Comment by bflesch
1 month ago
How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration.
This is extremely bad engineering and these engineers should be called out for it. It takes a special kind of person to deliver this and be proud of it.
Once they made their millions at Google these engineers will be our landlords, angel investors, you name it. The level of ignorance is unfathomable. Very sad.
The expressed goal is emotionally impacting UX. They clearly got strong emotions out of you. Mission accomplished!
It's not just a laggy mouse. I scrolled through half a page of a completely black screen. On a high powered machine with lots of bandwidth and low latency.
The designers here have lost the plot.
I'm on mobile and scrolled through most of this waiting for images to load, and wondering why I didn't see any.
Very unusually, everything is working and smooth on Fennec F-Droid for me. Usually it's the opposite but it happens more often these days.
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Working perfectly fine in LibreWolf on macOS. Huh.
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Can't even move the mouse while scrolling lmao
Macbook air M1 scrolls text in Firefox fast and smoothly...
I don't think it's performance bottlenecking so much as that the site is capturing the cursor and taking over its physics/acceleration, I think? Which probably isn't noticeable as long as the acceleration is similar to how your OS shell is configured, but was definitely noticeable for me on GNOME.
“then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration”
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And they are very well paid for all that work!
I could do way better and I am not even a web developer. Their talent is social networking and/or securing the job somehow. :P
Couldn't agree more. It's basically a page with some pictures in it, and everything in it loaded so late for me that initially I wondered why they left so many large empty spaces in the page.
This could work and be fast with tech from at least 20 years ago, probably even more. It's really incredible this is output from a company valued in trillions.
Indeed. Google is the worst at designing around lazy loading. Their UIs in Drive, Youtube Music, and others essentially become unusable once the list gets long. God forbid you don't have a super low latency connection straight to the data center. Even holding open a web socket to fetch "next pages" doesn't cut it in most of the real world. If you're gonna lazy load (which I admit sometimes does make sense) you need to aggressively fetch the next page. If I have 200 files in my Google Drive and they're sorted alphabetically, and I want one that starts with "y", the UX is so unbelievable bad that I sometimes wonder if I'm being pranked. I'll have to wait through a dozen "next page" loads that only load a screen worth of files at a time, and each pause makes me wait a second or two. That really adds up when I just want to scroll to the file. Scrolling through large playlists in Youtube Music is utterly painful nowadays too.
Please people, test your UI on low bandwidth connections, high latency connections, and both conditions together. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near this bad. HN performs way, way better than these modern javascript heavy lazy loading apps, and I think there's some important insights in that sitting right there for the taking.
Scrolling back in google chat is another horrendous experience. Trying to see a message you sent last week? Scrolling up is like “here’s 5 messages”… “here’s 4 messages”… “here’s another 5”. It’s like a college student wrote it.
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The crazy thing is, theyve written one of the best guides on the internet on how to do an infinite scrolling list: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/infinite-scroller
Especially when metadata is so cheap to send over. Even if you have literally thousands of files, there's no reason why they couldn't send it all in a single JSON at first page load. Gzipped it would be nothing.
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If you hate how Google Drive works get excited about searching in the new Outlook. Nothing like being able to not sort your search results and only getting 200 at a time and having to page through them when the search returns anything useful at all.
They also seemingly went out of their way to prevent ctrl/cmd+click on several anchor elements in pages like https://m3.material.io/components.
Arrreg!! So many of these React (et al) sites, with poorly re-built elements and break the built-in functionality! The A tag works perfect! But no, we need three or four nested divs, components, and many lines of JS to end up with something worse.
Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?
With every client-side routing framework or library I know of, the trivial happy path will involve using their provided link component which performs client-side navigations on click but also renders an underlying anchor tag with href (and works with cmd-click, middle-click etc.).
You really have to go out of your way to break this, and I don't think client-side routers deserve any blame for this. Anyone who is ignorant or careless enough to ship broken links using a client-side router would be just as likely to break anchor tags with their own hand-rolled JavaScript.
> Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?
