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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?

#231

The AWS console isn't fast either (just shy of 1 MB of data transferred). I chalk it up to - 1. So many services all living in the same place with a variety of UI components 2. The complexity of turning all the knobs and dials of building infrastructure (or multiple pieces) into a UI. 3. Being an ancillary service (admin UI).

Might not be great but AWS Console has been evolving and it's far superior than GCP Console. It baffles me when some people here in HN say that GCP's UX is better than AWS's? Like how?

I use both extensively and have a way harder time to figure out what the heck is going on when using Google Cloud Console.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#232
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say after using Microsoft Teams... M$ is back, baby. I would invest in them if I invested in huge-market-cap companies. After IBM, Microsoft became the company selling Windows and Office for businesses. Huge cash cow. They lost that for a while due to the iPhone and Google and stuff moving to the Web and mobile. Now they’re back. The fonts and aesthetics remind me of using Windows apps 20 years ago. This ain’t…

> Compared to Slack, this is way better Try scrolling up in Teams. I'll wait. Now do it in Slack - 10 times quicker, and thus usable.

On the flipside though, try doing a video chat in Slack.. Not exactly an ideal experience

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you think https://mail.google.com/mail/mu , the mobile web version aka "superpudu" is slow? Can you tell me your device? It paints itself in only 400ms on my iphone. I actually prefer it over the app because it's so fast.

My comments were about Google Keep, not Gmail, though I do actually find the Gmail web app pretty slow too - it takes several seconds to send an email. I didn't know there was some kind of secret mobile Web version of Gmail - I get a blank white page when I open your link on mobile tho (using Brave)?

Oh, I totally scanned passed "Keep" in your comment. The mobile web version of that does indeed seem a bit rough. It's been a while since I worked at Google but when I did, Keep was a one-engineer project so the amazing thing is it exists at all.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#235
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't if this true but I have realized whenever I try to access google apps in firefox they are slow and sometimes breakdown but when I try to do it in chrome they just work fine. Like I was trying to submit some work using google classroom on firefox it wasn't letting me upload the work but when I did it in chrome it just worked well

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe that this is not incompetence, but sabotage. Everyone uses Google products; if they work fast in chrome and slow on firefox, people will blame Firefox, not Google. And therefore will eventually switch to Chrome. Good strategy to steal market share.

It's not intentional sabotage; it's positive feedback loops.

Using Chrome, your tooling experience developing software at Google is, maybe, 1% faster. Some of that is core (TBH, FF's engine is old and creaky and webkit-derived browsers out-perform it on all kinds of metrics, though FF has significantly closed the gap). Some of it is that teams develop for Chrome first, because it's the first browser shortcut available. Plus, Chrome has all kinds of extensions built in-house at Google to make your life easier, and those have to be rewritten from scratch if someone wants them for FF also.

So now when you're doing UI development and testing it, your first testbed is always Chrome, because it's what you're using as a developer. So bugs always get seen first in Chrome, and only seen in FF if your team has acceptance testing requirements or you happen to have a team member who uses FF. So the gap widens: now using Chrome in Google is, maybe, a 5% better experience, because you're that much less likely to hit bugs the developing team hasn't hit yet. And th positive feedback loop continues.

The only way I'm aware of to stop this is to force teams to put half their engineers on using FF as their primary browser, and I've never seen a team willing to do so.

FF has die-hard supporters inside Google, but few are so die-hard they're willing to intentionally slow down their own development velocity by using a less-supported browser. Google's too competitive to incentivize that.

(Note: this applies to bugs that crop up between OS platforms also, because that happens---sometimes, the details of Chrome on MacOS surface a bug that never shows up on Linux. Some teams do require one engineer at least to use Mac, because the MacOS userbase is big enough that there's financial incentive to not break it. FF has like 5% market share; there's no such incentive there).

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#236
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, fee…

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

They did the same thing for GC UI. They think it tricks the user into thinking it's fast, instead of making it fast.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#239
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What happened to the Closure Compiler stack? Nothing, I still use it daily at work, alongside Angular (though not together). > how the heck did they end up settling on Angular of all things At Google, It's convenient to use Angular because there are well-documented ways to do all of the normal things you have to do to have a production-quality front-end application, such as building reusable components, dependency…

As a former frontend dev, current google employee, I don't think it would be as technically herculean as it would be politically herculean. Plenty of production apps aren't on angular, but they are in much smaller orgs with less management, or they are in search where shaving ms of time is a job description.

It's really hard to wrangle the amount of feature growth cloud is experiencing and I expect they made tradeoffs to satisfy that first.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#240

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…

I think there is an important difference between what the company "can do" and "do do". Which is to say if it was a focus, surely they could do better, Looking at the article shows that it's clearly possible to do better with focused effort.

I think you're right in that this is the best any individual in the company "can do" they likely run up against organizational road blocks and incentives that run they astray. But if the organization would take this as a priority, surely with all the capacity they have, they could do better.

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