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The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

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Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#381

Post by TeMPOraL »

xj9 wrote: post #315
Razengan wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…

In my opinion, if there is something that the web can't do as well as native it is a bug. Web technologies can already do most of what you are proposing, including notifications. There are some performance issues, but they are well on their way to being fixed.

Thing is, those performance issues matter. In user interfaces, they mean a lot. And they're also important when you're trying to do actual work. I'm yet to see a web app that wouldn't choke on the amount of data a power user may need. Yes, that includes Google's office suite, which is so horribly laggy when you put more than a screenfull of content into it that the very experience justifies switching to Windows and buying Microsoft Office.

What we would need, if the browser is to become a platform for actual productivity tools and not shiny toys, is a decent persistent storage interface - one that would be controlled by users, not by applications, and that could be browsed, monitored. And most importantly, one that would be reliable. And then, on top of that, a stronger split between what's on-line and what's off-line. Because some data and some tasks should really not be done through a network.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#382

Post by timr »

dasil003 wrote: post #379
timr wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just off the top of my head: Delphi, Smalltalk, Java, Flash, Mono, and many different cross-library thunks like wxWindows, Qt, GTK+, and so on. Two seconds of googling will find you dozens.

Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation. None of those ever had any hope of crossing the chasm to ubiquity, they only gained as much traction as their vendor had market clout on a limited set of platforms for a limited time period.

"Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation"

And web browsers are different how, exactly?

(Other than the fact that "the web" is a mish-mash of hundreds of different "standards" with varying levels of mutual compatibility and standardization, of course.)

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#383

Post by Sanddancer »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #314
r1ch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still 84 KB of highly compressed javascript code to parse and execute. Even on a 4.4 GHz CPU core and a cached request, jquery takes upwards of 22ms to parse - that's just parsing - not even executing anything! Now add a bunch of other frameworks and utility scripts and your 100ms budget for feeling "fast" is gone before you even reach the HTML content.

How long does it take you to start Word versus loading Google docs? Has everyone gone insane? The web is absolutely incredible and JavaScript is absolutely killing it as a portable application language. Remember the dark days of flash? Stop complaining.

Yes, I remember flash, when it was trivial to save things I found with a couple of clicks. The typical webapp is ephemeral -- no way to save it, no way to run it a few years from now after the site it was hosted on goes bye-bye. The typical webapp is terrible at interoperability -- getting it to work with native libraries is pretty much impossible unless you've written your native code in one of the few languages that have transpilers available. The typical webapp is terrible at multithreading -- webworkers are a horrible hack, with no way to send/receive objects between worker threads other than routing everything via the main thread. When you start wanting to do anything interesting, the web's a set of blinders and shackles, keeping you from using resources.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#385

Post by dasil003 »

timr wrote: post #364
dasil003 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.

How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." ...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously). I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an appl…

> That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model.

Here's the crux of our disagreement. You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I (despite your presumptuous implication that I'm a millenial), have been around long enough to know that will never happen. Web standards will continue iterating, and companies will continue building apps on the web, even the most powerful app platforms today such as iOS and Android for all their market power can not stop this force. The reason is because it's a platform that works. The man-millenia behind the web can not be reproduced and focused into a single organized effort. You might as well argue that we replace Linux with Plan 9, it doesn't matter how much passion you have and how sound your technical argument is, Linux, like the web, is entrenched. It's gone beyond the agency of individual humans and organizations to become an emergent effect.

That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better, but it won't come because of angry engineers wringing their hands about how terrible the web is. It will come from something unexpected that solves a different problem, but in a much simpler and more elegant way, and over time it will be the thin edge of the wedge where it evolves and develops into a web killer.

Maybe I'm just cynical and lack vision, perhaps you can go start a movement to prove me wrong. I'll happily eat my hat and rejoice at your accomplishments when that time comes.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#386

Post by TeMPOraL »

pink_dinner wrote: post #285
pessimizer wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software that builds and displays the experience is the browser. Most webpages could be cut by 90% and be visually and functionally indistinguishable. For 90% of the last 10%, the functionality cut out would improve the user experience, especially on mobile.

..and the server, protocols, and language used to build that web page. It's not like a powerpoint presentation.

Which only highlights the point of how overengineered it is. You shouldn't need (and in fact you don't need) several-layer tall stacks of programming languages and support equipment to render something that's less functional than a PowerPoint presentation.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#387

Post by TeMPOraL »

jccalhoun wrote: post #338
snowwrestler wrote: post #110

The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer. Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating. Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Do…

that's because the moon landing was staged! wake up sheeple!!!!!!

Yes, it was recorded in a sound stage on Mars.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#388

Post by pikzen »

morgante wrote: post #370
delan wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with operating systems.”

And why do you think web development has become the dominant form of development?

Because literally any child can start developing, and then grows up and pulls every library under the sun because the language they use is a piece of crap, without a single thought about the consequences?

Thankfully node.js is bringing this clusterfuck to the desktop too.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#389

Post by TeMPOraL »

supergauntlet wrote: post #341
dclowd9901 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does it take you to start Word versus loading Google docs? Has everyone gone insane? The web is absolutely incredible and JavaScript is absolutely killing it as a portable application language. Remember the dark days of flash? Stop complaining.

This is disingenuous - he's obviously referring to image and text articles, not complicated web apps. Obviously such a website is going to take longer to load, just as complex native applications take a while to load. But to claim that because Word takes a while that it's okay that A WEBSITE WITH LITERALLY JUST TEXT AND IMAGES is 18 megs big and takes 6000 ms to load is fucking stupid.

Also, Word takes a while to load, but then works fast and is responsive - as well-written native apps are by default - and doesn't suck up your system resources. Something which can't be said about many websites "with literally just text and images".

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#390

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #372
timr wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." ...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously). I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an appl…

I'm in the middle of reading through The Unix-Haters Handbook and I must say that the arguments against web-as-application-platform (and the attempts to defend it) and are eerily similar to what this book reports about arguments against Unix that were circulated in the 80s and early 90s. Sadly, the fact Unix managed to a) win, and b) fuck up the computing world so badly that people don't even realize how much we've l…

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