Hacker News Reader

Comment by smofnoopttzzaaa | Hacker News Reader

To me, JavaScript is like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked all of the usability that I was used to finding on webpages, and therefore made for a very frustrating experience. No bookmarking, no back and forward, no right clicking to open a new tab, frequent superfluous sound, major security holes, long loading times. I would hardly call any of this elegant. As a user, I was thrilled when people stopped using JavaScript.

View on HN

Link me to the most user-hostile ECMAScript-based web page you can find, and I'll open up devTools and delete my way out of whatever email-list/login/begware DOM-jail they try to keep me in.

Link me to the most user-hostile Flash-based web page you can find, and I'll watch a ten year old hour-long video presentation from a Gnash developer explaining their 100-year plan to ship a usable open Flash runtime alternative.

There are some bad JS websites, but most of them do have proper bookmarking since pretty much every web framework supports adding multiple pages including forward and back navigation. Browsers are also good enough to handle #links as well within a SPA app. Also, they tend to have faster than typical loading times for navigation within the site.

Flash didn't have any of that, and was much slower to load than modern JS websites.

Just no. I'm on latest chrome on android 6 and when I browse search results on YouTube, then click a video and hit back I expect that the scroll position within the results is restored. Instead when I hit back I only see the red top bar and a loading spinner and a moment later the results show up again and I'm at the top of them. Because we don't have nice paged results anymore, but this hip and ubercool dynamically extending page of results and everything.

And this is not some student's first approach at modern web technologies, its fucking YouTube from google. They can't get their shit working on their own browser. I have yet to see an SPA with a convincing UX that's more than just some wannabe webdev's "about" page.

Firefox Android doesn't suffer from this defect.

> this is not some student's first approach at modern web technologies, its fucking YouTube from google

It's sad that Google is revered by the developer community as a role model for software engineering because their frontend web work has—at least for the last ~10+ years—always been terrible and a really great example of worst practice.

Gmail's early HTML version is possibly the last faded memory of a quality frontend product coming from Google. Everything they've created since the advent of GWT has been aggressively anti-user and anti-interop. Gmail took a long time to get full browser support and a longer time to play will with back buttons, etc.—meanwhile the Gmail interface has slowed and bloated with each iteration; the latest bordering on unusability on my very new midrange laptop. Wave never worked in anything but Chrome, the same is true of the early iterations of most of their large newly released products over the years. The Google homepage provides a totally inconsistent experience across browsers—on mobile I see three different results views in three different browsers, two are Blink-based! Why doesn't search by image work on mobile? We're thankfully no longer lumped with the distaster desktop experience the was Google Instant Search.

Similarly, Microsoft and Apple don't have great histories here. When looking for good development practices, you should always look at the example set by companies that need to compete. Monopolies don't need usability.

> Why doesn't search by image work on mobile?

This is a great example of Google's spotty frontend work -- especially since you can simply tap the share button on iOS, and then scroll over to "Request Desktop Site". And voila, image search now works perfectly. You can even click the camera icon to upload an image directly from your phone. And yet, this functionality is completely hidden by default on mobile.

Ironically google landed its initial success with (and maybe partly because of) an ultra minimalist website focused to the task. They seem to have forgotten that and now they have bloat everywhere. Instead of reducing it they put a lot of resources into developing technologies to deliver that bloat more efficiently.

> Instead of reducing it they put a lot of resources into developing technologies to deliver that bloat more efficiently.

Efficiency has a lot of different definitions depending on whom the efficiency is "for". I would say Google put a lot of resources into increasing the bloat (adding abstractions) in order to automate the creation and maintenance of their services. They are the pioneers of removing humans from the equation: they're using ML to create their maps, instead of the previous focus on humans driving around with cameras, they have a notorious lack of human-intervention customer service for most of their paid services, even GWT which I mentioned above removed human JavaScript devs (admittedly in order to allow Java devs to write it, but unlike other transpilers—e.g. Typescript/Coffeescript—which produce a relatively readable direct JS equivalents, GWT is heavily abstracted and the output isn't in any way representative of what a human would create).

On top of that, opening an email in a new tab from inside of GMail hasn’t worked for at least 2 years now, and it doesn’t look that they’re going to bring back support for this basic functionality any time soon. At least the new GoogleMaps version has gotten pretty acceptable in the last year or so, it’s almost as responsive as the classic one used to be.

Call me a conspiracy-theorist, or crazy. But I say that that is by deliberate design. Just like the push for HTTPS, on some level. You can't proxy most of the web, you can't cache, you can't bookmark SPA and ajax-loaded results, you can't scrape any of the data easily, you can't intercept and modify it if you wish without doing fancy SSL certificate injection.

