Her: my laptop’s getting slower Me: well... your laptop’s not getting slower; it’s as capable with apps like Word. you’re doing more work in websites than 3 years ago, and *those websites* are getting slower. Her: ok yes but my laptop is still slower Me: *shakes fist at web*

It’s interesting that my wife is seriously considering switching to iOS (an iPad) because her MacBook Air is too slow. I could write a whole newsletter out of this.

pro - doing stuff on the web means you can use your computer or any computer, so the task is more portable con - feature set is often less and responsiveness/speed can also often be much worse con - all the ad targeting

It’s a mid-2012 1.8GHz Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. It’s perfectly fine for native apps on El Capitam. But the web (Safari 11.1) is goddamn slow on it. Ghostery is also on, blocking most.

I really do think this is a consequence of workflow moving to the web - or more generously, newer more useful workflows on the web.

I got myself an iPad Pro for work last year (lots of diagram drawing) and my wife’s been looking covetously at it for the Pencil. But one thing I haven’t worked out with iOS on Giant iPad yet is being able to look at two tabs in a safari at once.

You have a couple options: 1) Tap on a tab and drag it to the right of the tab bar, it should create a new space for it kinda like Split View 2) Long-tap any link and choose “Open in Safari Split View”

WHAAAAA

Is this the real reason? My phone gets 'slower' when I see a new one I like 😁

Oh, we’ve talked about it. I’m pretty sure it’s the real reason. This is borne out of genuine frustration.

IIRC, If you long press the new tab button it gives you an option for split view.

Seriously?! Where was I supposed to learn this?!

💡 How about splitting Chrome on one side and Safari on the other?

I thought of that and couldn’t bring myself do it yet because it’s such an ugly hack.

Dan.

Hey, it’s really good for taking notes with!

(sorry, to clarify, I think the ipad pro is great - it's the web thread I'm all 🤨🤔🧐 over 😉)

Hey you come tell Robin!

I have empirical data that the web is getting faster. Well, @slightlylate has better data but he's working really hard to make things not suck (and my evidence suggests he & friends are succeeding).

it's not outside the scope of my position that: * the web in general has gotten faster * web applications may have individually gotten slower and other web apps may have gotten faster * net new workflows enabled by the web (ie hard/impossible w/o web) can "feel" slow

I mean, I'm assuming that it's not outside scope that alex has empirical data that the web as a whole is getting faster* but presumably there's individual sites that are still just doggone slow * I dunno, I'm imagining page load times for everyone using GA?

The web is getting slower because no matter how much faster we make Chrome, developers abuse users with ever-larger piles of JS: httparchive.org/reports/state-… ...and JS is the most expensive thing: infrequently.org/2017/10/can-yo…

I fantasize about a "never unknowingly slow" mode for Chrome: under a set budget, we load whatevs. Above that limit, we pause/block, log it as an error, and prompt users with a "tap here to continue" in case it's too broken. /cc @taloppenheimer @ojanvafai

Do iiiiiitttt I mean Apple does it for 32bit apps on iOS so you can just say you learned it from them

So real talk: could this be an iframe / script parameter? Because unlike Chrome on an arbitrary page, we know which parts of the page are critical to show to the user and which bits are optional.

Please do. Start with third-party content, and then we can see how it goes.

I KNEW IT ALEX AGREES WITH ME or rather Alex already knew it and I agree with him

Lol well in some web devs defence, our pages load over twice as fast as they used to, and we measure against slow mobile devices. 😎 (We have a long way to go but native apps these days do 3d compositing on the GPU for button presses or vr or something 😆)

Preach it brother!!!! I take flack for pointing this out all the time. Especially from enterprise developers. An average page load near 20 seconds is completely unacceptable.

- I want this <div> in red - ...thinking - npm change_color install > installing ... 4kb/300kb

It's just like adding lanes to freeways. In the long run it makes traffic worse.

