Comment by PaulHoule
4 years ago
The inconsistency doesn’t bother me so much as a lack of immediate responsiveness when I start a program.
Sometimes I can wait 30 seconds after clicking on the menu before there is visual indication that the program is really loading. In that time I don’t know if I should click again, reboot the computer, walk away for 5 minutes for the services to settle, or start diagnosing the problem and take remedial action.
Part of a ‘computer users bill of rights’ is getting rid of all hourglasses and spinners and always having clear visual indication that progress is being made.
That bill has never been passed it seems, in the mainstream that is. I've been wondering how to design a system that would focus more on this aspect. Opportunities here.
Look at how you get correct progress bars for free with Hadoop. If it is that easy to do for a huge distributed cluster with 100+ machines imagine how easy it could be to do on a small scale.
What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait?
One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2, have 8 in the cache, the rest loading efficiently, but the last DNS lookup hangs and causes a 30 sec timeout.
If customers knew who the blame then the brand destruction would progress that much quicker; and I wouldn’t be facing the sisphyian journey of proving over and over to sheeple that that the javascript CDN slightly improves median latency at the cost of vastly worse tail latency.
…that’s because you have a set job with constraints and machines dedicated to that sole task in a controlled environment. Personal computing, third party drivers, background tasks, etc all impact this.
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there was a contravariant scheme where web became chromeless, everything was ultra cute, flat and abstracted away while the web became more and more sophisticated (js loading, cdn, reactive/components) too
back in the days you had more information about the technical details of browsing (and prior to that, some browser exposed GC/ram use as a toolbar button)