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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why anyone would design a website so complex that there is a noticeable benchmark difference between $100 processors and $1000 processors.

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They wouldn't, but they do. Frameworks upon frameworks upon frameworks, and nobody knows what happens underneath. If you are a gmail.com user, have you ever tried the plain HTML version? The difference in speed is mind-boggling. Yes, the Javascript version is doing more, but it should also be able to be faster as it doesn't have to load the whole page each time.

Fun anecdote: I tried using newegg.com to build a PC based on these new processors. My 2 year old Macbook Pro almost melted, with only about 6-7 tabs (all pointing to different parts on newegg.com) open. This is kind of ironic: you need a really powerful PC to use a web site which sells powerful PCs. Catch-22.

No. I do not want a web page to be able to eat up more than one core. Frankly, I feel like I want to try a browser extension that "locks" any web page within 20% of a core performance.

These developments make me believe that browser-based apps, that were "around the corner" 10 years ago, is a lost cause. Despite numerous optimizations done to Javascript engines and despite tremendous performance of modern CPUs, browser-based apps continue to crawl at a speed of early IBM PCs of the 80s. Even a 286 circa 1992 running DOS apps felt faster than newegg.com in 2017 on a modern Intel i7.

Sure its tempting to blame "lazy programmers" and bloated frameworks, but bad engineering, tight schedules and tech debut have always existed, for all platforms, all the time. There's just something fundamentally broken about apps built on asynchronous loading of dozens of UI components from a remote location and assembling them into a coherent UI screen as the pieces arrive.

Similarly: running with e.g. noscript reminds you that internet speeds actually have improved over the years. Pages load in instants rather than seconds, it's wonderful.

The view that web apps can only be for simple things is a dated perspective, but also probably a symptom of the fact that it's not really possible to take full advantage of many CPU cores in a web application.

An in-browser photo editor or 3D modeling software would be expected to run much better and apply complex effects or render models much faster on high-end hardware. It sort of works this way with WebGL content, but even there you're limited to feeding the render pipeline with a single thread.

I want the web as a platform to succeed. It is the only truly universal runtime and with some care it could offer very few performance trade-offs. I sincerely hope tools like servo and others unlock this potential.

From first principles, one shouldn't expect the menus or other simple rendered parts (things not involving backend traffic) of a user interface to have any perceptible lag on a sub-100 processor, be it an application for web, mobile or desktop. Most likely they shouldn't involve millions of computations or hundreds of megabytes of memory reads.

But looking from the other end, somehow they definitely do. And we're probably wasting trillions on this problem. Wasted time, wasted electricity, wasted batteries, wasted computers and phones.

I think the web should succeed as a platform for so-called "content", but I don't see why the web ought to be best for progams or applications. I still hold the "dated" belief that native is better.

The "universal runtime" idea doesn't make sense to me, it's just a single language (javascript) that everyone implements bad, competing interpreters for on different platforms. I don't see why this has to be the only or best way to distribute cross-platform applications.

Granted, web apps can be used for complex software. Maybe someday soon we'll install an Electron runtime and install the software to run on it, and it'll be good enough for most things, doubly so moving forward into webassembly.

> An in-browser photo editor or 3D modeling software would be expected to run much better and apply complex effects or render models much faster on high-end hardware.

Isn't that kind of a tautology?

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