And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.
My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you’d have to wait even more.
It’s a two-fold curse - first, every single program these days isn’t a stand-alone program, it’s a glorified web browser. Hand-in-hand with that is the fact that, in order for these webpages-disguised-as-programs to behave in the way you normally expect a modern UI to act, it has to have five layers of javascript frameworks, each adding its own pile of cruft to the slagheap that is modern app design. It’s horrendous and I hate it.
That’s because in the Celeron 266-300A-350 days we overclockers were as gods! And if you had just moved from a modem connection to a university LAN connection like me, it was peak computer usage.
The way you describe performance then and now makes me wonder if you’re thinking mostly about running SUSE back then and if you’re talking about a Windows (Teams) machine now. I definitely remember things like the right-click menu taking forever to load sometimes on old windows & HDD based systems.
Using Linux on my work & home PCs now after being used to Windows on them first, they have that responsive feel back.
I use Arch BTW.
Teams runs on just about anything, which is part of why it’s so slow.
Back in the day Windows 98 was definitly faster than SUSE on my machine. Drivers back then on Linux were rough and if you wanted to play a game you’d need Windows or DOS for sure.
I only had 56k dialup back then, no fast internet for me.
Gotcha. Something about what you said made it sound like the standard windows flavor to me.
Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so used to running teams in a browser tab that its lagginess just feels like a slow loading webpage refresh, while the rest of the system’s GUI is flawless.
Oh my fuck, my work has a website and I hate it. There are multiple fields to fill out on a page, and every time you fill one field, the entire page automatically refreshes. I can’t just tab from field to field and fill things out - I have to fill out a field, wait for the refresh, click in the next field, fill it out, wait for the refresh, click in the next field…. until I’m done.
Next, for some reason everything is a floating window and there is no scroll outside of it. Which means that if I click the page wrong, the floating window moves, and I can’t move it back. I lose all progress because the only way to fix it is to refresh the site.
Then there’s the speed. At the end of the day, when everyone is using this site, it gets extremely slow. You’d think this would be a predictable issue that the company could be proactive about, yet every day, right when we’re itching the most to go home, every one of us experiences the dreaded lag. I hadn’t seen lag this bad since I played Sims 2 on an old computer.
In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it’s gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. “Why shouldn’t we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days”
The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.
The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it’s now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.
Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.
There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.
The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.
Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros–rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape–would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn’t happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.
While there’s an overhead to safer runtime environments, I wouldn’t put much blame there. I feel like “back in the day” when something was inefficient you noticed it quicker because it had a much larger impact, windows would stop updating, the mouse would get laggy, music would start stuttering. These days you can take up 99% of the CPU time and the system will still chug along without any of those issues showing.
I remember early Twitter had a “famous” performance issue, where the sticky heading bar would slow systems down, because they were re-scanning the entire page DOM on every scroll operation to find and adjust the header, rather than just caching a reference to it. Meanwhile yesterday I read an article about the evolution of the preferences UI in Apple OSs, that showed them off by running each individual version of said OS in VMs embedded within the page. It wasn’t snappy, but it didn’t have the “entire system slows down and stops responding” issues you saw a decade or so ago.
Basically, devs aren’t being punished (by tooling) for being inefficient, so they don’t notice when they are, and newer devs never realise they need to.
One thing I love about the Linux/FOSS world is that people work on software because they care about it. This leads to them focusing on parts of the system that users often also care about, rather than the parts that Product Management calculated could best grow engagement and revenue per user over the next quarter.
I’m not arguing that all these big frameworks and high level languages are bad, by the way. Making computers and programming accessible is a huge positive. I probably even use some of their inefficient creations that simply would not exist otherwise. And for many small or one-off applications, the time saved in programming is orders of magnitude higher than the time saved waiting on execution.
But when it comes to the most performance sensitive utilities and kernel code in my GNU plus Linux operating system, efficiency gets way more important and I’ll stick with the stuff that was forged and chiseled from raw C over decades by the greybeards.
“If you have resources, why shouldn’t MY website be using 100% of it?” - web developers since 2017
Sad part about this is it’s not comic hyperbole. It’s just literally an average online experience.
I came here to say this. Often times the pop ups are so bad that I just leave the site. Its almost never worth it
I often decide I don’t actually need what I was about to purchase when I run into this, and I close out the browser tab and move on.
