Browsers (Was: A very basic blog about D)

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 09:56:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Which means *every* time I want to open two or more file manager
> windows, I have fool this stupid fucking piece of shit NannyOS 
> into doing so, instead of you know, just clicking the damn 
> button however many times I need.

Yup. I've found you can get around it somewhat well by right 
clicking and open in new window from the parent directory. Still 
somewhat annoying - I think XP started the downhill trend, maybe 
even 2000, with changing the explorer around. I really liked it 
in Win95 - it just got the job done in a simple, straightforward 
way.

That said though, I don't have too much trouble with the newer 
Windowses. I actually like Vista!

> Yup. So depressingly true. And what's really bizarre about it 
> is that a LOT of that JS is specifically in the name of speeding
> up the site ("Because you don't have to redownload *all* 1k of
> HTML on every link!")

Oh yeah, I have to deal with this a lot too. The big thing is 
even in ideal situations, an ajax request is likely about the 
same speed as a full refresh, since on most sites, it is 
dominated by request latency anyway! If it takes 50 ms for your 
signal to cross the internet and 5ms to generate the ajax and 
10ms to generate the full page.... the whole ajax thing only 
saved you maybe 10% of the already very fast speed.

(If your site takes longer than 50ms to load, I think you've 
gotta spend some time in the profiler regardless.)


It just seems to be psychological, because sometimes the browser 
will white out the background or jump around the scrollbar while 
loading the full page, it feels more jarring. But they don't even 
always do that.


Important to get this working though is to set the right cache 
headers on everything. And I betcha that's where people make 
mistakes. I like to cache those ajax answers too when I do have 
to use them, because killing the server round trip latency is a 
huge win.

> And what's the extra bonus for that pessimization? Broken 
> "back", broken "forward", broken bookmarking, and broken link 
> sharing.

But you see, this is why those FB share + tweet buttons are so 
important! Otherwise people will copy/paste the wrong link :<

blargh.

> JS's bottleneck was never bandwidth.


Indeed, and this is one reason why I absolutely refuse to use 
jQuery. (The other being it isn't even significantly different 
than the built in DOM! IMO most of jquery is just pointless 
wrappers and name changes.)

If you're using it from a CDN so the browser has cached bytecode 
(or whatever they do), you can get it reasonably quickly, about 
10ms added if you reference it.

....but that's actually pretty rare. I don't remember the number, 
but there was a survey of web traffic that found a big percentage 
of users aren't cached. And if you are slow for first time users, 
how much you want to bet they'll just hit back, try the next 
guy's link, and never return?

jQuery in file cache but not pre-compiled is brutally slow, 
something like 150ms on my laptop, on top of everything else it 
has to load. So the page is loaded, but it won't actually work 
until that pretty noticeable delay. (And then it still has to do 
whatever work you wanted jquery for in the first place! Since js 
is usually loaded sequentially, the other stuff has to wait for 
this to complete)


It has some nice things in it, but just isn't worth making my 
site 5x slower than it would be without it.

> Floats are good for what they were originally intended for 
> (wrapping text around an image) and for nothing else.

Amen.

> Just so I can do as much as I can without putting up
> with a unified forward/back, browser skin, address bar with
> unicorn-rainbow-vomit Fisher-Price-sized text, or all that UI
> over-minimalism.

Let me show you what my firefox looks like:

http://arsdnet.net/firefox.png

I had to change a few settings to get it there, but I think this 
isn't too bad at all, and as you can see, it is a fairly new 
version. (I'm probably 10 versions behind again, it has been like 
three months!!!!! but meh.)


> And those minor annoyances have been more than made up for by 
> all the times I've banged my head against the wall over some 
> PITA HTML/CSS problem, then decided "fuck this shit, I'm using 
> tables" and

Eh, I haven't that that, at least not for a long time, but it 
could be because I know a lot of arcane css crap so it isn't a 
head banger anymore.

Could also be that I'm given simpler designs too!


> Heh, I can't stand tiny TVs (I don't even like using portable 
> game systems).

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't like *big* tvs. Too much light, 
weird movement just looks wrong to my eyes, and watching them for 
a while hurts my brain, literally, I get headaches.

Might not all be size itself, could be the high def, frame 
interpolation, lcd tech, whatever, but I just really prefer my 
old tvs. I have a 19" that I watch when I'm on the other side of 
the house (the room it is in is a long one, spanning the house's 
entire 30-some foot width) and a 13" one that is about 7 feet 
away from my computer desk that I watch a lot when sitting here.

Both televisions are from the 80's, but they still work quite 
well so like Rick Astley, I'm never gonna give them up.


