Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

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I said that 20 years ago, but so far I've been proven completely wrong. Skype/etc just keep getting bigger and slower despite, from what I can tell adding absolutely no additional functionality. In fact if you consider it can't seem to do peer to peer anymore, its lost features.

Very few companies are rewritting their electron apps in win32 (although they should be). Instead it continues moving in that direction, or worse. Crashplan rewrote their java GUI a while back in electron. Java UI's are mostly garbage, but compared with the electron UI it was lightweight and functional. The electron UI (besides shipping busted libraries) has literally stripped everything out, and uses a completely nonsensical paradigm/icon set for the tree expand/file selection. Things like slack are a huge joke, as they struggle to keep it from dying under a load my 486 running mIRC could handle. So blame it on the graphics and animated gif's people are posting in the chat windows, but the results speak for themselves.

Without a way for end-users to actually make judgements about application efficiency, there will never be any real pressure to make efficient, native apps.

Though the only measurement I think people would actually care about is battery impact, and even that is pretty much hidden away on phones except to the few people who actually look.

But the other problem is: who cares if Discord or a browser's HN tab aren't optimally efficient? You're just going to suck it up and use it. With this in mind, a lot of the native app discussion is technical superiority circlejerk.

Without a way for end-users to actually make judgements about application efficiency, there will never be any real pressure to make efficient, native apps.

I'd say it's more of a "without a way for end-users to compare" --- the average user has no idea how much computing resources are necessary, so if they see their email client taking 15 seconds to load an email and using several GB of RAM, they won't know any better; unless they have also used a different client that would do it instantly and use only a few MB of RAM.

Users complain all the time when apps are slow, and I think that's the best point of comparison.

There is an economic theory that's escaping me right now, but the gist is that with certain goods, the market will hover at the very edge of efficiency; they have to become just scarce enough to break a certain threshold, then the market will realize that they are in fact a scarce resource, then correct to achieve a high efficiency equilibrium.

Even further: without a way for end users to take action based on that comparison.

If I decide that I don't want to use Slack because it drains my battery, then I can't take part in Slack conversations.

Because Slack is the go-to chat application for so many teams, excluding myself from those conversations is not feasible.

End result: I carry on using Slack.

THIS. I do remember outright revelations in user experience, as I showed people how much better Firefox 2.0 was, compared to IE6 (and looking back, version 2.0 wasn't all that wonderful, from present point of view - tells you more about IE than about FF).

edit: it was 2.0, I misremembered.

Instacart website has dreadfully slow search. Looks like instant search update takes forever to update with each character. The whole site is so slow. It makes my Mac Safari complain that the page uses significant resources.

This weekend I noticed that Amazon Fresh now delivers the same day—-for the past few months they had no slots. I switched to Amazon away from Instacart at once. The Amazon website lacks some bells and whistles compared to Instacart but it is completely speedy. If Instacart website were satisfactory I would never have switched.

Slow, bloated websites can absolutely cost companies money.

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