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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame you got downvoted for that, as you make a very good point. This whole trend of making the web browser a poor man's OS is definitely a bit hinky. I mean, how many layers of abstractions built on top of other (redundant) layers of abstraction really make sense?

This stuff is one reason that, despite the advances associated with Moore's Law, the advent of SSD's, and increasing RAM counts, computers don't feel any faster than they did in 1995. It's ridiculous in a way.

Just to play Devil's Advocate: maybe web browsers should be good at, ya know, browsing and leave the other stuff for something else.

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> how many layers of abstractions built on top of other (redundant) layers of abstraction really make sense?

As many as needed. This is a political problem, not a technical one.

OSs don't want to provide one common framework for writing and distributing sandboxed one-click-install write-once-run-anywhere applications. So browsers are solving this problem on their own.

Maybe you don't care about this, but users, developers who need to write universal apps, and their marketing managers definitely do.

> It's a shame you got downvoted for that, as you make a very good point.

I think this is because the comment comes off as flippant and snarky.

> This stuff is one reason that, despite the advances associated with Moore's Law, the advent of SSD's, and increasing RAM counts, computers don't feel any faster than they did in 1995. It's ridiculous in a way.

That statement is ridiculous. I've never heard anyone claim that the computers of today don't "feel" any faster than computers of 20 years ago, but if you feel that way I just don't think you're living in the same universe as those of us who walk around with quad core computers in our pockets.

> maybe web browsers should be good at, ya know, browsing and leave the other stuff for something else.

Please define "other stuff" and where you draw the line between that and simply "browsing"

As someone who has been around since before the Web, I can confirm that computers today do not feel any faster... despite the fact that your phone is faster than the fastest computer in the world from that time.

In fact I gave a speech about this at Berkeley last week. I think it'll be online pretty soon.

So now you have at least heard someone claim this.

> As someone who has been around since before the Web,

While this is an impressive credential, it's one that I can also claim.

> I can confirm that computers today do not feel any faster... despite the fact that your phone is faster than the fastest computer in the world from that time.

I appreciate your confirming a subjective feeling based on anecdote, but as someone who was also around in 1995 and has continued to use computers daily since, I'll respectfully provide my own experiences as counter-anecdote to your own. I don't think there's any point in trying to debate our subjective opinions regarding how fast computers feel, but I'll assert that if you sat someone down with a 133mhz P1 desktop with 32MB of ram and a 2ghz i5 with 2GB of ram, 9/10 they'd agree that the 2ghz computer unequivocally feels faster than the 133mhz one.

Dude my first professional programming experiences were on a 486/33. Compared to that a P1/133 is pretty darn fast!

But as you say, there is not much point debating subjectivity here. It's not like I had the foresight to record benchmarks of how long it took web pages to appear, or to open a window, etc, back in the mid-90s.

Edit: How about if I put it this way:

If you go back in time to the 90s and tell everyone "20 years from now, we will have a much more advanced web where EVERYONE WILL HAVE A SUPERCOMPUTER IN THEIR POCKET", people would imagine the web would be amazing, and responsive and beautiful, and we would be doing some seriously intricate stuff.

Instead ... no, we have a pile of junk that only kind of works, and slowly at that. In terms of potential unreached, the web is kind of a massive failure. (Yes, it is "successful" in the sense that we are able to do a lot with it that we could not 20 years ago, but the mediocre is the enemy of the good, and all that).

> people would imagine the web would be amazing, and responsive and beautiful, and we would be doing some seriously intricate stuff.

I think this is what happened. Everyone can agree that there are many examples of extreme over-engineering on the modern web, but sites like gmail, facebook, youtube, twitch, google docs etc, by the standards of 1995 are pretty damn amazing, responsive, and beautiful. Concerns about privacy and ads have made us wary of these trends on the web, but from a purely functional perspective, the modern web has achieved incredible technical feats compared to what was possible in 1995.

> Instead ... no, we have a pile of junk that only kind of works, and slowly at that.

Yes, there is a lot of junk on the web, and yes, it "kind of works", but this is true of all software on all systems. There are plenty of compatibility issues with native software across operating systems, there's also plenty of junk software on the desktop and in mobile app stores. All software is crap and the web is no different, but it isn't especially crappy, it's just that we see a lot more crap on the web because visiting a URL is a lot easier, safer, and more discoverable than executing arbitrary binaries.

> by the standards of 1995 are pretty damn amazing, responsive, and beautiful

Yeah no. If you had gone back to 1995 and told me that gmail was what you would get when I have a supercomputer in my pocket, a super-super computer on my desk, and all web pages are served by SUPER-super-super computers, I would have quit the industry out of depression.

It is some horrible bullshit when you look at it in perspective.

About the quality issue, no surprise that I also disagree there: the web is especially crappy.

I do not consider any piece of software that I use to be performing acceptably (native or web), but there is a stark difference between the native apps and the web apps, in that the native ones are at least kind of close to performing acceptably, and also tend to be a lot more robust.

