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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance.

I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't.

If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related, or the fact that some page is loading 300 ad-tracking scripts and one of them is accidentally blocking. The only time I really notice client-side execution performance is when someone posts a cool 3D browser example on HN and things slightly slow down a bit on my phone when there are a couple million polygons or whatever. Even then, things are fine on my laptop.

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100% - people cared about browser performance and usability until Firefox and Chrome solved 99% of the problems users would ever face (tabbing, consistent rendering, security, beauty(!)) and now it’s a market that’s immune to change.

Wait until adblockers stop working, and see many people start seeing YouTube ads again. Will they agree to stay on Chrome?

My only use for chromium is youtube. I only watch a handful of channels but things are getting ridiculous. Sometimes I get ads every minute. Every minute! Just the other day I got served 5 ads in a row after a simple fast forward. I gave up TV more than 20 years ago and this crap is way worse.

What can I do without letting them in my actual browser? These people are crazy.

I highly recommend Youtube Premium. Also heard from creators that they get paid more from Premium views than from free accounts.

This, as much as people may moan, is the answer. Either that or go subscribe to Nebula or whatever not-YouTube platform your favourite YouTube channels are publishing to.

Content production costs money, in some cases vast amounts of it, and while advertising is a terrible solution to that just not paying is an even worse one. If everyone blocks ads then nobody gets paid, and nothing gets produced.

Its not just about moaning, it's about paying it forward. I'm not sure when people decided everything should be free - under a certain income sure we should be subsidized, paying for things is a way of voting for the way you want to see the world.

If you don't pay you don't have a choice. "Not using" is not enough, because you still need to support what you do use.

I pay for premium but still have to use vanced to avoid the sponsor segments that are in literally every video now. I totally understand why people wouldn't bother with premium until youtube offers a native sponsorblock-like alternative

"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots."

I watch youtube through firefox with adblock on

uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock is what I use.

>I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't.

It is our job to care so non IT people don't have to.

To a degree yes but acting like anything that uses <500MB of RAM is a disaster goes beyond what is a reasonable concern in my opinion.

I think you got your greater than sign the wrong way around? Consider a lot of non-tech people don't constantly upgrade, and still rock 4GB systems, at least an eighth of that resource is a big ask for a sloppy app (unless it is the only app they use on the device).

A 1GB system should be sufficient, and apps should be less than 100MB.

For games etc yes 32GB+ is fine but we went the wrong way thinking what we have is acceptable.

Yeah my sign is the wrong way. My bad.

I’m not sure if this is true because there are many many many examples where improving client performance increases conversion in e-commerce sites.

https://web.dev/rakuten/

I am an insider to this space and I think you are probably an outsider.

That link doesn’t say what you think it does.

LCP before optimization is a cause of what? For example, a complex product page. Well of course that will convert worse, because the product is complicated.

But not too simple! 0.5s performs as bad as 2s.

Anyway, in my real experience, conversion fluctuates so much across products, the range greatly exceeds the impact measured by aggregate conversions by LCP, so your interpretation is wrong.

But it doesn't say 0.5s performs as badly as 2s. It lists 5 ways it performs better including a 33.13% increase in conversion rate. What am I missing?

98% of performance problems on my machine are traceable to a crappy Electron video communication app (skype) eating 4 cores and still having hiccups galore. Switching to a different app usually fixes the issue.

I'm pretty sure the average user cares about "hey this app sucks, but this other app gives me the same functionality without issue".

You can hope they never discover other apps for work-from-home, but frankly, if that's your business model, you're doing it wrong.

> My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance.

Where have you lived? Asking because “normal” varies a lot by geography.

> If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related

I guess if you are on HN, you wouldn’t be considered “normal”?

Framerate, response time and loading times are all very important to the user. But yeah loading times are a distant third.

"I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance."

Eh I think technical sales people overestimate how much users don't care, the feeling of "normal" users don't care is primarily driven by a narrow age bracket of folks who haven't had enough time to form an opinion (ages 20-25).

As this age bracket thinks of itself as "normal" and tends to live in its own bubble, it dismisses the general distaste for technology as being "not technological", when in fact the older generations already have expectations which it recognizes that technology is getting worse, not better.

I think this is true in one sense and false in another.

It's true because users often don't complain about or even consciously notice poor performance. So if you are trying to sell a product, advertising performance benefits doesn't work well. People don't think they care (except in extreme cases).

But it's false because even moderate performance differences actually have enormous and easily measurable effects on user behavior. So if you care about providing value, then performance is one of the most important things, and it's consistently overlooked because it doesn't sell.

People complained about the amount of RAM NeWS apps took up, too. In retrospect we realized NeWS was a missed opportunity to revolutionize networked-app UI.

Electron is the dream of NeWS for current-era hardware and software. In the future we won't even blink at the space it takes up.

I've never seen the acronym NeWS before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

It was one of the competitors to X back in the day. Basically all the window painting and client-side logic would be handled by an extended PostScript interpreter, which would receive and run the client code from the application, much like we do with HTML/CSS/JS today.

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