I’d be interested to see the same chart for mobile app sizes. Anecdotally it seems like app sizes have ballooned too.

Actually, I just found that chart of app size over time: medium.com/googleplaydev/… Looks like it follows the same pattern as the Web has.

except app startup isn't dependent on wire size and JIT to nearly the same degree. We have applied modern software engineering to the ecosystem that can least afford it and users suffer as a result.

And most of this is to run ads that nobody will ever click on except bots.

I’d be interested in studies of the 1st party vs 3rd party split for these 300-400 kB of scripts. Also the functionality vs ads+tracking split.

We know that (based on @HTTPArchive) sites with more third-parties tend to have a much slower time-to-interactive. We might be able to dig into the 1st vs 3rd party attribution for heavy scripts too cc @rick_viscomi @paulcalvano

Did something similar for my SmashingConf talk - basically grab timeline JSON for HTTPArchive run, and run it through 3rd-Party-CPU abuser (github.com/andydavies/3rd…) @paulcalvano’s approach might be quicker though

Hmm. Is Chrome the only browser now? Is the web only accessible by Chrome? I must've missed that memo. 😐 Also #notallJSdevs 🤣

Alex is a Chrome engineer. In addition Chrome has a huge market share, if the web feels slow on Chrome it feels slow for everyone. Not All ________ is unhelpful in any conversation. We have to persuade our industry peers to do better. Just being JS light ourselves is not enough.

Sorry, irony/humour fail (but that's asperger's for you). Others on the thread seem to be making my point more cogently than I. I do, however, find Chrome's dominance deeply disturbing.

I shall now crawl in a hole and delete my Twitter account.

And still I meet web developers who think that it is still a good thing to cram everything into one JS file (no lazy-loading). Sigh...

I recently booted up my Powermac G4 from 2004, top of the perf line at its time. Rendering GitHub main page takes 56 seconds with it.

I'd buy that position, too, but as "influencers" that "the web sucks and we should use proprietary platforms to write software" is probably not the best conclusion to draw.

ah, well that was not the intent of my position. I really was trying to explain the trade-offs: when R and I were talking about it I was careful to say: look, there are genuine benefits here to web platform software over native stuff.

e.g. I found her using a web-based piece of music notation software and I was like: in the past, you'd pay per licence for that, it would only work on one computer and you couldn't use it from anywhere. This is clearly better on some axes! *AND* it's also potentially slower...

part of my argument was: hey, someone can write music notation software that works on the web and they can do it in javascript! Javascript might not be the fastest [citation needed] way to implement the product, but it got done & released to millions etc

the alternative is someone writing a native app that only runs on one platform, that also might be really difficult to put together and *may* be "faster" than a web implementation.

I don't know if @soundslice would work for R, but @adrianholovaty is a genius. And it's fast.

Ahhso! Carry on. 😁

... and I mean I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories but we all keep going on about how great it is that apple's business model is transparent and based entirely on selling hardware so Occam's razor thin laptop applies?

oh yes all that too frankly i'm surprised and grateful that a 2012 macbook air has lasted 6 years before sustained complaints about feeling slow

If only they sold new laptops that didn't suck 😂😂😂 But seriously I hear a lot of good things about the pixelbook.

Yeah, and browsers are becoming so much more ram hungry because of all the unnecessary crap we are building in.

Honestly this is one of the things moving to the iPad Pro helped for me, a LOT. My Macbook had specs as good as they’re still selling now...

When you move to the paradigm of single-purpose apps instead of one Safari instance with 483092480 working tabs, everything speeds up so, so, SO much!

MacChrome an option?

Chrome the browser or a Chromebook? If Chrome the browser on macOS my intuition is that any speed increase over Safari might be neglible and/or countered by battery/power usage. Which ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It just seems to have a snappier JS engine.

Worth a shot, then. Thanks!

The only reason I had to finally retire my beloved 2007 MBP was that Chrome wouldn't update on the version of MacOS I was using, and upgrading MacOS fried the hard drive.

