they have a good reason to target you, personally.

But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion mailboxes.

There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom mailserver with a budget of $1.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#173

Post by nottorp »

usr1106 wrote: post #168

The point they make is more than valid. I don't like the attitude calling them craptops. A Gigabyte of memory and 10 Mbit/sec are enough to meet 99.9% of the user needs for Web browsing. If sites were implemented in a resource-aware manner of course. Instead of looking down at craptops I would look down at people introducing 4K and using many Gigabytes of memory for personal computing. Even worse making masses use it…

> A Gigabyte of memory and 10 Mbit/sec a more than enough to meet 99.9% of the user needs for Web browsing. If sites were implemented in a resource-aware manner of course.

The devs need that just for Slack sadly.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#174

Post by jcelerier »

My personal rule of thumb for native development is to almost always run with -O0 and ASAN / UBSAN enabled on my dev computer. If the software is too slow that way it will be too slow on low-end machines (Pi 3) at -O3 -flto -march=native.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#175

Post by pjmlp »

izacus wrote: post #164
l0b0 wrote: post #41

There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…

In my personal experience, even getting an average web dev to touch a slower Windows machine is mission impossible. The best you can hope is "ewww, this sucks so much and it's ugly, why would anyone do this" and then arrogant walk back to their 3000$+ MacBook to shovel more JS libraries into the website. I've literally not seen a single rockstart javascripter actually willingly try to test things on Windows, much les…

Come to Europe, most of those designers will be using Windows machines issued by IT to everyone on the building anyway.

And the only Apple gear will be iPhones and iPads used by upper management.

Yes, I am also aware there are plenty of cases that aren't like that specially for the fortunate ones living on tier 1 EU countries.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#176

Post by interactivecode »

rtpg wrote: post #138
einpoklum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.

Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Sig…

If you’re on mac mimestream is really good:

https://mimestream.com/

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#177

Post by kuon »

I still encounter websites/UI that are laggy on my high end workstation, I cannot image how unusable those websites would be on a low end laptop.

The funny thing is, most of the time those websites have no complex requirements, it's mostly news site with things likes a covid map embed, but the map has a resolution to the meter for country boundaries... A few KB image that open the interactive map on click would work just the same.

And for website with heavier requirements (web app), there are two camps, those which are excellent (like onshape, that thing is amazing, or draw.io) or painfully slow to the point I had to ditch them (notion, clickup).

I have a feeling that many of those laggy website could do some key optimization to make everything order of magnitude faster/lighter.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#178

Post by mkl »

telesilla wrote: post #152
animal_spirits wrote: post #85

> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…

We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never…

What mechanisms did you use to get users providing feedback? Popups asking or something?

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#179

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kiwijamo wrote: post #155
l0b0 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.

I have to use Gmail for work. I've found Gmail to be pretty slow nowdays. From HN comments on other threads I'm not the only one to have noticed this. It even occasionally fails to load and just hangs at the loading screen requiring a refresh and fingers crossed that the second try succeeds in loading my inbox. When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast a…

Indeed, I have Outlook, Yandex and Gmail, and Gmail seems to be the worst of them all.

I cannot understand all thr praise people give it, is it simply brand loyalty?

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