…I guess in some weird way, the poor experience benefits me!
I can hear it now. My kid’s generation is gonna be giving each other shit like "wait, you bought this off a website? Like a millennial?"
Ah, yes. I keep hearing more and more of people buying merchandise through TikTok among some other seemingly app-only interfaces.
I miss “old internet” :(
Two years ago I bought one pair of shoelaces from a website that looked like the old internet. It was fucking great.
I’m totally not looking at temu
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we have redlib tho
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ugly af
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It’s just literally an average online experience.
I am going to refute that claim as I don’t see monitors falling out of windows everyday.
And I am pretty sure people are doing “online” stuff.Not with a good ad and annoyances blocker. I reformatted my hard drive recently and the few pages I had to visit before installing that really opened my eyes to how bad it is, and how most people just live with it being. Hadn’t experienced much of any of these the past several years, and it has gotten a lot worse since I did. I’ve noticed that most people I know who are not that tech-savvy have stopped going to websites or even trying anything online other than a very small selection of apps, and now that makes total sense.
Remember YouTube before ads? Seriously profit motive and infinite growth ruins everything. I want to play Luigi’s mansion every time google asks me to switch to an app or sign in when I google something. Like fuck off.
The fake chats all seem to use the exact same image too. Apparently this one woman works for dozens of support sites if you were to believe she was real in the first place.
c/overemployed
Likely because those sites are built by the same provider.
I work for a car dealership and all of the other dealerships of the same brand in our region use the same family of providers, We -used- to have the faces of real employees pop up on the chat thing until they got too busy to handle it
now its the same stock photo of a person who likely doesnt even exist
The second last point is the most enraging to me. Either show me a loading overlay or don’t move the items a single pixel!
And the worst part is that the correct way works since HTML 1.0. Give the element a width and a height.
Literally enshitification. Often when these companies focus on one aspects and not others, it leads to such results.
Was the cookies popup really 3 years ago already?
They’ve been around for over half a decade.
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it’s called “enshittification”, atleast that’s how i refer to it
And, the sites end up eating battery.
Yeah, but they would have done that in 2005 too, if you were using them on a device with a battery.
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OK. Someone please drop a comment to this post telling me how to make all the “sign in to Google” and “Allow Essential Cookie” popups to go away. uBlock filter list?
There’s a cookie popup blocker in the filter lists by default. You can just enable it and it will dissapear 90% of cookie popups
Consent-O-Matic should make the cookie popups less of a problem at least.
Oh man that sounds so great
Click link
Already installed🗿Feels chad man.
If you encounter web pages where consent-o-matic doesn’t work, you can report them.
Though it might take a while if the page is unpopular.
You can block the Google popup by adding:
||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframeTo your uBlock Origin filter
should of used a rust based browser
You obviously also need an account for everything. This requirement is only communicated at checkout.
i always look for the ‘guest’ checkout option. some merchants have it, and i’ll choose them over somewhere like azn if the price is reasonably close.
Yeah but then they pull the old you need to enter everything to get the delivery costs. I understand they need my address to figure out what shipping would cost. But they also require my name, email and phonenumber before showing the shipment costs. So annoying, it makes comparing prices between shops impossible as some shops have higher prices and free shipping, where others have super low prices, but then fuck you on the shipping.
I love using rockauto for buying car parts for this reason. Basically the whole site works like it’s 2002, in a good way. Enter site. Click the items you need, with easily searchable indexes. Get multiple different brands and choices of same part. Go to checkout. Enter email and zip code you used last time. Enter CC info. Done.
That’s the point at which I assign a shop it’s very own email address and give it a bad phone number (not incorrect, unrouteable)
it is bad enough on some websites to make me wish I could just use a mail catalog thing
It used to be that the ads, viruses and tracking were on the web pages, but now we are so blessed that they are built into our browsers and operating systems! Talk about optimization!
Don’t worry, they are still in the web pages too
Honestly like 2/3 of this is handled by the right Firefox plugins but that JavaScript Shuffle bullshit drives me INSANE
MY PHONE IS AN HTML ONLY ZONE
Yeah… I tried that for a while. You don’t go very far on modern internet with JS disabled
Use noscript and whitelist urls as needed. Pages that dont need javascript dont get to use it, and for pages that do need it, you can make sure it only runs exactly what it needs to.
