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Seriously? The reason for things being this bloated is that we put every piece of junk in an inefficient web browser, in an inefficient scripting languange, instead of the reasonably fast, compiled ones. Put gmail and facebook into a real desktop qt program and a 10-15 year old laptop would be glad to run them, just like they did to thunderbird, pidgin, msn messenger, and all that jazz. Geez.

Thunderbird is a funny example here, because all of its UI is rendered by a web browser...

It takes quite a bit of developer effort to write good desktop apps, especially if you want to make them cross-platform as well.

Developers are expensive, and getting pricier. CPU cycles get cheaper every year. Spending more cycles in order to spend fewer developer hours is better from the perspective of rational allocation of resources.

That is utterly untrue. Compare e.g. the terse, intuitive GUI tooling you get with Racket vs. the effort required to achieve an inferior result with Javascript and the framework of the week.

You need to hire a dev that actually knows Racket. Companies already have JS programmers around because they always need to build a front end.

Just compare mobile to desktop. Apps abound in mobile because the extra performance inefficiency actually matters enough that it's worthwhile to put in the engineering effort; on desktop the web app is feature-rich and fast enough.

There's a reason people use FB in a browser on desktop but the app on mobile.

I don't mean performance inefficiency, I mean that developing apps in JS is harder and slower than with other frameworks. I picked on Racket because it's possible to build a cross platform GUI app skeleton in less than a screen full of code, with no external dependencies.

And don't underestimate shipping them!

I think there's a generation of people who, since they've never done it, have no idea how hard it is to ship an executable that will reliably run even across multiple patch levels of what is nominally the same OS. Let alone across different OS versions or even OSes. And then even knowing of crashes that happen on end-user boxes, let alone debugging them, is another pile of suck. And upgrades.

The web browser is a light-years better target, because it lets you run the servers yourself. And you can do things like only have one version deployed at a time! No more trying to make different client versions backwards and forwards compatible with multiple server versions, etc.

> Put gmail and facebook into a real desktop qt program and a 10-15 year old laptop would be glad to run them

Depends on how much mail you keep.

I use GMail's storage as it's intended, I don't delete anything other than spam. Over the course of however many years I've been using it my mailboxes have expanded to the point that simply keeping track of the current state of things causes Mail.app to drag my '08-era Macbook Pro to a crawl. That's a native app built by the designers of the platform. Thunderbird wasn't much better. Simply opening either one up basically maxes out 4GB of RAM, and unfortunately the model I have doesn't like 8GB.

I stopped using a local mail client and went back to webmail pretty much because of that.

> What has changed is the volume of data that we generate, send, receive and have to store and process.

I don't think this is true. The volume of data that a regular user generates, sends and receives has changed, but if this were the root of the problem, I'd expect to see CPUs stalling while waiting for the damn network to roll. What we see instead is CPUs spinning hot in order to display the latest list of hotties in your area.

> Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo.

And ten years ago, default settings in scanning software would result in 20-megabyte JPEGs that were processed just fine.

> Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.

I think I first used SSL for email in mutt 1.4 (I might have been using it in Evolution before that, but mutt being mutt, it was a little painful to get it working, so I remember it well). That was more than ten years ago. OpenSSL itself is almost twenty years old, has been quite extensively used throughout its history, and it's the successor of another project.

> Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.

And yet wget-ing a page over HTTPS works fine on a 600 MHz, single-core, low-power i.MX6. So does browsing it on a 600 MHz PowerPC with a 2003-era browser, at least until the banner-carrying JS cavalry comes in.

(Not to mention -- again -- that HTTPS worked just fine ten years ago, it just wasn't as common; but it's well within the processing possibilities of a relatively modest CPU, and it's not like now your CPU is continuously spinning encrypted data for umpteen websites at the same time).

> Ten years there were no videos on facebook,

This one might be true, but videos, real-time chat and real-time video streaming were certainly available on the web, even though not on the (still recently-launched) Facebook.

Dropbox wasn't launched yet, but they hardly invented file storage and distributed access, and I am not going to start explaining why the amount of storage that a webmail provider offers should have no impact over the speed of the client-side code of their webmail interface.

I think you're on to something but I would like to point out

> realtime chat

hasn't really improved over the past 25 years. Someday we'll have federated chat servers, but that seems more of a social engineering problem than a technical one.

But IRC was just plain text with URLs that you had to click on! Now you can post inline GIFs for everyone to see!

... Oh wait, that's actually not an improvement. :)

Also, FTFY:

> Someday we'll have federated chat servers again

> Ten years there were no videos on facebook, no realtime chat, no realtime video streaming. There was no Dropbox, and most webmails used to allow up to 100MB of storage.

Youtube was around in 2005, realtime chat hasn't changed, cloud services and facebook suck anyway, and I had file sharing long before then.

"Everything is encrypted" is fine as well.

I hear you on "everything is bigger now," but I don't see much benefit from it.

> Get over it.

Pff.

> Youtube was around in 2005

1080p? Your point is invalid.

> and I had file sharing long before then

Oh, and how much storage did the typical user have ready access to?

1080p60 is gradually happening, which is what's making my 2009 laptop suck at YouTube.

…that and a depressingly inefficient playback path. (It is not necessary to spin up my fans to play 1080p30, but it is from a Web browser.)

I am not saying nor implying that bigger is better.

Come on, people!

I am clearly stating that pretty much everything is bigger today, and old PCs hsve become slow because they weren't designed to handle such s volume of data.

My post was only an explanation.

> Now, we could ask ourselves, why do many websites have to be so fat?

Lots of javascript to get ad dollars.