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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

debugbear.com

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Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#361

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…

I would've expected a shared design library that had all the standard widgets, and then each page / area of the UI to be implemented and managed by the individual teams.

The dependency version drift could be solved by forcing every part of the application to use the same version, though obviously this increases the complexity of each upgrade.

My understanding from following angular development was that prior to each angular release they effectively beta test it across Google's estate - I think this is partly why the upgrade process is so smooth, because it wouldn't be tenable otherwise. The same pattern could be applied to a shared design library

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#362
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 availabl…

> those have to be rewritten from scratch if someone wants them for FF also. What? Why are they not standard WebExtensions?

Because (a) most of them predate the standardization of WebExtensions and (b) that API still isn't standardized enough to make building against it as cheap as building a chrome specific extension.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pet peeve I have is getting to prime video. They own primevideo.com, but it just tells you to watch on Amazon. It's also the first result when you search (on google) for amazon prime video. There's no direct url to get it (afaik).

amazon.com/primevideo and amazon.com/video both go there. The situation with primevideo.com is strange, but it seems to have something to do with non-US territories?

PrimeVideo.com is the website (in addition to apps on mobile and living room devices like TVs and consoles) where customers outside of the US, UK, Germany, and Japan can watch Prime Video. In the aforementioned four countries, customers can watch Prime Video directly on their amazon.* retail website instead.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#365

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…

disclaimer: i work in google cloud, but on the apps side.

One thing worth noting here is that google pretty famously has a monorepo and single-version policy. Meaning: while you may be right about the subteams/orgchart meta-issue, it's not actually shipping multiple versions of the same subcomponent. There's just one version.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#366
post #365

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…

disclaimer: i work in google cloud, but on the apps side. One thing worth noting here is that google pretty famously has a monorepo and single-version policy. Meaning: while you may be right about the subteams/orgchart meta-issue, it's not actually shipping multiple versions of the same subcomponent. There's just one version.

and i should add that this constraint is one of the reasons why some products get discontinued. right now, I'm dealing with migrating a dependency that has some breaking changes in an old section of my codebase that nobody has touched in years. I have to change it, because the dependency is changing, and I cannot continue to depend on the earlier version.

Happily, it is a simple enough update (and frequently these changes are automated by whomever is actually changing the library). But when this is something that needs extensive reworking, the project might get turned down instead.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#367
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding for Android has taught me that is definitely not the case. They managed to make a mess worse than JEE, the native layer took 10 years to finally use Android Modules, they keep fixing the header files, still don't have proper C++ bindings and force everyone to write JNI boilerplate by hand.

Android is really the worst platform for developers. Context? Let's make a god object, and also create application context and activity context, and screw liskov substitution principle. Also create a library to fix all our bugs in all versions of the platform, but also have a shit ton of bugs. Microsoft did nail windows phone apis, 10 freaking years ago, too bad it didn't survive.

Yeah, keep using my Lumia and playing with UWP.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and be willing to take a whole-page refresh when the user transitions from one page to another. This should be the default! What a world we live in.

I prefer sites like this. Also give me plain links that I can middle click on to open new tabs. Let my browser manage my workspace, please don't make a window manager inside my browser window.

> [G]ive me plain links that I can middle click on to open new tabs.

[Stampede of +1s]

It's really sad that WeB ApPlIcAtIoNs seem to be synonymous with broken no-choice-but-left-click navigation. Yes, I consider that broken.

I only remember to right-clicking the tab to try duplicating it about half the time, and that works maybe 60% of the time I do try it.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who regularly uses other e-commerce front ends, I find Amazon to be quite cluttered and messy. Also it‘s surprisingly difficult to quickly find a specific product.

I am simply happy that Amazon has not embraced the ridiculous trend of low-information density with large amounts of whitespace. Give me a cluttered UI that has everything available any day.

Totally. Cmd+F FTW, if you wanna search.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep seems to have gotten slower and slower over the years too - the web version is practically unusable on mobile, not just because the UI design isn't responsive (!), but because it's so painfully slow. Boggles the mind how Google web apps have performance issues like this.

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.

5.5 sec for that link to show anything other than a blank white page on a Pixel 4a.

I thought it was a broken page at first.

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