A lot of similarity here to roads: The more lanes you add, the more cars drive on that road, but it never gets faster to drive on.
The Bullshit Web (2018)
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#72I don’t really understand the complaint. If you don’t like the CNN website, don’t go to CNN or use CNN lite, which has been well documented on HN. No one is forcing you to visit the site. Also, blocking webfonts is trivially easy at this stage so if you have specific complaints then you can take matters into your own hands with little more than a flip of a setting.
I don't understand the complaint. If you don't have a problem with the web or don't experience those problems, don't comment on this HN thread. No one is forcing you to like it or engage with this post.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#73Very good reading. I always say that when people say "hey, remember when we had 10G hard drives. They were so small". People don't realize that today we have bigger drives but we also have bigger files. Of course our pictures today have better quality, but proportionately we have similar storage capacity as we had in the early 2000's
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#74Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…
I work for a company where we basically sell access to a SaaS behind a frontend powered by React. The customers pay, very well as I'm led to believe by our figures. There's no advertising. Nobody cares that the frontend is slow, because that slowness is because it's an SPA and that's factored in as a necessary cost of business.
In other words, even if you pay, there's no reason to think the software should be any better.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#75Very good reading. I always say that when people say "hey, remember when we had 10G hard drives. They were so small". People don't realize that today we have bigger drives but we also have bigger files. Of course our pictures today have better quality, but proportionately we have similar storage capacity as we had in the early 2000's
That's true of course to some extent, but I don't think the trend will continue on quite as drastically.
Like sure, you have games nowadays like RDR2, CoD, that have inflated to absurd file sizes of up to like 200 GB, compared to only a few gigs for AAA games maybe 10 years ago, but you also for examplehave more powerful hardware and more advanced compression like x265 which can store vastly more video in a lot less space than it was ever possible before since it can be decoded and unpacked in real time.
It used to take 4.7 GB of a DVD to hold a single movie at an abysmal 480p resolution, whereas nowadays you can pack a full HD one in easily a quarter of that size. I'm sure this will get even more extreme as processing power increases.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#76It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…
> a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second
Nope, that'd be a 14 Mbit modem, a relatively high speed for ADSL modems and not something you'd be able to push through those rusty barbed wire fences which make up some of those old PSTN installations. I guess you mean the 14.4k modem has a theoretical speed of 14.400 bits per second.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#77Back in 2008 I was doing a lot of flash banners. Some clients would request the swf file to be as small as 9kb for a multi-scene banner.. It was a pain in the ass but we managed it most of the time with no design changes. We would spend a lot of time tunning image compression params to get the smallest swf possible. Sometimes the image quality would get awful.
Today, my clients just don't care at all if the frontpage is 10MB as long they can have a multi banner hero with a video running in the background.
Side note: I worked on a chatbot widget project where the tech PO was pushing us to move from react to preact to save 8kb on a 60kb script. I said, why bother? There is a 1.2MB image on the front page. Just give me access to the front page assets and I can save 800kb alone on that image.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#78It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…
>> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now
I remember taking 24 hours to download something like an IDE or the JDK.
No way could I do a clean Maven build of one of the projects I work on now with late 90's download speeds.
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#79It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…
I truly wish I had the data to back this up, but in my memory the web is WAY WAY faster than it was back then even with all of the extra "bullshit". I mean the images were like 16 colors and 200X300, and even just text based sites were slower and latency was worse too. Am I crazy here?
Latency was also a contributing factor. 56K modem latency is about 200 to 300ms higher than latency on a pure digital connection (ISDN, 56K frame relay, 56K DDS, etc.)
Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much c…
I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.
Pretty much none. I used Word 97 well into the early 2000's. In the early 90's, my Amiga ran a decent word processor in 1 meg of RAM. Software expands to consume whatever resources are available: memory, disk, CPU, bandwidth...