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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

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Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#191

Post by Traubenfuchs »

woah wrote: post #152
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

Is this some kind of dig against the web? I prefer native myself, but obviously there are huge numbers of faster websites out there. The answer is that Google’s frameworks suck, and have for many years. I can’t comment on whether things are equally a mess in their proprietary code, but I don’t see any reason to think they’re not. This is a problem with Google, and their slide into mediocrity.

I love the web from the bottom of my heart. I love Javascript, I love Typescript, I love Angular. Develop once, run everywhere, no client side updating required. I love rest(ful) APIs. I consider working with Angular a joy. I am serious here.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#192

Post by moogleii »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

That sounds a bit dramatic. It seems more likely that, given the competition and alternative choices, their current effort is good enough, not their maximum capability...

I think YouTube has been going downhill for years, but where else are people going to go? Vimeo? Users have been trickling away to other platforms, sure, but not enough to seriously challenge YT. FB video is probably the only serious contender in the rear view mirror at the moment.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#193

Post by manigandham »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

It's not the best. It's what is passable considering the politics and priorities involved.

Attach a monetary concern directly to the performance and there will be improvements overnight. Otherwise this is the "best" we get, given the circumstances.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#194

Post by kossTKR »

influx wrote: post #81
GhostVII wrote: post #51

Google's UI's in general are shockingly slow. I don't understand why my Google Drive and Gmail have input lag and choppy animations on my 5 year old xps13, it's not that hard to make navigating a filesystem or list of emails fast. Actually I do understand, it's because they want everything they build to be made in a massive javascript framework with shared components, which looks nice but runs like garbage on anythin…

The original gmail design was so fast, beautiful and minimalistic. It had vi key bindings and was close to perfect. The new one had a bunch of useless white space and the app has a loading bar! Wtf?!

Yeah the Gmail UI has become absolute garbage lately.

The fact that i need to see a cute-dystopian loading animation for 2 seconds each time i reload the page is incredible.

Send plain HTML, then make JS take over after loading like most modern frameworks can do.

.. yes i really have to ditch Google ..

On a sidenote YT has also become a dystopian addiction machine - years ago you could easily curate what you saw, feeds, channels etc, now everything is controlled by the "google god skinner box algo" just like i feel Gmail is headed towards with all kinds of automated tools.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#195

Post by johnghanks »

symlinkk wrote: post #136
graderjs wrote: post #53

The medium is the message. In some domains, slow and clunky feels like gravitas and reliability. Enterprise software. Enterprise recruiting software. AWS has a pretty slow, and clunky dashboard. AdSense is clunky. A lot of the biggest companies' flagship apps have a very bland "bureaucratic" look and feel. You may find it hard to believe, but Zuck wanted facebook to look like a government database for a long time, wh…

This is a joke right? You really think they have someone spending all day writing while loops to slow down page load times?

This is a joke right? You really think the OP is suggesting they have someone spending all day writing while loops to slow down page load times?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#196

Post by dmitriid »

choathedolls wrote: post #168
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. Shouldn't this be the opposite? Maybe this is just me but if I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere.

Not the opposite, but we're missing the simple fact that enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. There are constantly clients bringing their demands for additional features or major fixes, very rarely are they "please optimize the UI". For consumer facing products, that's not really the case, unless some massive features are missing, they would rather things be snappy as they…

> enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations.

I've been using logs, bigquery, dataflow, and a smattering of other products pretty regularly for the past few years.

Are these products getting "more features"? Hardly. Well, dataflow deprecates minor SDK versions every month, so you have to run twice as fast just to stay in one place.

Instead, they have been redesigning the logs interface with fancy animations. And for the longest time ever they removed features from it like streaming logs.

Meanwhile the minor stupid things like displaying dates in MM/DD/YYYY format in date pickers, using AM/PM for time? Oh, they stay on. Graphs that work half of the time and you can never know if they are broken, cached, or just don't work? Oh, they stay on.

It's Google's systemic organisational failure: they suck at UIs, they don't care, and they couldn't be bothered to maintain features because "oooh, shiny new thing looks better on my resume".

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#197

Post by cstrahan »

simonw wrote: post #97
citrus1330 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Criticizing Google's frontends but praising GitHub and Amazon? If I had to pick a large tech company with a bad frontend Amazon would be top of the list. GitHub is not great either. I guess this kind of thing is just subjective though.

What do you find lacking about GitHub's frontend?

For one, they're using some sort of link / browser history hijacking (something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks, IIRC) which is buggy, for example:

* say you're on page A

* navigate to page B

* navigate to page C

* click your browser's back button, hoping to be back at page B

* the github UI screws up and keeps you on the same page while changing the URL in the address bar

* so you click back again

* now your on page A, completely skipping page B

* clicking forward takes you back to C

Additionally, GitHub is insanely slow. This page, for example, takes 3 seconds to load: https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe6622...

Couple broken history back/forward navigation with long page load times and GitHub is easily one of the most frustrating web sites to use.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that GitHub doesn't have value -- it most certainly does -- but that doesn't excuse bugginess and absurdly long page load times. If they fixed these problems it would be 100% awesome.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#198

Post by manigandham »

doomlaser wrote: post #183
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

How is it that Microsoft's Electron apps are so snappy and performant? You would never know Visual Studio Code was Electron by how it performs. I'm not a user of their cloud apps, but are they similarly snappy, or is it just that Microsoft's Dev Tools team is way out in front?

Performance is a priority for VSC. Same with Azure's console. Same with sites like Stackoverflow.

It's not a priority with many of Google's current apps.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#199

Post by landerwust »

pradn wrote: post #164

Googler who doesn't work in front end here, so take my opinion with a grain of salt: 1) A "footsoldier" dev has no choice in frameworks, and heavy frameworks with heavy reusable components are the norm. Frameworks are used to improve dev velocity and ensure consistency among the 100 teams that contribute to the web UI. 2) Devs care about performance but might not have time to do much about it given competing prioriti…

What happened to the Closure Compiler stack? It was infinitely ahead of its time, how the heck did they end up settling on Angular of all things

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#200

Post by jeffbee »

Perfect counterexample for the person who was telling me that single-threaded performance isn't visible to users any more. On the M1 mac mini the Google Cloud console is fully loaded in 5.1s (2.6s when cached), not 8.1s. As an enthusiast of software efficiency I don't think either of these is great, and there's obviously a lot they can do to make it faster, but it just shows how users still greatly benefit from throwing hardware at the problem.
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