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Comment by sergiomattei | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. Enlighten me as how software feels slower than 20 years ago, because I haven’t witnessed it outside of casual HN trope-y statements.

We have competent design tools running in the browser now… we’re doing fine.

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I have some old machines for retro purposes, including some Pentium 2s running Windows 98. Things take longer to load, that's for granted, but once something runs it just feels infinitely more snappy than a modern desktop. This is not rose-tinted glasses misremembering how things were like 20 years ago; this is actually turning that machine on in the current decade and observing how an older version of the same software behaves on that machine vs on a modern Windows 10 machine.

Just for experimental purpose, you can try disabling all UI animation to make ui interactions instant [1], and perhaps disable ALL antivirus and their filesystem filter drivers as they make all disk access slower [2] (including windows defender, you can re-enable it again after you're finished messing around). See if those tweaks can actually make your computer as fast as the old machines.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-office-a...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server...

I did something similar a while ago by explicitly adding a call to disable all theming in an app. That way you can even make the window decorations look like old Win9x borders in Windows 10. Disabling theming makes window creation measurably faster, by a lot. That includes lack of animations for that specific app, of course.

The old machines had similar 'speed tweaks'. For example I ran my Windows 95 from a big ramdisk and it was blazing fast.

Older computers have measurably lower input latency, for starters.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer....

Lol, my desktop feels a lot faster too, but that's due to a minimal setup with swaywm and not a lot of electron nonsense.

Going through dozens upon dozens of layers (ever increasing) just to draw a rectangular box with some text inside is creeping complexity.

So, yes, I am fine on my beast machine, still the direction is wrong for me.

Try to use windows 10 on a laptop with teams and office 365. You will underestand.

20 years ago software was running locally. Now, it must communicate with mothership for every action you make. Tools running in the browser are slow, because they use the browser to get user input or to display information.

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

There should definitely be more exploration of latency in the software that we use. Here's a really nice article about it from a while back, about typing in particular: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

In particular, this image offers a nice comparison of some newer and older pieces of software: https://pavelfatin.com/images/typing/editor-latency-windows-...

That said, typing isn't everything, but there are stark differences even in something so basic.

> These are tests of the latency between a keypress and the display of a character in a terminal

People noticed that the windows built-in terminal app has noticeable latency, and when the WSL1 team implemented their own terminal app, they ended up with much better latency [1]. I wonder if this input lag test was done using the built-in terminal or this WSL1 terminal.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327

try to run it on a average persons notebook or a students chromebook, you'll quickly learn that even things like the new reddit design dont run well.

Reddit on the web is an abomination.

I’ll give y’all that. New Reddit is the absolute worst web app I’ve used in my life.

It barely chugs through on my 2018 iPad Pro. Every click takes actual seconds to load.

I find most websites to be like that these days. That's why I block all javascript by default using umatrix. It

No one really picked umatrix up again did they? Still not outdated, but no more updates from gorhill right?

For the time being, there have been no need for updates. Gorhill has t updated it for like a year before he discontinued support. It's not likely to preemptively fork, but probably will once it's needed.

He added basically everything it can do to uBlock Origin's dynamic filtering, and it's easier to maintain one addon than two.

Indeed. People who repeat this absurd meme either have a terrible memory or are just flippantly cynical. Computers 20 years ago were very slow compared to how things are today, this is especially true of professional software like compilers, digital audio workstations, video editing, photo editing, 3d modeling as well as common utility software like file compressors, codec converters, disk searching tools etc, but also gaming, video playback, and don't even get me started on internet speeds. It's just flat wrong.

Try testing startup time (yes it matters) of old software (on current machines) compared to new stuff... even web pages are slower than that most of the time.

Can’t tell if that was sarcasm or not. I still have hardware from the DOS era. For example, Microsoft Works starts up almost instantly. That is definitely not the case with Office 365 in 2022. Latency is far lower back then too. I could go on and on.

I remember waiting for loading modals when you would try to close windows.

In what world was anything faster 20 years ago? Do these readers not remember waiting minutes for their computer to start up?

They're talking about post start up. Yes, disk speeds are much faster now. Other than startup however, everything feels slower. Heck, now the limit on my speed is often internet, not disk.

I literally remember waiting for individual windows to close when I would press the 'x'

It took like 3-5 seconds at least, growing up

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