I'd say developers who aren't web developers trying to do web dev seems to be the cause of this. Understanding the platform you're developing for is pretty much table stakes for any developer, and not understanding when to use <a> is pretty much the most basic mistake you can make. Literally the first things you learn in web development is about linking to other pages, yet somehow still people fuck up putting a <a> into a webpage properly. Boggles my mind.
React makes it as easy as any other library/framework, but if you don't think about what ends up in the DOM, and why certain things have to be a specific way (often for accessibility and user experience), then you'll screw up even big and expensive projects like this apparently. 2x boggling since this project is literally all about user experience yet they get the most fundamental part of the web wrong.
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If you render an <a> in React (or Angular, which I think they're using here), it's just an <a>! You have to do extra work to fuck it up!
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One of my pet peeves is people blaming things on React that have nothing to do with React. I see this quite frequently on Hacker News. Using an a tag or not has nothing to do with React.
This website is awful. It is extremely sluggish, laggy, and annoying. On top of that, I had to wait a significant amount of time for it to load. No thanks. I thought the tab is going to be killed...
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration.
I have a dual GPU setup with one GPU dedicated to browsers, the cursor still freezes while scrolling and jitters after that and has noticeable lag even when not scrolling across both Chromium based browsers and Firefox on Windows. I'd compare it to a video game with really bad aim acceleration where the mouse just feels sluggish and uncooperative.
I like that people are studying what works and what doesn't in UI/UX, but I'm not sure why they have to break the basics in the process of doing that - that is quite distracting from the overall experience and makes it kind of miserable, just as opening a very JS heavy SPA or what have you would.
Probably because they seem to be recreating the cursor on the webpage for that cool effect. Even on a good computer I have some input lag, and going from very low input lag and 120fps cursor to that it feels slightly off. Although I might be imagining it just because it looks different than the normal one...
Browser don't support replacing cursor images natively for obvious reasons. You have to use JavaScript for that.
CSS supports replacing cursor images natively.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor
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The only obvious reason I can think of is security concerns (some sort of user confusion), but JS wouldn't help with that. What other reasons are there?
I am so happy this is the top comment.
My experience was...
Skim through sentence after sentence of award-winning inanity like "Expressive design makes you feel something" as my powerful Macbook stumbles and wheezes...
Then think: "I like how default scrolling makes me feel!"
Not just the technical aspect here. I read through the page and nothing of any measurable importance was stated. What problems did this solve? What benefits does this bring to users? I guess I was expecting more from Google. The initial Material design system made some good points and addressed some issues for UI design. This just seems unfocused.
It comes across as AI-generated diarrhea, without any point. Maybe I am just too dumb to recognize talent?
This comment speaks to me on an almost spiritual level. It highlights the fact that it isn't engineering prowess for people to get these jobs.
Yeah it’s kind of weird that “UX” morphed into a non-engineering role. Like, the interface to the user is still part of the software product. It seems like that sort of role would be best executed by the subset of engineers who lean towards visual design, as opposed to the subset of visual designers who lean towards computing.
Leetcode monkeys with little dev experience will do that.
The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript.
As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities than plain HTML and CSS.
Confirmed. It felt OK on my M1 Max laptop but on my 2019 Intel laptop it feels like laggy shit. This is the stuff that makes you want to quit programming and go pick berries in the woods.
They had to add that 500ms of input latency to feel like you're really using Android.
I am on Debian linux with 128 GB of ram running the latest brave browser and the cursor lags for me also.
I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you?
It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to.
And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.
I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own.
This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app:
https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/
I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course.
The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.
My hot take is that material started with only one goal in mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of the bathroom
OMG I thought it was something wrong on my end, privacy add-on or whatnot. Glad to see they just lost it.
One of the good things that came out of COVID was Google Docs suddenly getting a whole lot better. Why? Because Google engineers finally had to use their tools like the rest of us do, and found out very quickly that Google Docs on normal consumer internet connections sucked.
Google as a company, and in many ways Silicon Valley as a whole, is designed around being a bubble that is ignorant of how the rest of the world actually functions.
Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before COVID.
