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0 pointsashark10y ago0 comments

My opinion:

* People made a bunch of things that should have been websites apps. Still happens way too often. This sucks.

* More recently, people have been making things "mobile web apps" that should be websites. This sucks.

Mobile apps are a mess and the mobile web keeps getting worse, IMO. This won't stop until people quit pretending Javascript/DOM performance — including power drain and memory footprint — is acceptable on mobile. It's even bad on laptops!

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sanderjd10y ago· 2 in thread

I think mobile Javascript/DOM performance is acceptable while being in bad need of improvement. When looking at the state of web applications on mobile, I don't think we should say, "it's horrible and hopeless!", but rather, "it's horrible and we should improve it!".

asharkOP10y ago

I'm not sure how it could improve much. Without major changes to the language it'll be hard to reduce memory use much.

Tons of resources have been thrown at e.g. v8 to get us where we are today, but the biggest gains were years ago and the pace of performance improvement has slowed. There's only so much you can do with a highly dynamic, interpreted language.

[EDIT] as for being acceptable, ever looked at how much memory Slack or Atom or any of those other JS-on-the-Desktop applications use? It's insane. Batshit crazy. A Google Inbox tab? Nuts. And try keeping an eye on what they're doing to your laptop battery some time.

sanderjd10y ago

"Acceptable" is arguable and subjective. Every day when I open multiple web applications on my phone, I tacitly accept the performance, as does everyone else who does the same. But, of course, we would also all love everything to be faster and for our batteries to last longer. Those desires are being attacked from different angles with different trade-offs all the time. I'm not at all convinced that the pace of improvement has leveled off, but that's just my gut feeling, and I would be interested in seeing analysis. I'm also not convinced that, assuming evolutionary improvement has indeed leveled off, there isn't still plenty of potential for new techniques that bear more fruit. One area of research I'm aware of targeting further improvement to performance is increasing concurrency, which the servo project[0] is exploring. Perhaps things like asm.js and webassembly will also make an impact.

I'm not a complete web apologist and I'll freely admit that you may well be right that it is inevitably a resource hog, but it is an incredibly useful platform, and I think giving up on it would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

(I also find it pretty crazy that things like Slack and Atom spin up a full web rendering environment, and I would rather see us have better tools for making nice cross-platform desktop applications where they make sense.)

[0]: https://github.com/servo/servo

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