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Browse the web like its 1999

oldweb.today

21–30 of 136 posts

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#21

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…

The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets. I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question. As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.

Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display?

I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable?

"bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed

So where is the bloat from, really.

Javascript can be really fast. It's just, nobody really cares? I guess?

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#22

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…

Lack of care and attention. By developers who are pressured to keep sprint velocity up. By product owners who follow the ideal path. By designers who want sites to work like their mock-ups. By testers who don’t have enough time to test under specified features. By clients who are focused on reporting upwards and tracking business goals.

And by prioritising new learning experiences over boring reliable solutions.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#24

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…

I suppose most devs don't use tree-shaking when importing modules. The frameworks themselves don't add much bloat usually. I do believe however single page apps are a fad and we are going to return to SSG/SSR which is already apparent in new JS frameworks like NextJS.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#25

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…

Lack of care and attention. By developers who are pressured to keep sprint velocity up. By product owners who follow the ideal path. By designers who want sites to work like their mock-ups. By testers who don’t have enough time to test under specified features. By clients who are focused on reporting upwards and tracking business goals. And by prioritising new learning experiences over boring reliable solutions.

What's wrong with wanting a site to look like a mockup?

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets. I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question. As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.

Why does tracking and advertising take so much time to load and display? I would not really mind ads and being tracked if it didn't make internet sometimes literally unusable? "bloated frameworks"... I remember when React was touted as "faster than native DOM"! Which didn't make much sense even back then, because you need to do the things in actual DOM too... but... there was always the push of speed So where is the…

Best answer that I can give you is: Because many of the ad companies are run by sales people.

Seriously, we struggled with an ad/retargeting company, they ran EVERYTHING of a single EC2 instance and they didn’t understand the internet. If/when their service went down the checkout pages of all their clients would timeout. The word async meant nothing to them, but hey better to crash than not track users. They would continuesly lie about their implementation, because they failed to under basic terminology. “This is a HA setup, right?”, “Yes, it’s a cloud solution in AWS”. That just meant: Why would AWS go down?

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#27

"Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox to use this emulator. " Wow, it really does feel like using an old browser. (Safari Version 15.2 (17612.3.6.1.6))

Arguably, Safari is the IE of our times. Safari somehow always have rendering issues. I use Firefox as that's closest to standards, I hate bending standard code to fit a garbage browser's special needs.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#28

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…

Javascript is one of the major reasons, but also trackers, huge graphics and loads of videos. Old pages still load fast so it's not the browser's fault. Say what you want about https://www.lingscars.com/ , but it loads instantly, is full of all animations and doesn't lag down the browser. The problem is modern design, basically. We've invented server-rendered pages, then started rendering everything client side with…

> web developers out there that are just shit

The technical term is webshits.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#29

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…

Did you try restarting your computer? If that doesn't work, try restarting your router.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#30

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…

Browsers aren't fast. Computer hardware is.
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