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Comment by sharikous | Hacker News Reader

It's one of the things that are infuriating for technical folks but meh for everybody else.

In the days of programs taking forever to load or web pages downloading images slowly we knew what technical limitations were there.

Now we know how much sluggishness comes from cruft, downright hostility (tracking), sloppy developer work, etc.. we know this is a human problem and that angers us.

But for non-technical people it hasn't changed too much. Computing wasn't super pleasant 25 years ago and it's not now. Instead of waiting half a minute for Word to load they wait 4-5 seconds for Spotify to load. They were never interested in Notepad or Cmd or Paint. It doesn't bother them that now they open slower than in 1999.

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It's very surprising to me how much non-tech people are willing to put up with. They'd patiently wait for their phone to freeze for a solid 5 seconds because they installed an antivirus on it, and then proceed to try to use it at 2 FPS.

The quality bar is so low now, it went underground. It's so easy to compete with the status quo. You just pretend that all the "progress" that happened in software development technologies over the last 15 years didn't happen. And, most importantly, you treat JS as a macro language for a glorified word processor and don't try to build actual applications with this stack.

Many non-technical users assume blame for slowness and clunkiness. So many times I've heard self-blame when helping out family. "I shouldn't have so many pictures on my desktop" (there are 8 pictures). "I just can't figure out these phones" phone is dark patterning or has hidden functionality six menu items deep and behind a swipe/long press. "I never should have let it update, it's never been the same" - a forced update.

I have heard that gem for about 2 decades now.

When the reality is more cpu/memory usually cleared things up. In the old times a good defrag did not hurt either.

People blame themselves when a lot of the time it is rubish software/hardware.

Then you have the other side of that coin. The yes clickers. If it asks a question just answer it however you need to do for whatever it is you wanted to work. Surprising number of dark patterns on that gem... Then they hand it to you and expect a miracle in 5 mins. Sorry this is the first time I have every seen something like this it may take me a few mins to figure out what is wrong before I can even begin to fix it.

> Then they hand it to you and expect a miracle in 5 mins. Sorry this is the first time I have every seen something like this it may take me a few mins to figure out what is wrong before I can even begin to fix it.

Oh yeah, like when I have to fix the smartphones of people who have been using them for years while I do not own or use a smartphone. I will fix it, but I've got to learn how to launch/exit an application first ;-)

Many people (hi mum!) are surprised that you may take a few minutes to calmly observe, probe, assess, read and think a bit before engaging in the actual fixing. It never occurred to them that one may do something else than clicking, more or less randomly and as fast as possible, when something shows up. And do not worry about your example altering their future behaviour, it will unshakeably go on as it always went :-)

Oh the "too many pictures" thing is a favourite of my older relatives. They think it must be "weighing it down" or something and they have to delete pictures to make it go faster.

On the flip side, I recently visited a local tourist attraction, where a visitor asked me to take a photo for him - and then promptly had to spend 2 minutes deleting files on his phone because he’d literally run out of storage space and his phone wouldn’t let him take another photo. Bit of an awkward moment!

My parent comment is based on real events. A relative did actually install an antivirus and a bunch of other crapware on her Android phone. The thing was so agonizingly slow I just didn't understand how she used it at all.

But that phone ran an Android version from before Google started seriously cracking down on apps running background services without restrictions. Modern Android is pretty robust in this regard — with a few exceptions, an app can't run in the background without showing a notification ("foreground service" is how the API calls it).

There wasn't much self-blame. She just assumes that technology is like that, complicated, unreliable, slow, and full of magic. It's nice when it works, but not a huge loss when it doesn't. She would also indefinitely quietly put up with things not working until someone asks and finds out, then I'd fix it.

I agree though I’d say non-technical people are naive and so don’t know why the experience is not ideal or fun or smooth. I suspect if asked the right questions, non-technical people would also complain.

Computers have always been just useful enough for as long as I’ve used them (since the 80s). We’ve _always_ put up with a lot of nonsense and pain because the alternative is worse.

Latency is one of the things my iPhone owning friends complain the most about when they try another phone (usually a Samsung loaded to the brim with bloatware)

This. My daily driver is a geriatric iphone 7. When I bought a new Galaxy A33 a few months ago for my mum, I took it for a spin for a day. I was shocked by how much lag there was, for example when scrolling. I know the A33 is a low-maybe-mid-tier phone. But it was brand new, whereas I bought my iPhone used in 2017 when the 8 was already out and maybe even the X (if not, it was right around the corner).

It actually was a very weird feeling because the scroll itself was way smoother than on the iphone, probably thanks to the somewhat higher refresh rate. But there was a noticeable and weird lag between my finger movement and the screen contents moving. Also, scrolling would sometimes randomly glitch for no reason in basic apps, like the settings.

What's the situation for new iPhones? Is the compute power of chips more powerful than my computer eaten away by software latency? I'm thinking about buying one. My iPhone 7 only started to very sligthly lag after the iOS 16 released and its update lifetime ended. I'm still using it. I don't even notice the lag if I don't pay special attention.

And no, I'm not an Apple fanboy, rather a NixOS nerd but I need a phone that reliably works.

The lack of latency comes from decisions at every layer of the stack — apps don’t control scrolling or layout, the OS does. iOS is consistently responsive to user input throughout all versions and levels.

My Xs is still fantastic except on battery life generally or if it gets hot at all (sun, charging, running shit apps). My main issue is Google Maps kills my battery life faster than anything else except maybe scrolling through Instagram reels.

