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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?

#271

Post by chubot »

The real answer is that Google's promotion and hiring processes don't respect front end developers. Systems programming and distributed systems are considered "hard" and worthy of reward. This explains why Google's front ends are bad, and it also explains why there's a proliferation of non-composable distributed systems inside Google. As a second order effect, the design of those back ends also make it harder to make fast front ends.

And front end devs are often using tools designed for back end devs, like the Bazel build system. (Compare that to FB having online / incremental compilers for Hack, as far as I understand.)

So they either don't get the best people working on front ends, or the people they have aren't doing their best work because they're looking to move into a role that may be more respected or rewarded.

Before 2005, Google built two of the most innovative AJAX apps ever: GMail and Maps. People may not remember how awesome they were. When GMail came out, it was faster than Microsoft Outlook on desktop, which I was using at the time. You would click and your message would appear instantly, which was not true of desktop apps. The app startup time was also better than desktop! (i.e. seeing all your messages from a cold start)

When Maps came out, people didn't believe that the scrolling and zooming could be done without a Flash app. It also had incredibly low latency.

But somewhere along the way the company lost its leadership and expertise in the web front end, which I find very sad. (I worked there for many years, but not on front ends.) The slow Google+ app circa 2011 was a great example of that, although I believe the structural problem had set in before that project.

I don't think there's any question that FB and even MS are significantly more accomplished in these areas. They're the "thought leaders" (React, Reason, TypeScript, etc.)

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edit: Also, if you want to remember what Google UI looked like circa 2005, look at sourcehut: https://man.sr.ht/

It was fast, simple, and had a minimalist style (though some people mistake that for no style). There is probably a generation of people who are scratching their heads at that claim, but yes that's pretty much what Google used to look like: the home page, which lacked JS; News; Groups; Webmaster Tools; Ads front end to some extent, etc.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#272

Post by logicslave »

wrsh07 wrote: post #150
levosmetalo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone assuming that just because someone works for Google has to be competent? Solving algorithmic puzzles is not an indicator or actual technical skills. To me, it looks like a work of incompetent developers led by incompetent technical managers upon requirements of clueless and ignorant product managers.

I think by attributing it do incompetence you're missing the incentives problem. Others point this out, but Google just has no incentives to improve this UX. Think about who makes the decisions to use Google cloud and what criteria they are using. The snappiness of the gcp ui is not likely to be near the top of their list

No incentive? AWS is crushing them, the UI is the product.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#273

Post by SilasX »

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?!

It still has the pseudo-vi key bindings that you can turn on in settings. I've been really satisfied with how fast it is to do anything because of the key commands + relatively quick response and autocomplete (except click on links because I have to turn off Vimium for Gmail).

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#274

Post by polytely »

solarkraft wrote: post #131

Many people here seem to think this is due to incompetence, I don't. It's due to a lack of focus on speed as an indicator of quality. I think Google devs are perfectly capable of building fast frontends, maybe they even want to, but if they're not rewarded for it (but are rewarded for "getting things done") they won't. It's management's fault.

But that is just managerial incompetence and the inability of the devs in question to push back against that managerial incompetence.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#275

Post by pier25 »

solarkraft wrote: post #131

Many people here seem to think this is due to incompetence, I don't. It's due to a lack of focus on speed as an indicator of quality. I think Google devs are perfectly capable of building fast frontends, maybe they even want to, but if they're not rewarded for it (but are rewarded for "getting things done") they won't. It's management's fault.

Isn't that incompetence too?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#276

Post by tracker1 »

onion2k wrote: post #178
solarkraft wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the best they can do. It's the best they will do. There are companies with higher (arguably actually acceptable) quality standards, but they're few and far between.

It's not the best they can do. Without seeing them do better there's no way to actually know that. You're assuming they're capable, but you could be wrong.

Considering as a company, they created the first very fast JavaScript engine, massively usable browser implementation and UX features along with other applications that are pretty complex with UIs that aren't excessively slow to load, evidence is contrary.

I think it comes down to their best and most experienced developers and designers are focused on other areas with higher visibility, engagement or critical function.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#277

Post by polytely »

pimlottc wrote: post #111

The G Suite (now Google Workplace) admin console GUI is also pretty slow. What makes it worse is that you have no other choice - it's the only complete tool for administrating G Suite. There are APIs for some things, but quite a lot is only available in the GUI, and new features always show up there first (if they ever make it to the API at all). There isn't even a way to import/export settings, so you have to painst…

G Suite is the worst piece of shit I have to use in my work and I curse the developers every time I'm forced to use it. It's like they went out of their way to make the worst design choices at every point. It would be impressive if it wasn't so depressing.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#278

Post by dullgiulio »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart. Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component…

This comment makes little sense. AWS is even less uniform when it comes to tools, exactly because of its organic growth. This clearly has no impact on its success nor its features.

Google does have a problem with management and the org-chart, but not the way you think.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#279

Post by tracker1 »

StillBored wrote: post #214
manigandham wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is a problem with the dev environment. If it takes a lot of effort to make an application performant then most of the applications written in that environment will be slow.

It isn't so much about environment as it is experience. It is incredibly easy to bring in libraries and components that bring the entire jungle for want of a banana. Especially graphing/charting libraries. It's also about focus, the focus is on the feature not the performance/feel.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#280

Post by markbnj »

Is it slower than the AWS console? We use both and my subjective sense is that it isn't, but I regularly visit just a couple of specific sections in the AWS console whereas we use the Google console for a lot of things daily. I'm sure front end engineers could find a lot to complain about in the GCP console's design and implementation, but the tl;dr for me is that it works and it's fast enough for the things I need to do. In areas where the console is limiting I am probably working off the CLI anyway (daily operations within our k8s clusters for example).

Probably worth noting as well that for both consoles the underlying APIs are broad, complex, and evolving at a dizzying pace. I can only imagine the technical and organizational challenges around keeping these consoles up to date and improving them where possible.

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