Open browser
Browser demands updates
All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.
Close ten tabs you didn’t open
Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.
Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.
Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.
Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.
Back button doesn’t work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.
Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.
Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.
Add to cart. You are not logged in.
Log in.
CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.
2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.
Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”
Yes. It crashes.
Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.
Give up and use your phone
4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.
App store ad appears for the site you’re already on
Clicking “x” opens the ad anyway.
You close the phone browser
Go outside
Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”
- 1 year
I think it’s interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you “you just won a free iPod!” and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):
Yet you don’t hear people complain about that as much today. It’s like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don’t see pages out in the open.
- 1 year
Those popups were so prolific that all browser developers responded by implementing popup blockers.
Which kind of led to the absolute mess of banner ads (and the adblockers created in response) that we still have today. I dare you to deactivate your adblocker on any of the major (commercial) news sites.
Honestly like 2/3 of this is handled by the right Firefox plugins but that JavaScript Shuffle bullshit drives me INSANE
MY PHONE IS AN HTML ONLY ZONE
- 1 year
OP just has crap internet. It absolutely does not take noticeable amount of time for JavaScript to download.
1 yearI experience the “search box deselected after starting to type” problem on Amazon pretty much every time I use it, even if I have the page up for several minutes before starting to use it. Its like the search box.is specifically designed to fuck with me.
Multiple platforms, multiple browsers, it’s like they dont have anyone actually looking at their UX.
- 1 year
And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.
My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you’d have to wait even more.
- 1 year
In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it’s gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. “Why shouldn’t we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days”
- 1 year
One thing I love about the Linux/FOSS world is that people work on software because they care about it. This leads to them focusing on parts of the system that users often also care about, rather than the parts that Product Management calculated could best grow engagement and revenue per user over the next quarter.
I’m not arguing that all these big frameworks and high level languages are bad, by the way. Making computers and programming accessible is a huge positive. I probably even use some of their inefficient creations that simply would not exist otherwise. And for many small or one-off applications, the time saved in programming is orders of magnitude higher than the time saved waiting on execution.
But when it comes to the most performance sensitive utilities and kernel code in my GNU plus Linux operating system, efficiency gets way more important and I’ll stick with the stuff that was forged and chiseled from raw C over decades by the greybeards.
- 1 year
The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.
The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it’s now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.
Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.
There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.
The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.
Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros–rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape–would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn’t happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.
While there’s an overhead to safer runtime environments, I wouldn’t put much blame there. I feel like “back in the day” when something was inefficient you noticed it quicker because it had a much larger impact, windows would stop updating, the mouse would get laggy, music would start stuttering. These days you can take up 99% of the CPU time and the system will still chug along without any of those issues showing.
I remember early Twitter had a “famous” performance issue, where the sticky heading bar would slow systems down, because they were re-scanning the entire page DOM on every scroll operation to find and adjust the header, rather than just caching a reference to it. Meanwhile yesterday I read an article about the evolution of the preferences UI in Apple OSs, that showed them off by running each individual version of said OS in VMs embedded within the page. It wasn’t snappy, but it didn’t have the “entire system slows down and stops responding” issues you saw a decade or so ago.
Basically, devs aren’t being punished (by tooling) for being inefficient, so they don’t notice when they are, and newer devs never realise they need to.
