Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

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>Modern front end javascript frameworks are made to offload the compute from the server to the end user

Which is why I roll my eyes every time someone recommends using vintage laptops from the days they were user upgradable (ThinkPads, MacBooks, etc) and scream from the top of the hills what a great experience that is and why everyone should join in on that.

Yeah I get it, as a HW engineer and tech enthusiast and big right to repair advocate, I also appreciate how upgradable older machines were and how easy to repair they were and I still keep some old machines kicking around, but the modern web is simply a jarring experience on those old machines compared to the experience on modern machines with the latest processors that I cannot in good conscience recommend it to people, if they can afford something decent.

If you live in Vim and the terminal and just use your laptop to SSH into stuff then yeah, they work just fine, but for consuming content on the modern web or heavy productivity tasks I can never recommend staying on vintage HW if your time has any value and if you can afford the upgrade to newer HW.

It's just not a nice experience and with most web-devs using M1 class machines it doesn't look like things will improve for the users on less powerful hardware which I guess here lies the problem.

In Hollywood/Netflix productions, video mastering is done on super accurate $50K monitors but they use in parallel a $300 Walmart grade TV, set to the shitty "Vivid" setting to make sure the final content also looks good on the average TV average consumers have in their homes.

I think the same thing should be done in web development. Feel free to develop the front-end on your kitted out $6000 M1 MacBook Pros but testing should also be done on your average $500 Walmart laptop to check it runs well.

It's fascinating how most of hackernews is arguing against making usable products for 70% of the internet users. Go on https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats and look at the screen resolutions used in africa, india, china and most of the non developed world. Do you think these devices are in any means powerful?

Let them eat Megabytes.

>It's fascinating how most of hackernews is arguing against making usable products for 70% of the internet users.

Don't know who you're referring to but I wasn't arguing against making usable products. I'm not even a web developer. I merely stated the facts grounded in the real world. Most of the web is dogshit slow. What is more likely to happen from the two: 1) Web-devs starting to optimize their code to run well on old hardware or 2) People upgrade to HW that can run the current web a little bit better.

> used in africa, india, china and most of the non developed world. Do you think these devices are in any means powerful?

I find it funny the moments the HN users try to shoe-horn the poverty of the third world into various arguments, as if that's somehow a consideration for most people in rich countries on how they conduct their lives. Spoiler alert, most people only care about what happens in their surrounding, and in their personal bubble, and that's it, and most app-devs and web-devs care about the userbase they can monetize the most, which is why some app devs, especially in the US, never port their apps to Android as well and are fine with only with the more affluent iOS majority userbase. So bringing up the third world poverty and inclusiveness in such contexts feels deeply ironic to me.

Yeah, I'd like that too, that web-devs and app devs would not discriminate between iOS and Android and all websites would run great on older machines, but that's not the truth. The truth is that most websites developed in the west are not optimized property therefore heavily favor those with modern machines and some apps are even Apple exclusive to the detriment of those left out.

I've seen Facebook offer Lite version of their mobile client and messaging apps but that's only due to their huge userbase in the developing world, which like ou said, owns mostly low-end devices.

I can't believe people are missing the obvious here.

Why are websites now less and less optimized? Because people use apps and APIs. Ergo, they're just fetching the data set.

CloudFlare Pages and GitHub Pages are bringing in a new era of fast, static websites. It isn't all doom and gloom. Furthermore, plenty of people are now using static site generator plugins with CMS like WordPress so that there's no database access required for each page load, which is really what slows things down.

Yeah, this is why I turn more and more to alternative front-ends like Invidious for YouTube, scribe.rip for Medium, teddit for Reddit, and so on. On that note, I'm actually starting to feel like online services should be required to allow (or be forbidden from explicitly blocking) alternative front-ends. I should be allowed to interface with APIs with whatever client I want, and I am beginning to think that should be a right. Currently people using software and online services are basically completely at the mercy of software vendors who have basically zero motivation to respect the user. I'm not really willing to subject myself to very much BS on the web anymore and without these alternative front-ends I'd just completely opt out of the respective services.

Oh FWIW my personal site is static files built with Hugo SSG, and a minimum of JS. I don't think I will ever use a server-side technology for my personal site again. I do think a growing number of users are "seeing the light" in this regard.

>CloudFlare Pages and GitHub Pages are bringing in a new era of fast, static websites.

