alt Hacker NewsIt's really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.
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When I use my work PC under Win 11, I endlessly notic all the lag on basically everything. Click and email in outlook at it takes 3 seconds to draw in... thats a good 12 billion cycles on a single core to do that. Multiply that by hundreds/thousands of events across all events on the system and I wonder how many trillions of cycles are wasted on bloat everyday.
My 17 year old core 2 duo should not feel faster on a lean linux distro than modern hardware and yet it does. Wild to see and somewhat depressing.
I see old videos (Computer chronicles a good example) of what could be done on a 486 for instance. While you can see the difference in overall experience, it isnt that extreme of a difference, the 486 being released 37 years ago...
And in 1990 people were complaining about the same thing [1].
[1] Why Aren’t Operating Systems Getting Faster As Fast as Hardware? https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/osfaster.pdf
You are describing Wirth’s Law.
> Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.
It's not though, is it? Even browsers are capable of painting most pages at over 60 FPS. It's all the other crappy code making everything janky.
Resources have certainly been squandered, but there are also a lot of apples vs. oranges comparisons that overlook advances in UX/DX and security.
Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 <table> by now.
Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be.
We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?