"used Docs internally" is not the same as:
> on normal consumer internet connections
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I have an 8 core CPU and a 10 TFLOP GPU and the cursor on this site lags in Firefox but is noticeable smoother in Edge.
It's usable (as in smooth-ish) but still visibly laggy compared to the normal mouse, in Chrome, on my hefty M1 Pro macbook for work.
Also... I fucking hate it. I don't want my mouse to stick to buttons, or to change colors constantly.
The "emotion" the this site generated for me was "anger". If this is the pitch for the new design system, my journey of not using Material is coming to a middle.
These are UX researchers. This is not an engineering project.
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy?
FWIW, the link is to basically a glorified demo page _of the design_ of material 3, not a real world implementation of that design. So, that page's performance is not at all reflective of what you'd see when using a relatively recent android app that uses flutter's material components (https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material) or one of the many web component libraries that implement MD.
The lag you're noticing is also likely entirely due to their weird cursor behavior. If they simply removed that, I suspect the page's performance wouldn't be at all noticeable.
If the people who came up with this design can not make the demo site performant, site which will be the first impression of your new design language for most, I don't think there is much hope for the rest of us.
But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their users.
I think the people who implement google's html/js/css for random articles aren't particularly connected to engineers working on android/flutter widget performance, and the MUI developers aren't even google employees (mui/flutter being the main implementations of MD AIUI). I'm not at all concerned.
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This page is a promo page of the ux design language people as created by UXD/UXE role people.
It's basically like looking at a Figma export and complaining about the performance of it; any actual implementation would be done for any user-facing products realistically will be entirely unrelated both technologically and organizationally.
Firefox on a mid-range Android phone here and this page didn't even feel particularly heavy to me. Everything loaded before scrolling into view and no stuttering while scrolling whatsoever.
Ignorance is a key trait for angel investors.
Why does everything reek of late capitalism? Even design doesn't fail to emanate a distinct "dystopian megacorp" stench.
The update to Android 15 was TERRIBLE. I updated it the past days, it's literally a bootleg copy of iOS interface. I despise it so much, much more than the move from Material Design to Material You. Everything occupies so much space, there is less information available for you, and important things like changing the music in your lock screen is confined to a tiny space.
At least they got the Expressive right in the name now, Material Expressive (HATE).
Every update is worse than the last. I did the same, and I'm particularly loving turning bluetooth on or off requiring a swipe and three button presses instead of one. And I thought the quick settings regressed in 14 when they went from icons to huge buttons, but now they've gone for less-huge buttons with always-truncated text in.
At least with Windows it alternately gets much worse then a bit better again with each version.
Regarding the monstrosity in the link, yes it does make me 'feel things' - things I will refrain from typing out lest they be construed as threatening behaviour.
You can say a lot about Android 15, but I have a Pixel and an iPhone 16 Pro and they do not look alike... at all? Pull down the notifications and quick settings, it does not look remotely like iOS. The same for all the native apps.
I wonder if you have Samsung One UI 7 or some other skin. One UI 7 looks a lot more like iOS, but there is little Google can do about that?
I have One UI 7. Most screenshots I've seen from Android 15 looked like One UI 7, though, so that's the reason for comparison.
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To be fair, if you try to paint something on a webpage that follows the mouse cursor it's gonna be laggy af even in really simple toy examples. The blame may fall more on browsers.
I'm not understanding this comment. I'm running this site on my Pixel 5 and on Firefox on a Thinkpad W530 (12+ years old) and it's flying on both. What part is laggy?
Hmm, works just fine on my pixel 6a in chrome.
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy?
The lag and that cursor makes it feel like trying to type with mittens on.
I wish I could upvote you ten times.
I only came here to rant about how no one should mess with my mouse cursor.
I'm with you there.
People complain about how crap UX is now, and how computer illiterate the general populace has become but I firmly place the blame on forcing the web into an application delivery platform, abandoning all operating system HIG and conventions so that every app is now it's own unique snowflake that breaks conventions.
IMO people would struggle less if it was all native apps that followed the OS. You learn your operating system's conventions and shortcuts, and those translate into every app you run - but then marketing people got their hands in things, and suddenly everything had to be branded and unique, and we are worse off for it.