Static site hosting with a brand name smashed onto it is a new era? GitHub itself btw is broken on palemoon for one thing. Not here to defend palemoon but it does show one thing: GitHub's frontend is over-engineered.

If you think this is simply "hosting" then you're out of touch with why it's interesting. Instead of being served from a central server ala a VPS or colocated box, or even a central server augmented with a CDN, it is instead served from a ton of geographically-local servers. Oh yeah, and it starts at free, with unlimited bandwidth. This is without getting into Workers et al.

Not a GitHub Pages user, also not a Palemoon user, so couldn't say, but Palemoon is niche. There's not even an official macOS version.

>it is instead served from a ton of geographically-local servers.

All owned by the same company. I'd agree about it being revolutionary if it was on some distributed p2p network like freenet, torrent, ipfs etc. But to call some company doing things in a slightly different manner a new era? Come on

I said "interesting", not "revolutionary", to my knowledge anyway. If I did say "revolutionary", even I don't agree with me.

It's the "WorldWideWeb".

Yes, it's the "WorldWideWeb", not the "EqualityWideWeb". Wealth inequality is a thing, and it exists even in the west. But how does that help us? The web is still slow at the end of the day for those on older HW. Does crying about it help how? Or does upgrading to newer and better HW help those who can afford to?

And if western web-devs cared so much about the experience of the users in poor countries, why haven't they optimized it already to run better on older devices?

webdevs ≠ corporations

What's your point exactly?

When most people go online they go to consume content on the websites of the biggest corporations like Google, YouTube, Netflix, Reddit, Facebook, TicTok and so on.

That's what most of the internet is for most average consumers.

The fact that indie devs exist who care about well optimized websites doesn't change this.

The cormobidty of keeping a service alive and renewing it by forcing more and more unwanted features on the users is a fact. Every manager wants to parade around the new shiny thing without listening to their development team. It shows that you are not a webdev because you don't know the inner workings of a big tech corp if you really think it's just some indie devs that care about speed and optimization. The devs very much care.

By web-devs I didn't mean your average employee but any company doing web development and making bad decisions.

I have nothing against the individuals doing web-development, it's just a job to eat and pay rent.

How many developers in the US work at companies targeting a worldwide audience? Out of those that do, how many have one site that targets a worldwide audience?

My web browsing VM host is a Thinkpad X230 with an i7-3520M and it runs browsers just fine. It only slows down when I have too many loaded tabs in firefox, and that is mainly the firefox process itself (other VMs are unaffected).

I'm sure if I upgraded CPU, things would become a bit quicker and I would perceive the older performance as slow, similar to every computer upgrade from 1990-2010. But it's really not as dire as you're making it out to be.

Also the javascript heavy web is for the most part an entertainment medium. I'm loading a link to Twitter (one of the most pointlessly heavy sites) and it takes several seconds, I'm already wasting time and so wasting slightly more isn't a big deal. If I wanted to optimize that path, I'd just not click the link to Twitter in the first place. Or if I needed to use Twitter professionally, I'd install a responsibly-developed third party client.

(Having said that the M1 is interesting for its low power consumption)

How often do you actually browse with old hardware? I have a 2009 MacBook Pro that I and my family use almost every day for basic web browsing. It has no trouble with Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, PBS Kids, even newspaper sites. We do block ads, which probably helps.

Is it as fast as my M1 MacBook Air? No, of course not. Is it unusably slow? No.

>How often do you actually browse with old hardware?

On a daily basis.

It's a matter of perspective in the end. I upgraded from a notebook with a 6th gen Intel chip which I thought was fine to a notebook with a 5th gen Ryzen and the difference blew me away and made me realize how sluggish things were on my older machine in comparison.

There's nothing wrong per se with my old machine, on it's own it's fine, but the newer on is so much faster in comparison, it's night and day for me.

For my parents the old machine is fine not it's own but they're coming from one with a core 2 quad so there's that perspective.

Yeah, I do most of my web work on $2k-8k workstations but then I test on a pretty broad range of devices, including phones, laptops (currently using one from 2013 to type this msg), "obsolete" OSes and even text-mode browsers and of course screen readers. I believe in the broad universal accessibility of the web as was originally promised and try to ensure that same degree of accessibility whenever possible. It's hard to gauge how common that mentality is, but I hope it isn't too rare!

$500 Wal*Mart laptop? Why be rich uncle pennybags when you could instead use an RPi4?

The only common tasks on the Pi4 that have unacceptably slow performance are web browsing and any IO speeds for the primary SD card.

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