Ask HN: Why gmail and Facebook websites are so slow and buggy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why gmail and Facebook websites are so slow and buggy?

12 pointsttty219 comments

gmail is crazy slow. Facebook has some weird bugs all the time.

What is going on with these companies?

They have too many software developers and their middle management needs to justify the headcount. So they spend their time rebuilding interfaces that were just fine to begin with.

That's more or less clear, but the big question is: do the people higher up don't realize what is going on? Especially Gmail is losing its competitive advantage - it's still usable, but slow enough that the competition looks blazing fast. If anything, they should focus on things that make it more difficult for other startups to compete with Gmail - but by the recent update they just made it easier!

There must be some business people at Google knowing this, I can't believe they're all patting each other backs saying the new Gmail works better than ever, there must be some folks with some common sense in the upper management.

I may be unusual but those sites both work great on my 7 year old Macbook Pro running Google Chrome on a 5O Mbs internet connection.

Which brings up the point someone brought up is that the developers, QA testers, and managers at those companies probably have more modern computers and even faster network. But there are some ways around that like VMs and virtual network interfaces that intentionally throttle the speed and performance and I would be surprised (although not TOO surprised) if no one on the QA teams at those companies used them.

Another thing as others pointed out is that these apps are insanely complicated. They have live updating, undo, advertising, inline preview of links, search, autocomplete, etc... tons of features that many users will never use.

And that's just the client-side complexity.

Part of that is due to user demand and part of it is due to the app just slowly getting more complicated over time (call it feature creep and technical debt). And part of that may also be because as one cynical (albeit probably not wrong) person put it, there are huge teams working on many of these features[1] that need to justify their budget by showing "results."

You may also be assuming that 1000 features that are easy to build, maintain, and keep bug free scales to a single system that is easy to do those things. It rarely works that way because components need to interact with each other and by necessity you have multiple people (multiple teams in fact) who need to integrate their stuff together.

[1] Some of the features I'm sure have more team members than my entire startup company just to build one feature.

I haven't used the web gmail in ages, however I have to agree that Facebook is slow and terrible to use.

I have not yet found a computer and browser combination that's capable of handling their site for an extended period. Simply put, if you use it for a long enough time, visit groups you're a member of, scroll through the messages there and talk in group chats the Facebook tab will eventually slow down so much that after a while even your keyboard input will become laggy. Whether that's on a year old 15" MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16 gigs of ram in Safari or a full Windowe 10 desktop with 32 gigs of ram, you'll eventually run into having to close and reopen the tab again.

They just seem to be generating incredibly complex dom trees for the simplest of components for no discernible reason whatsoever. A friend in a similar situation permanently shifted his Facebook usage to exclusively using Messenger.com partly because of this.

The downside of giving developers top of the line hardware to work with is that they’re liable to produce work that’s performant only on top of the line hardware.

I use the following to view FB:

https://mbasic.facebook.com

This link to view GMail as HTML only:

https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

Definitely speeds things along!

Sorry for the blunt answer but: just open your browsers dev tools and start debugging: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/netw...

Determine if it is external factors (your connection/computer) or the site's fault. Learn something about web dev. in the process.Otherwise I would suggest not to complain on HN but with the supplier that you pay for the quality of this product.

Because software these days is crazy complicated. You would expect lots of features from any web app that you visit :

- Autocomplete for most used items ( emails, users, etc. )

- Some real time tagging / categorising feature

- Confirmation blockers on dangerous actions

- Undo button for almost any action

- Fine-grain privacy related functionality

- Text editor with features, which renders whatever you type nicely formatted

- Tons of helpers, video playback functionality, photo gallery, photo uploads, etc.

- All of the above free and because of that, tons of analytics included in the page, which show you a relevant advertisement.

Yeah if you don't like all this you can replace Gmail with Mac's mail app or any other program that sends / reads mails.

You can also replace facebook website with the app on your phone.

But you can't have all those features run fast on slow computers and a slow computer for me these days is something < 16GB RAM or < i7.

I find Facebook on the browser (Safari or Firefox on macOS) quite slow in many interactions. Even looking at the list of notifications takes a long time on a high speed connection. I’ve concluded that Facebook doesn’t do much performance and responsiveness testing on browsers...which is not logical since this is the same company that tries to get people on 2G connections and slow 3G connections to use its platform.

Another guess is that the development and testing targets mainly (or only) Google Chrome, which I don’t use. I’m not sure if long running browser sessions (without restarts) cause more issues. But the Facebook pages are heavy, and rendering is a lot slower than it used to be a few years ago.

Just one person's experience, but I don't find them slow or buggy. This is on an ~4 year old Macbook Air.

Performance is an after though, users notice new and shiny features but performance gains are not seen as a feature. Plus, developing code that is functional and performant is actually a challenge, which few can do and still deliver on time.

Part of the problem is that they are developed and tested on top of the line laptops on internal networks. Even if they are also performance tested on other devices, the developers rarely feel the pain

Because Javascript. Not the language itself actually, but the developers (ab)using it.

Welcome to the world of buggy software.

So you're attacking the technical chops of FB/Google by filing the kind of vague bug reports made by non-technical users?

If even non-technical users can point out flaws in your product, consider it flawed.

OK, I guess we can all agree that every product/service ever created in this world is flawed, because all of them are "crazy slow" and/or exhibit "weird bugs" to someone. Doesn't make for a productive or useful discussion.

Maybe you're on an airplane? Or your ADSL line is so bad that anything on the internet performs badly for you? Because your own machine is full of viruses and other cryptomining malware?

You give us zero information, so best we can do is: guess you have the same issues as our own parents and other non-tech lambda people.

https://leantesting.com/write-good-bug-report/

https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/how-to-write-good-bug-re...

You said what I was thinking, and got similarly downvoted. OP makes complaints with zero details about what their situation or what they've observed, leading to half of the repliers commenting "Works fine for me", and the other half just wanting an excuse to opine about how software and web development is going to complete shit.

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