This is classic enshittification. Make poor software to nudge people into buy new hardware supposedly handling it better. Rinse and repeat.
Also shittier software means you can hire cheaper workers to plough on.
As someone who had a landlord that was a google software engineer, I concur.
If you try to move the mouse while scrolling the cursor freezes... jfc bring back 2010's Google.
Wow, yeah just tested that and it's really bad. I guess it's a strange thing to do, but a good way to test how the cursor hijacking code gets stalled when scroll is active, and I'm guessing they're doing UI updates on scroll so the thread is getting thrashed there.
Even just making a circle motion with a mouse produces a lot of stuttering. I just did the same action on HN and it's as smooth as you'd expect on a CPU from 1995 and beyond.
It's because the developers have extremely fast and graphics accelerated hardware. I can't notice any lag whatsoever on the mouse cursor on my M2 Pro but.. But a lot of folks won't have top end HW.
I am on a four core also with a (non-recent) NVIDIA graphics card and its laggy...
That's crazy. In many ways we are moving backwards.
I have no cursor lag and I'm on a 2019 Intel MBP.
I’m on an iPhone, and I see no cursor lag!
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m1 pro using firefox, I can notice the cursor not being smooth, and if I move the mouse while scrolling then it lags hard
You are just part of the problem. In which companies do engineers still have the final say? Almost none.
At almost all the companies I’ve worked with engineers might not have the final say but they’re still on the hook for blatant performance issues
Exactly.
What do you expect from an OS that has a trash can for a logo?
because they're regarded MBA controlled clowns and engineering is no longer valued but showing some flashy new bs rounded edge design on a button are ffs
[Ticket Closed] resolution: user should buy a macbook pro with at least the M3 processor
/s
SecOps put CrowdStrike's Falcon and Windows Defender on our Macs so we'd have about 20% CPU left for our actual dev work. That's not an exaggeration, staring at the System Monitor is all you can do when everything is locked up.
The Android emulator sucks the remainder with ease. The app performs better on a low end Android burner phone then our dev machines so at least we know our users are having a reasonable experience.
You just triggered some PTSD... years ago I had to send my CTO a recording of my screen with keyboard input lag on VSCode because CrowdStrike was eating up all my CPU.
I asked him if it was a good use of my (expensive) time to wait 30 seconds for characters to appear on my code editor.
Luckily he gave me a "special exemption" that allowed me to shut that monstrosity down !
I had a couple of customers that deployed 7 endpoint security tools of the "hook into processes and inspect everything" variety. The exact mix was customer-specific, but if you're wondering what that looks like:
* Stand-alone "best of breed" endpoint DLP
* Stand-alone "best of breed" EDR
* Process whitelisting tool
* NAC posture assessment agent
* Three different AV agents
This is not even counting their VPN client(s) or the third party disk encryption agent they used.
I marveled at how they even got all of the agents to coexist, let alone have enough CPU left for people to do their jobs.
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It's so bad with my work laptop that I find myself doing work on my personal laptop and git patching it on my work laptop.
Also doesn't help that because I don't feel comfortable with all the monitoring software on my work laptop, I won't use the services I personally pay for with my work browser because I don't want the IT department scraping my personal passwords.
The web pages are working properly on my 5-6 year old laptop running Ubuntu and Chrome. Maybe it doesn't work in Safari or on Macs?
It's working perfectly fine on my m1 Mac + firefox.
My comment was a joke
Images loading is lagging on my M3 pro with 48gb ram on fiber
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By calling them engineers you're only feeding the ego.
Any idiot can build a page that loads, but it takes an engineer to build a page that barely loads.
Next time I'll be ranting against overengineering, I'll be stealing that :D
The mouse cursor / general performance complaint is valid but:
> spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration.
These systems don't exist unless you go out of your way to turn off graphics acceleration. In which case that's kinda on you. It's like ranting about sites requiring javascript. It's just not a realistic expectation to have of anything anymore.
> In which case that's kinda on you.
What if I turned it off because it makes my machine more stable? Why do I have to choose between crashing and jank?
What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
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