Jonathan Blow

Thanks, I hate it.

Everything about this is perfect. I also get the wrong thumbnail.. Looking forward to the day we'll get random privacy leaks through random thumbnails..

we do need theory to understand why software is slow... I really wish to understand exactly what the problem is, is there any presentation out there on the web?

You don’t need theory. It’s simply bad engineering, like a poorly made chair that wobbles.

well, the "bad engineering" is the theory that I want, who is to blame?

Oh, well bad engineering comes from big groups of people all working on the same thing. For example, the standard keyboard layout is outdated since it was optimized for typewriters that could jam. But it’s mostly unchanged today since nobody cares and everyone is used to it.

By bad engineering I mean the kind of bad engineering seen on Chrome and the web in general. There’s no centralized decision maker, so there’s no way for competent decisions be driven into reality. It’s just a bunch of people all using whatever existed before them.

To be specific, callstacks and memory consumption skyrocket as more and more dependencies are layered upon one another. Nobody cares about anything works so long as it works, and nobody has the power to change how it works because everyone else already does it that way (poorly).

So really the “chrome is too slow” is not an engineering problem per se. It is a people problem that festers over time, and constrains the engineering into a poor and unfixable state.

So to do anything about it you need A) money to support yourself since you’re now on own, and B) extreme engineering competence. Clearly these mighty guys lack B, and can’t even write proper English on their website.

I really enjoyed using Netscape version .8 on my 486. It opened in under a second and most pages rendered faster on dial up (no pictures then) then they do now. 1 billion times faster to make things slower. The sole limit of computing is frustration.

Chrome isn't the problem, but sites are. Modern web complexity is at the point where a site can do almost as much as a standalone program, with browser being an OS for them; but site devs rarely understand the HW and just slap giant JS frameworks together, often for ads/tracking.