Comment by sharikous
3 years ago
It's one of the things that are infuriating for technical folks but meh for everybody else.
In the days of programs taking forever to load or web pages downloading images slowly we knew what technical limitations were there.
Now we know how much sluggishness comes from cruft, downright hostility (tracking), sloppy developer work, etc.. we know this is a human problem and that angers us.
But for non-technical people it hasn't changed too much. Computing wasn't super pleasant 25 years ago and it's not now. Instead of waiting half a minute for Word to load they wait 4-5 seconds for Spotify to load. They were never interested in Notepad or Cmd or Paint. It doesn't bother them that now they open slower than in 1999.
It's very surprising to me how much non-tech people are willing to put up with. They'd patiently wait for their phone to freeze for a solid 5 seconds because they installed an antivirus on it, and then proceed to try to use it at 2 FPS.
The quality bar is so low now, it went underground. It's so easy to compete with the status quo. You just pretend that all the "progress" that happened in software development technologies over the last 15 years didn't happen. And, most importantly, you treat JS as a macro language for a glorified word processor and don't try to build actual applications with this stack.
Many non-technical users assume blame for slowness and clunkiness. So many times I've heard self-blame when helping out family. "I shouldn't have so many pictures on my desktop" (there are 8 pictures). "I just can't figure out these phones" phone is dark patterning or has hidden functionality six menu items deep and behind a swipe/long press. "I never should have let it update, it's never been the same" - a forced update.
I have heard that gem for about 2 decades now.
When the reality is more cpu/memory usually cleared things up. In the old times a good defrag did not hurt either.
People blame themselves when a lot of the time it is rubish software/hardware.
Then you have the other side of that coin. The yes clickers. If it asks a question just answer it however you need to do for whatever it is you wanted to work. Surprising number of dark patterns on that gem... Then they hand it to you and expect a miracle in 5 mins. Sorry this is the first time I have every seen something like this it may take me a few mins to figure out what is wrong before I can even begin to fix it.
1 reply →
Oh the "too many pictures" thing is a favourite of my older relatives. They think it must be "weighing it down" or something and they have to delete pictures to make it go faster.
1 reply →
My parent comment is based on real events. A relative did actually install an antivirus and a bunch of other crapware on her Android phone. The thing was so agonizingly slow I just didn't understand how she used it at all.
But that phone ran an Android version from before Google started seriously cracking down on apps running background services without restrictions. Modern Android is pretty robust in this regard — with a few exceptions, an app can't run in the background without showing a notification ("foreground service" is how the API calls it).
There wasn't much self-blame. She just assumes that technology is like that, complicated, unreliable, slow, and full of magic. It's nice when it works, but not a huge loss when it doesn't. She would also indefinitely quietly put up with things not working until someone asks and finds out, then I'd fix it.
I'm even more amazed at my IT colleagues (so "tech" people) putting up with windows' doing god knows what constantly. We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.
They also don't bat an eye when lazy devs recommend we should reboot the servers daily. They put up with laggy VNC when they have a perfectly good remote desktop solution set up.
I guess, if it sorta kinda works, people just get used to it. The fans blowing like a jet engine. Apps taking forever to load. Windows getting stuck for no discernible reason.
> We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.
I think some of this is just poor defaults. Every windows laptop I've had in the last 10 years has defaulted to a thermal management profile that ran the fans aggressively. Usually you have to install some crapware from the manufacturer (it's "Dell Optimizer" on my current machine) that allows you to change the thermal profile to quiet mode, and it's totally fine after that.
1 reply →
The terrible thing about modern macOS and Windows is that they keep indexing your files in the background. Microsoft and Apple somehow consider that index-based "instant" file search better, yet it's actually extremely terrible and mostly useless. The file search in XP, that traversed the file system every time you searched something, worked so much better than anything modern. Right now I use a Mac app called "Find Any File" that does the same thing.
On other stuff Windows does in the background, I managed to disable Defender and the updater on my VM by deleting their files via the recovery mode command prompt. That seems to be the only reliable way to do that.
2 replies →
I have to put up with laggy VNC sadly, but not by choice.
Latency is one of the things my iPhone owning friends complain the most about when they try another phone (usually a Samsung loaded to the brim with bloatware)
This. My daily driver is a geriatric iphone 7. When I bought a new Galaxy A33 a few months ago for my mum, I took it for a spin for a day. I was shocked by how much lag there was, for example when scrolling. I know the A33 is a low-maybe-mid-tier phone. But it was brand new, whereas I bought my iPhone used in 2017 when the 8 was already out and maybe even the X (if not, it was right around the corner).
It actually was a very weird feeling because the scroll itself was way smoother than on the iphone, probably thanks to the somewhat higher refresh rate. But there was a noticeable and weird lag between my finger movement and the screen contents moving. Also, scrolling would sometimes randomly glitch for no reason in basic apps, like the settings.
8 replies →
I agree though I’d say non-technical people are naive and so don’t know why the experience is not ideal or fun or smooth. I suspect if asked the right questions, non-technical people would also complain.
Computers have always been just useful enough for as long as I’ve used them (since the 80s). We’ve _always_ put up with a lot of nonsense and pain because the alternative is worse.
The thing is, users do care, they just don't understand how to articulate it. The Doherty threshold is real, and it's baked into our physiology as humans.
So it does bother them, it's not 'meh', it's just the status quo. Every once in awhile you run across an application or website that's fast, and it's jarring how much better it feels to use. That's something worth striving for.
The strange thing for me is how much time we spent in the early 2000s discussing website responsiveness and quick loading times as ways to improve user engagement and productivity. Although I can't provide any statistics that I'm intimately familiar with, I recall reading numerous case studies where improvements in responsiveness resulted in significant productivity gains for end users. If I recall correctly, this wasn't just about dial-up connections and multi-second page loads. This belief was still prevalent even when discussing sub-second responsiveness.
Perhaps the direction of the case studies started to shift, and we stopped hearing about it. However, it seems to me more like we pushed hard to reach a certain level of speed in our computer usage, then became complacent, and have been regressing ever since.
I don't have any data on it but I think people gradually came to accept the slower loading times as a reasonable cost, in return they got true multimedia and the fat client experience (first with flash, then jquery and so on) which was impossible in hypermedia.
Currently node unifies (or seems to unify) the FE and BE into something that looks pretty worrying (or rather alien) to someone who grew up with LAMP stack and CGI for dynamic content.
Enter htmx to turn the tide again.
>Enter htmx to turn the tide again.
Doesn't htmx use server side rendering for everything? So every interaction incurs a network roundtrip?
2 replies →
I've literally started using Word and Excel less often because of just how long it takes them to start up. Like, I just want to write a quick document or edit my CV, why do I have to sit here and wait for 10-20 seconds??
Electron apps don't have to be shit; VS Code demonstrates this. But the VS Code people are also insanely performance-focused; your average app developer does not care.