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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

"Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."

This is not restricted to websites - a lot of software has suffered from the same trend, where newer versions look simpler - and often have reduced functionality - while for some reason still requiring more resources than the previous version.

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Yes, Windows 95 run on 4MB RAM, Windows 2000 on 64MB. Than the bloat came, and nowadays Windows 10 looks more blant and has reduced UI than ever and still requires and runs as slow as Windows 7 which had a lot of themes and transparent effects and a rather modern and nice interface. No wonder several parts of the interface like the startmenu are now in dotNet. It was already a major mistake that lead to the restart of the Longhorn project which became Vista - the former dotNet based Explorer and shell and WinFS all were dotNet applications and very slow. I run WinFS beta 2 on WinXP on an high end PC at that time and it was promising but aweful slow. Instead of adding the database-like features to NTFS driver (parts of the object features from Cairo project are still there), they added an filesystem filter driver in userland and a dotNet service. Needless to say that idiotic design and relying on dotNet for a mission critical component never worked out. Vista shipped with an improved WinXP desktop search.

Windows 95 could almost run on 4MiB RAM, but that's with heavy swap use, as is the advertised minimum, 8MiB. 95 really needed 16MiB or so, to be fair to it.

Windows NT 4 could run in 16MiB but ideally had 32MiB.

And Windows 95 had no modern security checks in place, so good luck with Internet access. That stuff has performance costs. Also people seem to forget that we had to reboot those machines all the time due to crashes, more code that has performance hits. Yes there is definitely bloat but there is also a lot more going on underneath the seams than before.

95 perhaps. NT was rock-solid.

What kind of examples do you have in mind? I don't disagree entirely...but I've found that sometimes what seems like gratuitous weight is a result of the amount of code that has to be used to not only fix past bugs, but reconcile all the new standards and external mishmashes (such as interoperability with operating systems and other libraries that themselves have been upgraded) that have come into existence.

The magnitudes of increase in lines of code for the installers we download definitely outpace the increase in functionality, compared to 1 & 2 decades ago...but we have a lot more systems to interpolate with. That said, I'm always gobsmacked when I download a relatively new game from Steam and it weighs in at under 100MB...which would've been 70+ floppy disks back in the day :)

(though in the case of games, the increased weight is most often due to multimedia assets)

The Opera browser is an egregious example. It used to be a browser that had everything plus the kitchen sink, it was blazing fast, and really small (both in executable size and in RAM). It managed to keep that way for many years, constantly improving and packing more useful features while keeping the small footprint, I'd say until version 10 or so. Versions 11 and 12 starting removing features and introducing bloat, and then after version 12 the browser was switched to Blink and became a Chrome clone that didn't have even a quarter of the features of the previous versions.

I think probably one (not the only) reason for this was the "reconciling all the new standards and external mishmashes" you mention, but how does that make the weight less gratuitous? It only means that the blame is not exclusively on Opera but also on other companies, committees, etc., but it doesn't make the phenomenon any less ludicrous and sad.

Not the poster and not quite what you were talking about but I was recently impressed that the new Node version of the Wordpress control panel is 126 Mb whereas the old php version including that and the rest of wordpress is 24 Mb (both unzipped). I guess the Node thing includes Node and a browser but it still seems to have quite a good bloat to functionality ratio.

I wonder how much of that is simply npm duplicating libraries (at slighly different versions) due to its no-shared-dependencies approach?

https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/blob/master/package... uses ~130 libs. After npm install (incl. dev deps), node_modules/ weighs 170M file size (and whopping 550M(!) disk size). Let's check duplication. Dirs: (Assuming equal size & name indicate equal content)

    $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | wc -l
    6259
    ~/wp-calypso (master) $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | uniq | wc -l
    3286
    ~/wp-calypso (master) $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | uniq --skip-fields=1 | wc -l
    2799
    $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | uniq --skip-fields=1 --count | numaverage 
    2.23615576991783

Bytes:

    $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | tr -d , | numsum | numfmt --grouping
    170,022,500
    ~/wp-calypso (master) $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | uniq | tr -d , | numsum
    117,107,993
    ~/wp-calypso (master) $ sed 's@\S*node_modules/@@' DU | sort -k2,2 -k1,1 | uniq --skip-fields=1 | tr -d , | numsum | numfmt --grouping
    91,895,673

=> dirs appear in ~2.2 places on average; ~31% of total size is wasted on exact dups, ~14% more spent on different versions on same lib.

    $ npm dedupe
    ...
    $ $ du --summarize --apparent-size node_modules/
    166,097,508	node_modules/

Underwhelming! Only 2%?! dedupe is constrained by npm lookup algorithm (can only lift equal versions to parent dir) but 2% is useless. Should have used sym/hard/reflinks.

Anyway, I now know npm's exact-duplication overhead is not huge (though could be linked); inexact-duplication is small enough to be easily worth the ability to mix versions; and that the new control panel is indeed bloated [however I assume it has more functionality than old?].

The entire iWork suite of Apple software suffered this. I used to use PAges and Numbers for a LOT of business stuff. Now it's not even an option. They don't do half the stuff the old versions did.

A recent example of this is buildbot. The current version (8.x) has a very no-frills, utilitarian python/jinja UI which has served me, personally, and many other open source projects well (chromium, mozilla, LLVM, etc). Version 9 is a rewrite two years in the making using angular with the modern JS toolchain for its frontend. I tried out the latest (beta) build, and from what I can see I think it's exactly what you describe: more resources with less functionality. Time will tell whether the final version lives up to its promises but I'm very skeptical at this point.

Google invented their own name for it - Material design.

I laughed at this harder than I should have.

It's funny because it's true.

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