Interestingly too, I had a PS3 briefly. I say briefly because the 
piece of shit died on my before I even owned it for two full 
months. Maybe that's what I get for getting a cheap one on ebay, 
but the new prices are just unacceptably high. Regardless, my 
playstation (one) was used too, and it still works. So was my 
super nintendo, etc. They all still work. I think they just don't 
make 'em like they used to.

Anyway, playing the ps3 on my friend's 32 inch high def tv hurts 
me horribly. My eyes get tired after about an hour. I thought it 
was maybe just because I'm getting too old for this shit, but 
then I played the very same game at my house on my little tv and 
was able to go 5 hours before feeling tired. It still fucked me 
up - lost sleep (I played an FPS for a while and started having 
nightmares about shooting people in real life.... that never 
happened playing the NES), got sore, clearly I can't sit on the 
video games for 10 hours a day like I used to do, but I'm 
convinced there's something different about the new vs old tvs 
that affect me physically. My score tended to be better on the 
old tv too!


> And it really gets me how touchscreen devices are promoted with 
> the idealized concept of "touch" even though they *eliminate* 
> tactile sensation.

Yup. And it is too easy to accidentally hit "buttons" and not 
know it. I was watching the tour de france on the ipad yesterday 
when the puppy had to go outside. I carried it with me figuring I 
can still watch it... but apparently my shirt brushed up against 
the screen and it interpreted that as a swipe motion that turned 
off the live stream!

Ugh! And there's other crap about the ipad too: changing the 
brightness means turning off the stream, slowly finding your way 
to settings, hitting that thing, sliding the bar up, then getting 
back to the video.

So if I go outside and want to turn up the brightness, better 
hope no action happens in that next minute cuz I'll miss it. 
Contrast to a real keyboard, where you can just put that on a 
hotkey. Or hell, a multitasking OS where you could still play the 
commentary audio in the background at least while adjusting 
settings.


And yesterday too, right at the finish line, it decided to pop up 
a MODAL DIALOG BOX saying "battery level has reached 10% 
[dismiss]"... and it stopped the video while it was up!

So I'm like I DON'T CARE I JUST NEED ONE MORE MINUTE COME BACK 
COME BACK!!!!!! But by the time it did, the first place rider had 
already crossed. (Of course, they replayed the finish a couple 
minutes later, but still.)


Anyway I could complain about the flaws in this thing all day 
long. But the bright side is that I can watch the sports on it, 
and there's a huge difference without the horribly repetitive 
commercials. The tour de france is like a 90 hour event, and I 
like to watch a good bulk of it. Now let me tell you, seeing the 
same dozen sponsor's commercials over and over and over again, 
every 15 minutes watching it on cable just kills the joy. But 
forking over $15 for their ipad app skips that crap. Totally 
worth it. (Especially since cable is $70 / month. Really, at that 
obscene price, do they even need commercials anymore to turn a 
profit? I canceled it in christmas 2011 and set up an antenna. I 
still get most the shows I watch over the air (higher quality 
too*) and can get the rest on the internet or the ipad thing, and 
much lower price.)


* The new digital tv over the air signal looks great, even on my 
old tvs, compared to digital cable. Which kinda amazes me, but it 
does. I guess it has to do with cable compression. The problem is 
if you don't get a good signal, it is unwatchable. And when it 
gets hot and/or windy, my signal gets crappy.

With the old analog tv, it was almost always watchable. Maybe 
fuzzy or ghosting picture, but watchable, even in imperfect 
weather.

I think digital tv, maybe the PS3 too now that I'm thinking about 
it, are examples of where we're going toward more more more at 
the peak, more pixels, more channels, etc., while ignoring 
graceful degradation for an acceptable average.

Yes, with a strong signal, 1080p might be great. But getting a 
black screen when the signal weakens sucks. I betcha if they 
broadcast a highly error resistant 480i (or whatever standard tv 
resolution used to be) on that same data stream, they could have 
gotten a much more reliable stream, giving a very consistent 
quality even in poor weather.

But then how would they sell people new high def equipment every 
other year?


Wow I'm getting off topic even for an off topic thread! Oh well.

> Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches 
> (or rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player 
> program.

Yes, I like to use mplayer for things so I can skip and speed up 
easily. I don't like watching videos at normal speed (most the 
time), it just takes too long. With text, I can skim it for 
interesting parts. With video, I'd like to do the same but can't. 
Best I can do is play it at like 1.5x speed.... mplayer can do 
that. youtube/html5 (amazingly though, firefox apparently 
*can*)/flash generally can't.

And mplayer takes like 1% cpu to play it. Flash takes like 110% 
cpu to do the same job. What trash.