"Gee, I remember seeing this unique comment on a youtube video. Let me search for it, maybe some web-crawler has indexed it and made it available to the rest of the web. Nope."

"Oh I remember the video, it was XYZ. I'll just go there and find the comment. Oh, it's not at the top of the comments, and there are 5600 comments."

"It's okay, I'll just ctrl-F for that specific word I distinctly remember was used in that comment. Nope, ctrl-f only finds what's loaded in the Dom, you've got to scroll!"

"Hmm, maybe I can just keep scrolling for a while till I find it. Scroll, wait. Scroll, stop, loading icon, scroll some more, wait, scroll some more, wait."

Hey, at least I can share a specific time-stamp location within the video on Google+ and Facebook!

And then you have developers/companies/projects that end up treating JavaScript+HTML5 like "Flash but newer" or "Java but newer" or (for maximum pain) "Silverlight but newer". That sort of mentality - whether conscious or unconscious - underlies the vast majority of single-page apps in my observation/experience.

Javascript interfaces usually have much better usability than Flash ones used to have.

That is because following the standard semantics of the Web in Javascript is easier than breaking it, while for Flash it was the other way around. Of course that does not mean that every JS powered page is good, or that every Flash powered one was bad, and ironically it does mean that the more JS, the worse it tends to be, but the more Flash, the better it used to be.

Yet that doesn't prevent people from breaking it all the time.

You're absolutely right (and an excellently written post; very effectively communicated ), but I think the difference is in what's possible/easy/difficult.

Building a usable experience in Flash was possible, but sufficiently difficult that almost none did.

Building a usable experience in JS is significantly easier than it was in Flash, though sadly still seems to be sufficiently difficult that too few do. The ratio of usable JavaScript apps is a lot higher than it was for flash, but is still a minority. It is at least an improvement though, if an incremental one.

It's true that it is much easier now in JS, but that is because the browsers and the core web technologies have radically evolved in that 10+ years since Flash was the dominant way of creating interactive experiences. Looking back at the eco-system when Flash was still a viable technology, we have to recall where the browsers were at, where HTML was at and also JavaScript itself.

At the start of 2005, I was helping lead a team build a highly interactive experience for a major car company using Macromedia Flash and Flex 2. When we launched the site we had full cross-browser pixel accuracy, fully supported URL deep-linking, bookmarking, page history navigation, web crawling, keyboard navigation, screen reading support, interactive video, highly animated experiences and even had fully integrated web mapping using a beta version of Microsofts first interactive map tech (it eventually became branded as Bing maps).

What we built then was possible only because of Flash, there was no way we could have created the complete experience in JS/HTML/CSS. Granted, we could have done a lot of it in native web tech (and in some cases, we had to under the hood), but to make it fully pixel accurate cross-browser would be tripled the dev & testing time. On top of that, some of the features would have been impossible without Flash.

Let's recall where we were in 2005. Chrome was still 3 years away (it was released in 2008), Firefox was still version 1.0 (1.5 didn't release until Nov. of that year), Gmail was just released into beta (you had to have a friend to get access), Google Maps was still in an experimental beta and was truly pushing the boundaries of what JS/HTML could do. The browser history API didn't exist so we had to do crazy iFrame hacks to create deep-links and history (this was true of any app, no matter what tech). There was no video in browsers without a plugin (HTML5 spec wasn't finalized until Oct. 2015). There was no such thing as CSS animations, they got their first release in Firefox 5 (June 2011).

So, were Flash apps trash? Absolutely, but not all of them. That's like claiming that modern browsers solve it all. We still have massive load times (look at how much time and effort is put into optimizing content delivery), the cross-browser and backward compatibility is a nightmare, and way more of a challenge then it ever has been. In some ways, modern web development is much better than Flash development was, but to be perfectly frank, we have a LONG way to go. Honestly, we haven't caught up to where Flash was 14 years ago.

But, we are getting there for sure. I can see why Steve Klabnik is so excited about WASM. I can envision where it is going and it reminds me of where Flash was trying to go before it was slaughtered by Adobe. It's an exciting time for sure, but we should also look back at where we came from and instead of just stating Flash is trash and it caused the web to be terrible, we should also look at what it did right and what it allowed us to create before we throw it out with the bathwater.

Nice attempt at memeing a response, but that comment doesn't work. Most SPAs that I've seen allow bookmarking, back and forward, right clicking to open a new tab... and they certainly don't introduce major security holes to attack your local machine (they're just websites, not a poorly coded third-party plugin like Flash), and they do not typically have superfluous sound or long loading times. In fact, browsers are blocking superfluous sound more and more, which wouldn't be possible to affect with flash since the browsers didn't control flash.

So... nice one there, green user. You really got'em!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com