Web apps not working is just the way of life for the web. Any time I fill out a new web form I expect to have to fill it out three times because of some random BS or another.

Look at all the engineers employed by Facebook and especially Twitter. WHAT DO MOST OF THOSE PEOPLE EVEN DO? Obviously the average productivity, in terms of software functionality per employee per year, is historically low, devastatingly low. What is going on exactly??

I think it's a shame you got downvoted as well. Have an upvote on me.

As to the rest:

I've never heard anyone claim that the computers of today don't "feel" any faster than computers of 20 years ago,

Interesting, I find it to be a fairly common refrain. In fact, what I'm saying is basically just a paraphrase of Wirth's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

but if you feel that way I just don't think you're living in the same universe as those of us who walk around with quad core computers in our pockets.

Well, I walk around with a quad core computer in my pocket as well, and I still stand by that assertion.

Please define "other stuff" and where you draw the line between that and simply "browsing"

I'll allow that there's some subjectivity there, but when you're talking about a "web application" like, say, Microsoft Outlook online or something, or a programming editor or a CAD program or an image editing program, I can't help but wonder if that stuff should really be done purely "in browser" as opposed to being handed off to another program.

OTOH, I understand (some of) the arguments for doing it this way. Having a uniform experience for all clients, the security holes associated with plugins, avoiding the need to deploy software to individual machines, etc. I'd just like to suggest that people spend some time considering if there are other ways to achieve the same end(s) other than continuing to bloat the web browser until it replicates all the functionality offered by the underlying OS.

> Having a uniform experience for all clients

An experience that is uniformly slow and uniformly broken a different way on every browser...

I largely agree, but the argument is "If we rely on plugins, some users will have the plugin and some won't and since users don't install plugins, not everybody will be able to use our $THING".

And it is a somewhat legitimate argument. Whether or not it justifies having the browser subsume everything is, IMO, an open question.

I think if we decide heavily siloing / sandboxing is the right thing for software generally, then what you want to do is build an operating system that works that way (kind of like iOS, but with provisions to enable better data sharing so that you can actually make things with that OS).

This would be TREMENDOUSLY better than trying to make the browser into an OS.

What do you think about a browser tab that loads a VM running Linux running OpenJDK that runs a full Java application in its own sandboxed OS instead of an applet, with some mechanism for file transfer to the host OS? You could also support any other language, WINE, Mono, whatever. The point is having a sandboxing mechanism that gives existing native code first class status in the browser. Too hacky?

I agree. I used to be anti mobile app until I came to the same realization. Did you see https://www.qubes-os.org/ posted earlier today? It looks like an interesting sandboxing approach.

> I find it to be a fairly common refrain.

I don't object to the idea that some software trends towards sluggishness because of feature creep or lazy developers, but I take issue with the statement that computers of today don't feel any faster than computers of 20 years ago because there is a large cross section of computing tasks that are wrapped up in the notion of what constitutes a "fast" computer.

For example, in 1995, running Paintshop Pro and netscape on the same machine was about the limit of what my computer could handle at once. Today, I can run photoshop, chrome, Visual Studio and 2 VMs simultaneously without skipping a beat. In 1995 just trying to minimize netscape could result in a 30 second wait while the system attempted to redraw the windows beneath it.

I have distinct memories of how my brain was conditioned to avoid certain actions because it would render the machine practically inoperable if care wasn't taken to ensure that no more than a few programs or operations were performed simultaneously. Today, even on Windows, I can leave dozens of programs (including the browser with a dozen tabs of it's own) open for months at a time and experience zero slow down; compare this with 1995 where restarting a sluggish Windows PC was a daily ritual because it would just become unusable if left with multiple applications running over night. Even in 1999, if I decided I wanted to play the original starcraft, I needed to ensure that I closed all other applications if I wanted to avoid game-breaking slowdown, and even with that, accidentally hitting alt-tab resulted in a 30 second wait while the desktop rendered itself and another 15 seconds for the system to return context to the game. Today, I can leave all my work open in the background, play a few games or seamlessly alt tab to adjust my playlist and then continue working afterwards without any impediment. in 1995 it took my computer 20 to 60 seconds to boot, today, thanks to the SSD, it takes 8 seconds maximum from boot to desktop on Windows, and even faster on Linux.

Today, you don't even have to think about performance (as a user) because the vast majority of common computing tasks can be performed effortlessly by modern systems.

> I've never heard anyone claim that the computers of today don't "feel" any faster than computers of 20 years ago

It's a fairly common observation. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away, and so on.

Someone else linked to a talk that mentioned removing all the layers in some theoretical architecture called METAL (this is a old talk) basically running asm.js (again talk is old) directly through the Kernel and even removing overhead that Kernels need for making native code safe (such as the Memory Management Unit) and as a result it would run faster than normal native code.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

The major thing to be gained from all this then is software that can run fast but not have to be recompiled for all the different systems and hardware.

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