Shit is slower than it was in the 90s.
Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0.
Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0.
And it was almost instant.
On that level, Winamp did the job just fine.
If we're trading music player performance for the massive increase in availability I'll make that trade.
And nothing else related to the functional differences between Spotify and WinAMP can explain why Spotify is slow. Done properly, it should feel snappier than WinAMP felt in 2000.
But really, 99% of the value-add of Spotify over Winamp is stuff that happens server-side. Your Spotify client doesn’t have a database of all the songs, nor the ML models for computing recommendations. As far as playing streaming music goes, Winamp would happily play an m3u (mmmm soma.fm).
Don’t get me wrong, the discovery and search features in Spotify have brought me a ton of value. But wow is the client resource usage dramatically disproportionate for the added functionality
This is actually a point in favor of directly comparing WinAMP and Spotify - the important "value-add" bits of Spotify all happen server side, so they should have exactly zero impact on client performance.
All of which are Electron apps, apart from "Webmail" which is, well, what one might call a "distributed Electron app" (a website.)
Maybe, just maybe, Electron is the problem.
Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.
It’s incredible how much grief Windows Vista got in comparison.
Is there an actual causal relationship? And which crapware specifically? Asking because I only have access to a bunch of Windows 10 Pro machines which already don't seem to have most of crapware on there (i.e. often I see threads here where people complain about all kinds of ads and other things I never even knew existed) and the rest disabled (as far as I can tell) and still it's less snapy than this one Windows Server instance on comparable machine. (and sadly no single modern OS feels as snappy as even Windows XP SP2 for a similar level of functionality on not-so-recent hardware)
One could write those programs in a truly inefficient manner in a not too performant language and it would run without problem. Today’s computers are really fast.
Whether or not the new features make up for the general perceptual slowness of modern computers is a somewhat open question.
Of course IRC is much faster, it's also few orders of magnitude simpler than Slack. For work related communications I prefer Slack to IRC, but for chatting with friends IRC does just fine. One simple protocol vs hundreds of APIs that provide extremely rich content. Once again, Slack takes few seconds to launch on a modern machine, it's not that bad considering it does so much.
Yeah shit is slower, shit is also way more connected and complex than in the 90s.