Computers Aren’t Fast Anymore (2013)

This is all true (or debatably conceivable), so why are so many apps web apps? Well, in my opinion, it's this: they are easier to deploy, easier to adopt, easier to bill, and much harder to pirate. Web apps are worse for end users and developers, but better for everyone else: the people who sell them, the people who buy them, the people who deploy them, and basically anyone who holds purchasing power.

Fortunately, things are looking up: As the web stabilizes as a platform, and browser developers have time to pay back their code debt, applications will respond more quickly. Similarly, we're starting to see better toolkits like React and Om, which treat the browser more as an application platform and less like a document viewer.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment behind this post. We developed the web quickly; as the web stabilizes, so can we step back and optimize the slow parts. And we are: HTTP 2.0, Servo, WebGL, asm.js, better JavaScript engines, better rendering engines, and better applications.

The browser isn't inherently a slow layer of abstraction; we just haven't refined the technology to a point where it's simple to create performant webpages. I think we're on the right track, but progress is slow when you're trying to upgrade everyone in the world.

Maybe we'll go back, but I kind of doubt it.

As someone who has been using a computer almost daily since the mid 80s, I don't relate to this whatsoever. I remember waiting for programs to load for minutes in the 80s and numerous seconds even in the late 90s. Even fast DOS apps would hang for seconds to save something to disk.

I remember even early, simple versions of Photoshop taking a minute to load and then forever to run simple effects.. now it's about 2 seconds to load from scratch (and then milliseconds once in cache) and almost everything I do in the app feels instant despite being significantly more complex.

Even software operating way lower down the abstraction tree decades ago felt and acted slower to me than most JavaScript apps today.. things are only getting better IMHO, about the only limit on today's app seems to be network speed which in some cases is not much slower than disk speeds just over a decade ago..

Any of these problems in a game for instance would keep it from releasing - Quality Assurance would never pass it! Yet web apps are given a pass on anything. Why? Because there's no simple way to fix them - the tools are too far from the behavior on-screen. You're not in control of your mouse, or your widget behaviors, or your server responsiveness.

Java could have won the web-app war, with a little more foresight. But a terrible GUI framework, terrible updater, terrible deployment, etc. killed it.

They knew exactly what they needed to make back when the idea of web-apps was still nascent - you can see the scaffolds laid in the history of Java. A zero-installation platform for cross-platform GUI apps.

But they just made so many painful errors that their platform was unusable.

I'm a cranky EE with a background in routers and even I don't blame "teh web" for making apps clunky. It's just that we're doing more, more colors, more background stuff, more compositing, more buttons on GUIs, more simultaneous file formats - it used to be every program had approximately ONE file format it supported, maybe two. What about running with many different library stacks/APIs underneath? All that shit takes time and memory.

And we are in a transitional period. We're maximalists with respect to amount of features and compatibility we cram into every app (and platform), but maybe soon hopefully eventually evolution will cool a bit and things will start to run as tightly again as Deluxe Paint III on the Amiga 500.

Interestingly enough, this is one reason I still write blog posts in Textmate and longer documents in Word (laugh all you want, but Word for OS X on an SSD is actually very fast). I still use Mail.app, which is very fast for composition and searchable even offline. I'm running 10.6 instead of 10.9 or 10.10 (can't remember the latest number; allegedly the most recent versions are slow on the hardware I'm using (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/mac-os-10-7-is-out-...).

Many things can still be done on fast hardware. Most people choose not to do them, however. Do users drive developers or do developers drive users?

In any case the browser is intrinsically easier to operate than a package manager. I mean really, it can go from displaying a simple static content site with no formatting or CSS all the way to impressively complex web-apps like Google Docs. Not to mention the work of Three.js and the WebGL community. And all I have to provide is a single well-formatted string of no more than 2,083 characters.

If you haven't given any of the newest tools a spin, you may not have noticed yet. For me, we crossed a tipping point in the past several months where an environment like Ember (with ember-cli as the toolchain) is actually nicer in every way than writing a more traditional server-rendered app backed by Rails or equivalent. And I say that as someone who suffered through the early days when there were serious growing pains as the whole ecosystem matured.

Now, the experience for both developer and end-user is a major improvement. It makes you appreciate how crazy and convoluted traditional web application are, given the way they need to thread state across pages. Rails is a testament to how far you can go despite those crazy constraints. But once those constraints are gone and you're writing a real, persistent client that's only loosely coupled with the server, you achieve a new clarity.

Up until very recently, the tooling all sucked hard, and so the net benefit wasn't very compelling. That has changed, and even if you're still not impressed just give it another year, because the improvements are still coming fast.

Besides, the browser as a user interface is only going to last a little while longer. Have you used Janus VR [1]? Have you used it with an oculus rift? It is crude. The graphics are simplistic. But it is AMAZING. It represents the future. The metaverse is almost here, and this is a very exciting time.

[1] http://janusvr.com/

We witnessed that with virtual machine, the industry invented multiple OS, and turn out we need to be able to run different apps on different OS at the same time and we invent (process) virtual machine to bridge the gap like Java Virtual Machine, or even VMWare or Hyper-V.

And then we have different databases, and then we have different data access abstraction layer out of it making it hard to use the best bit for each database vendors.

And then we invent phones, and have different types of phones, and then again we re-invent phonegap to unify the different phones, and paid the price for that.

Who knows what's next - the history is simply going to repeat itself, we create variations, and then we create performance losing unifying abstractions...

And such trend seems to be in this industry only, you never see someone build different building and then find a way to generalize building and make worse master building out of them.

Just knowing such a trend is rather useless, there is nothing we can do to stop that either. As long as there are multiple big vendors around that just won't stop.

Native will always feel better, but the browser gives us a way to express cross platform designs much better/faster/cheaper than most native toolkits do, and far better than any cross platform toolkit that I've seen.

The tradeoff is performance in a big way.

Think of it this way, it's like the web is like OnLive or Galaki streaming to play a game and native is like playing a game on your local device. Streaming game performance is inherently worse, but at some point might be good enough/great for most people such that the investment in native games on local hardware no longer makes sense for certain games.

I think most people don't realize or think through the fact that they are making that performance tradeoff in exchange for other things.

Maybe people should have that discussion.

Still, grumpy old non-web developers love to blame their favorite whipping-boy. If pretending that web dev is an inherently poor quality technology makes you feel better, please carry on. Whatever gets you through your day, man. Just please don't start thinking your thoughts are clever or constructive.

I sometimes switch to tty, and am always surprised how responsive it is compared to my gnome-terminal which never feels slow on its own. In the tty characters seem to appear before I even fully press the key.

>> These crappy amateur applications were downright speedy.

Compared to what? Visual Basic performance was a joke, even when you compiled it to native code.