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Comment by verall | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to restrict this as a user? Like to force webpages to use under a certain amount of render/paint time/resources or else just break so that one dumb tab doesn't use up all my battery? Then I can opt-in to greater resources usage if it's a webpage I actually care about.

I've seen the "This webpage is using alot of resources" popup before but I don't think it would happen in this case.

Because honestly I think this is horrifying. I would rather it switch from grey to red "recording" dot than use even the 6% the author decided was "fixed". In 99% of cases I do not care at all about the "artistic vision" of the UI designer and in the other 1% of cases (say an in-browser game or some useful data-viz) I could choose to allow the tab to go crazy with my resources.

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Seriously. It seems pretty reasonable to allow a web page a total amount of processing that is something like 100% CPU or GPU for 5 seconds. (E.g. can be 25% for 20 seconds.) And beyond that it gets throttled to 3% CPU cumulative max for however long it's been open so far.

And make that the default for popular browsers, so sites are forced to be efficient or else be super super janky and stuttering. And allow a permission for unrestricted processing that things like WebGPU demos or games can ask for.

Firefox already has a monitor module that AFAIU tracks UI stalls and prompts the user to stop the website if it hangs for a long period [1]. It probably can be further developed to also track resource consumption and show a warning if some threshold is reached.

[1]: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/modules...

100% of the CPU for 5 seconds seems unreasonably long for a random webpage.

For a news article, absolutely. But I think it needs to be able to handle JavaScript-heavy webapps too.

My suggestion wasn't really about promoting maximum best practices, but just avoiding total runaway excess.

MS word on a 133mhz pentium and 16mb of ram needed less than 5s to start.

Websites don't need that much resources and should be optimized.... if somehow web developers could read, maybe they'd start doing that.

There are full on CAD apps nowadays on the web. Also, this "looking down" on such a huge group of people is pretty questionable behavior.

There were those apps on pentium 133mhz era computers too, even started in faster tha 5 seconds.

For 99% of the people, word 97 was good enough then and is still good enough now to do whatever they need. They can literally still use it today. (yes yes, docx compatibility, i'm just making an example).

Web stuff is one of the few things where the amount of useful data on an eg. weather report site (webmail, news site, bus timetable site,...) hasn't changed, the cpu requirements have gone way way higher for no useful reason (except to serve more ads), and the users can't use the "old versio" of the site anymore. It's literally gigabytes of ram and multiple seconds of 100% cpu usage to service 5kB of article text and a 50kB article photo.

There were full-on CAD packages for 133MHz Pentiums.

Yes, and they had perhaps 1% of the features you'd expect these days. Though of course, they were the important 1%..

This isn’t unsolvable. A CAD app or similar could ask for permission to use extra resources. There’s already one for storage, extending this to CPU and MEMory is not far fetched.

Your browser should allow you to override all CSS on the web. Here's how I disable CSS animations in Firefox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223080

This is a level too deep. I don’t want to dictate what a website can and can’t do to limit resource usage; I just want to limit resource usage.

Sure, noodling with content blockers has its own advantages, but for this particular case they cut at the wrong abstraction matter.

They should put in something that allows users to electroshock web designers for wasting their battery.

I don't think combined energy output of every power station on Earth would be enough after we have Electron apps for so long. (edit: typo)

They should call the feature “Electron.”

Electronshock

Well, now you know where the name came from.

A bookmarklet that injects custom CSS and selects all/certain items and applies the `contain: content` and `content-visibility: auto;` rules could do to trick.

Additionally, the pseudo `:empty { display: none; }` selector may get you additional mileage.

Probably too late, but uBlock Origin can disable animations (technically fast-forwards to the end, less likely to break the page) for all websites. In the Settings > My Filters tab, add:

  !Disable CSS animations globally
  *,com##*, ::before, ::after :style(animation-timing-function: step-start !important;transition-timing-function: step-start !important)

Text shadows and filters are also pretty heavy CSS properties:

  !Disable text shadow globally
  *,com##*, ::before, ::after :style(text-shadow: none !important)

  !Disable image filters globally
  *,com##*, ::before, ::after :style(filter: none !important)

Even disabling rounded corners can improve perf (and I think it looks better):

  !Disable rounded corners globally
  *,com##*, ::before, ::after :style(border-radius: 0px !important)

Yes, with StopTheMadness https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

It works on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but you must buy it.

It only works on Apple though it looks like.

ChromeOS has logic that restricts background tabs to 1% CPU use I think.

To take matters in my own hand I wrote "tabdouse", a tiny kill-at-high-cpu script: https://www.bugsink.com/blog/tabdouse/

Quite unreliable and more a joke than anything, of course...

How about just not using that site?

I wish. But some sites we are stuck with. EG: bank, HR App, etc.

How about not living in society and instead going into the wild?

Consuming 100% of my cpu for a stupid animation is the opposite of living in a society.

Yes, because we should never ever try to improve the society we live in. Our only options should be to a) run away, and b) shut up and take it.

That's not what I was trying to say. But the fault lies with me for being sarcastic and silly.

> In 99% of cases I do not care at all about the "artistic vision" of the UI designer and in the other 1% of cases (say an in-browser game or some useful data-viz) I could choose to allow the tab to go crazy with my resources.

I'm with you 100%. Although I'd go one step further and say CSS just isn't needed at all, and should be removed from all browsers. Same goes for WebGL (if you want to play a game, download Steam).

This would fix all of your issues and save an unbelievable amount of energy across the planet. Unfortunately people like us are a dying breed!

No css at all is pretty extreme, but I'd be on board with disabling css animations

That's very very sad. Animations can make UX much better when used correctly.

…how? How do they improve the user experience, at all?

Answering because I know the answer, even though I disagree:

There are some situations where having some animation can "attract attention" to parts of the UI, for guidance ("there's some info text here"), feedback ("operation complete"), state changes, timing. All this of course doesn't apply to decorative animations.

With that said: a lot of the situations I mention above are manufactured. They are often because of changes happening away from the mouse, or because the interface is brittle or too slow, and the user doesn't have confidence that something really happened, or because the organization of elements is not functional and things are too far apart that the user might miss something in a totally different part of the screen.

IMO, with enough thinking you can come up with alternative interfaces that don't require animations at all.

Imagine a list of 10 items that gets shuffled so that the order is completely rearranged. With no animation, it would take a lot of additional cognitive load to find where each item went. With animation, your brain would track the general movement of each item much more easily.

Basically, animation provides additional information about object state. Removing that extra information increases cognitive load.

This isn't to say all animations are useful. Many animations are excessive or completely unnecessary, which is probably what has given you a negative view of them.

Absolutely, without question. Do you think that humans, who evolved in a physical word where basically everything happens in an incremental way don't extract valuable information from in-flight state?

Also, as an example just try to use a window manager that just switches instantly to a new desktop, vs a very short animation. I find the former easily disorienting, and it is even more so when you have a more direct gesture controlling the action (e.g. touch or mousepad). Of course there is too much of everything, and too much animation sucks, no question. So is too much fat, but that doesn't make normal amounts any bad.

People are different, I guess. I remove those animations whenever I can. A desktop manager that switches virtual displays in a single frame is exactly what I want.

This is what I meant.

I disagree. The first thing I do on a new phone is to disable all animations. It makes the phone feel so much faster.

I'm doing something similar. I set them all to 2x the speed. That is much better than disabling them imo.

You can disable CSS in your browser. The fact that you even complain about this tells me that you didn't didable, yet you damned it to be removed. Pretty hypocritical of you.

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