My rooted A53 is pretty snappy, but it was pretty slow out of the box. It turns out the bloatware makes a huge difference.

My understanding is that the A33 is the same phone, only with somewhat cheaper display and cameras, so it should be able to get there, too.

So, how do you get rid of that bloat? I've tried removing all the apps I could, but it didn't make any difference.

Before my iphone, I used to have the GS1, 3 and 5 with custom ROMs. My fondest memory is of Slim Rom on the GS3. It gave it back its life. Before the A33, my mom used to have a GS4 mini with LineageOS. It ran circles around the stock version, even though it was a newer Android version. I think the A33 wasn't supported back when I bought it, so I left it with its stock ROM.

My 7-year old phone (2016) with Lineage and no Google junk is faster than my dad's brand new 500€ Samsung.

Do you think they do (or at least used to do) some tuning of how the UI reacts to touch?

Before my iphone, I used to have a GS5 with LineageOS, too. I don't remember the iphone being noticeably better for touch-related lag, which is why I was so shocked when comparing with my mom's brand new phone.

I'm even more amazed at my IT colleagues (so "tech" people) putting up with windows' doing god knows what constantly. We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.

They also don't bat an eye when lazy devs recommend we should reboot the servers daily. They put up with laggy VNC when they have a perfectly good remote desktop solution set up.

I guess, if it sorta kinda works, people just get used to it. The fans blowing like a jet engine. Apps taking forever to load. Windows getting stuck for no discernible reason.

> We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.

I think some of this is just poor defaults. Every windows laptop I've had in the last 10 years has defaulted to a thermal management profile that ran the fans aggressively. Usually you have to install some crapware from the manufacturer (it's "Dell Optimizer" on my current machine) that allows you to change the thermal profile to quiet mode, and it's totally fine after that.

I can buy that, but, anecdotally, my machine is noticeably warmer when I'm under Windows [0], and it does blow its fan too, just like my colleagues'.

So, I don't think it's just a question of fan profiles. Plus, on Linux, I can't control the fan. I can't even read its speed. On Windows, they have all the "recommended" HP crap, but it's true that I didn't fiddle with those, and I doubt my colleagues did, either.

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[0] I do use Windows rarely, but when I do, it's for fairly long stretches (multiple days on end) so it has the time to do its scanning, updating and whatever elsing.

I have to put up with laggy VNC sadly, but not by choice.

The terrible thing about modern macOS and Windows is that they keep indexing your files in the background. Microsoft and Apple somehow consider that index-based "instant" file search better, yet it's actually extremely terrible and mostly useless. The file search in XP, that traversed the file system every time you searched something, worked so much better than anything modern. Right now I use a Mac app called "Find Any File" that does the same thing.

On other stuff Windows does in the background, I managed to disable Defender and the updater on my VM by deleting their files via the recovery mode command prompt. That seems to be the only reliable way to do that.

One of my favorite ways to 'fix' vista era machines was to turn off the indexer. That bad boy would take over the machine randomly then rescan the files over and over. They fixed a lot of it in sp1 and win7. But it is still terrible.

On Windows with NTFS drives (networked or local), I use VoidTools Everything for instant as-you-type search results. It doesn't index contents of files, and for networked drives must periodic'ly re-index them, at moderate cost (compared to the heavier cost Windows Search when indexing /local/ drives).

Also unlike Windows Search, it doesn't default to "search a few of the most common locations and either take a random number of seconds to realise at least one of the search targets was already displayed in the current folder where you started your search or claim that nothing was found (when one or more actually matches exist)".

The thing is, users do care, they just don't understand how to articulate it. The Doherty threshold is real, and it's baked into our physiology as humans.

So it does bother them, it's not 'meh', it's just the status quo. Every once in awhile you run across an application or website that's fast, and it's jarring how much better it feels to use. That's something worth striving for.

The strange thing for me is how much time we spent in the early 2000s discussing website responsiveness and quick loading times as ways to improve user engagement and productivity. Although I can't provide any statistics that I'm intimately familiar with, I recall reading numerous case studies where improvements in responsiveness resulted in significant productivity gains for end users. If I recall correctly, this wasn't just about dial-up connections and multi-second page loads. This belief was still prevalent even when discussing sub-second responsiveness.

Perhaps the direction of the case studies started to shift, and we stopped hearing about it. However, it seems to me more like we pushed hard to reach a certain level of speed in our computer usage, then became complacent, and have been regressing ever since.

I don't have any data on it but I think people gradually came to accept the slower loading times as a reasonable cost, in return they got true multimedia and the fat client experience (first with flash, then jquery and so on) which was impossible in hypermedia.

Currently node unifies (or seems to unify) the FE and BE into something that looks pretty worrying (or rather alien) to someone who grew up with LAMP stack and CGI for dynamic content.

Enter htmx to turn the tide again.

>Enter htmx to turn the tide again.

Doesn't htmx use server side rendering for everything? So every interaction incurs a network roundtrip?

Yes, and returning a html fragment is generally fast.

Only if you're on a good connection and close to the data centre.

I've literally started using Word and Excel less often because of just how long it takes them to start up. Like, I just want to write a quick document or edit my CV, why do I have to sit here and wait for 10-20 seconds??

Electron apps don't have to be shit; VS Code demonstrates this. But the VS Code people are also insanely performance-focused; your average app developer does not care.

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