Yeah, she’s also running low on space on the SSD so I’ve been reluctant to move to High Sierra, too.

(It’s funny that I’ll upgrade to a new macOS release straight away and will suggest that she doesn’t because her stuff is more “mission critical” than mine; there’s my attitude to risk vs novelty)

My desktop is both my "gaming machine" and my "beater" so I'll upgrade the heck out of it to try things out until I realize that it directly affects my ability to play video game

"ha! ha! Win dows 10! let's try it out on a LOW STAKES system" *tries to play literally any videogame except the system updates and reboots six times a day and most of the time it freezes mid-reboot* "i am sad now"

Ah, I put Win10 on my Big MacBook Pro Touchbar and it nearly rivals the PS4 in the depth of its Install Updates To Play A Game mini game.

I like that this minigame is recursive, on Win10, 'cause drivers, then OS, then drivers again, then game updates, then the summoning, then the tribulation, then the reinstall of all apps, then the OS needs to update again,

Hey, it’s Package Management Simulator 2018! I know this!

Oh man, did you get the Virus Definitions DLC?

Bought the Season Pass! Gonna get all the Virus Definitions for the whole year, plus got an Exclusive Thanos skin for Windows Defender!

Now I’m thinking: What if EA made operating systems?

Loot boxes for basic OS functionality!

THIS IS WINDOWS 10.

Curiously “if it’s in the game, it’s in the game” is no longer strictly true.

Oh, this was the Snow Leopard -> Yosemite gap; I held out as long as I could until they just stopped making it possible to keep working on my old OS.

I use a 2012-model laptop too. I don't think we have any right to be running six-year-old computers. They should be unusable at this point.

i see what you're doing evan

It's a matter of common decency for us to buy new laptops, Dan Who do we think we are to flaunt Moore's law with impunity

gordon moore demands the silicon sacrifice to be paid in full

Do! Fwiw, I’ve done much the same. Though I did get a 4x speed improvement on the web by turning on madly stringent ad-blocking too. To think of the days I spent minifying stuff to save 2k on an index.html. Fml.

I’ve started doing some writing on the iPad Pro with keyboard. I’ve gotten as far as a text editor split screened with a browser but the newsletter is the kind of thing where being able to see multiple tabs/switch between tabs super quickly turns out to be important.

Right. I’m increasingly exclusively working on my watch&airpods&paper notebook, or a dual monitor wider-than-my-visual field desktop, and saving tasks for one or the other. My phone/iPad use is down 50% according to my stats thingy

It’s a very interesting experiment. I have my phone wrapped up in a Japanese wrapping cloth as a (notably pretentious but pretty) friction layer to see if I can do lots by watch-siri. I can, it seems.

I only use 110 baud teletype

Very mindful. Organic bits, I’m assuming?

Recycled bits

There's an organic bit recycling & vegan cheese collective in the Ferry Building.

Nice. I disabled touchID and use a secure/onerous phone passcode for the same reason.

Ben. Do we need to talk.

Well, always :)

We actually really do this time though.

Wo-ah. Would love a description/example how you work with watch please! :)

I’m going to write it up: it allows my mind to chill about fomo of important messages while I do thinky stuff on paper. I can use Siri to send messages, add stuff to Omnifocus and Cal. 3rd ed watch with a cell connection, and I’ve found a way to get podcasts onto it too.

Interesting. I've not been paying attention… Siri on watch takes dictation?

Apparently it does. Sigh. Ok, thanks for that :)

It’s not... great though, in my experience.

Will just leave this here.. twitter.com/IanNoble/statu…

Where do you write stuff up nowadays? Anything public?

Not public for a while. Tbh, this is the piece on top of my list to start doing that again.

Btw, what’s your stats thingy?

An app called “Moment”

You may also like: Firefox. Noticeably faster when I installed it on my MacBook-whatever-from-mid-sometime

I would shake my fist up in the air as well :P