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Comment by troncheadle | Hacker News Reader

And I would love if my 2001 Honda Accord was compatible with Tesla's autopilot, but I understand it is not a realistic expectation.

I'm not sure why you'd expect the web to be a. Mostly text and b. able to render easily on obsolete devices.

The web is becoming a robust application delivery platform. That is so, so awesome. Most people do not want to be stuck with shitty looking, text only websites. Moving the platform forwards necessitates that it will use more resources. Increased resources availability and consumption over time is fairly consistent across most aspects consumer computing.

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The point isn't that the web should be mostly text, but that it shouldn't comprise of layers and layers of unnecessary fiddle-faddle that doesn't add anything useful to the end-user's experience.

If you can convey what your trying to convey with a JS-less (or even just JS-lite) 2-page website, then don't build a monolithic, scroll-hijacking, background-parallaxing fireworks show of a website, tied together with the most tenuous of Javascript libraries.

I'm all for the web as an application delivery platform, but not every website, or application, needs so much bulk.

That's not a problem with the ecosystem though. That's a problem with bad developers. The same is true for any technology and programming language.

They may be robust but the user experience still sucks. JS heavy web sites are unresponsive and turn my 3 year old MBP into a vacuum cleaner. Facebook is the best example. I can barely load the web site without the fans spinning. Firefox can't handle it at all. It is unusable for me.

That is crazy. I use Facebook on a 5 year old MBP with no problems. I have Ad Block Pro and U-Block, but even without them, my computer can handle Facebook just fine.

ublock origin is the only adblocker you need. Adblock Plus does the same thing but is less efficient and lets some ads through by default, and ublock is abandoned.

Don't run two ad blockers, they will just use more resources for no benefit.

Something is wrong with your MBP.

It isn't just him. Facebook slowed for whatever reason on my PC too in the last half a year.

4.5 GHz 4670k, 16Gb of tight timings ram.

Might be more Firefox than your macbook or the web. I've noticed (while developing an extension) that Firefox feels noticeably more sluggish than Chrome. Safari somehow feels even faster than Chrome, but I'm too tied to the extension ecosystem of Chrome to switch.

I have the same experience with Firefox on OSX. I noticed that it isn't an issue with the dev version of Firefox with multiprocess turned on.

Firefox is definitely partly to blame. Chrome does work better and Safari is probably the best of the lot.

Safari is definitely faster than Chrome on Mac.

It also uses significantly less power.

Alas I dream for the day when Safari adopts WebExtensions

I'm using Chrome but I tend to agree. A particularly painful area of Facebook is Buy/Sell pages. It slows to a crawl if you scroll through too many listings. Even on my 6 core X99 system.

Ubuntu on chromebook user reporting. I cant complain much on the latest chrome even with my 2 gigs of ram and much less powerful processor.

This experience is not unique to the web, from what I've seen. Apps that aren't well made can easily drop frames on a 3 year old iPhone.

> Increased resources availability and consumption over time is fairly consistent across most aspects consumer computing.

Worth remembering this is the case for people interested in tech. The local library still runs Vista on a 10yo system. My parents will use Android 2.x until the phone does not turn on anymore. Bandwidth updates don't apply to many people living outside of towns. Etc. It's been a long time since we've reached a point where an average person shouldn't need more bandwidth and power to look for information online.

And BTW, you can have beautiful text-only websites. These 2 properties are not related.

> The web is becoming a robust application delivery platform.

This was our mistake. I don't want garbage shoved in my face. I want to read. And that's it.

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