- Windows 95 was 30Mb. Today we have web pages heavier than that!
Small aside: why did Google choose to go the design direction of “childlike”? Gmail, iOS Chrome, other apps are just much slower-loading, clunkier versions from three years ago, with cartoonish animations and rainbow colors. Trying not to sound curmudgeonly.
They famously measure and test the hell out of everything (there's an anecdotal story about testing metrics for a shade of blue) and so at some point their numbers improved when they made those changes. Bottom line: they probably sell more ads with those changes in place. That probably means that overall google's visitor to click more ads. SMH why did Google choose to go the design direction of “childlike”?
Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers "In the world of the hippo, you ask the chief designer or the marketing director to pick a blue and that's the solution. In the world of data you can run experiments to find the right answer. "We ran '1%' experiments, showing 1% of users one blue, and another experiment showing 1% another blue. And actually, to make sure we covered all our bases, we ran forty other experiments showing all the shades of blue you could possibly imagine. "And we saw which shades of blue people liked the most, demonstrated by how much they clicked on them. As a result we learned that a slightly purpler shade of blue was more conducive to clicking than a slightly greener shade of blue, and gee whizz, we made a decision. "But the implications of that for us, given the scale of our business, was that we made an extra $200m a year in ad revenue."Bottom line: they probably sell more ads with those changes in place.
"About six or seven years ago, Google launched ads on Gmail," Cobley explained. "In our search we have ads on the side, little blue links that go to other websites: we had the same thing on gmail. But we recognised that the shades of blue in those two different products were slightly different when they linked to ads.
Yeah... I realized about four years ago what a corner case I was in that I need email clients. A point made by George Gilder in his latest: Google's mission, ultimately, is to make the interface to the Web as fast and painless as possible. Google's business model, ultimately, is to make the interface to the web as bloated and arduous as possible. He opines that this dichotomy will not resolve cleanly.
I think he overstates a lot, except when it comes to web apps. Those have gotten bananas. I'm helping someone do a web site right now...dude is a web developer by trade, and I'm secretly appalled at how big this site is. Angular + all the JS add-ons. I've found bootstrap to be helpful all of twice. I'm glad I'm just vaguely helping in the background. But the most important thing he overstates is that it is unnecessarily hard to do what he's talking about. I tried writing a basic console program in Rust, and it was a horrible experience. The reason people use Electron is because it does what the documentation says it will. I shouldn't have to create bug reports because parts of a language's core library literally do not do what they are there to do. (Yet I did just that with Go yesterday.) So at some point, people need to quit their bitching and actually write things like "decent documentation" and "libraries that do what they're supposed to."
I'm only vaguely aware of what goes into web development and programming, so it's hard for me to judge what he says. But I would venture that "lean" web development or programming is harder, not easier. Twain's If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter principle applies. I shared the piece because nothing kicks up a conversation quite like someone passionately, cantankerously making a point.
Web software is the way it is because every browser works a little differently and only very large organizations or very dedicated developers are willing to test thoroughly in all versions of all browsers users are likely to still be using. Everyone else either uses a library or says "IE? Here's a nickel." The libraries are bloated because they try to turn the tangled mess of standards and browsers that implement them badly into something simple enough to be worth bothering to do interesting things with, and that takes a lot of duct tape, bailing wire, chewing gum and plaster.
The author used a bunch of xkcd comics for his article, but here is one that applies to library bloat:
I'm astonished by how timeless some Dilbert strips are.
The fundamental problem is that 99% of users out there don't need a computer. Period. and scene. We've convinced them that they need a camera. We've convinced them to trade texts for phone calls. We've convinced them that their happiness hinges on what people they haven't seen since high school think of their breakfast. We've convinced them that they need up-to-the-minute alerts about stock prices, presidential tweets, traffic, weather and the latest sale at Macy's but fundamentally, people don't need computers. But if they're taking pictures, they need a gajillion GB because their iPhone X is going to crush their data plan if they upload that shit to iCloud over cellular. And if they've got a gajillion GB, the guy with a gajillion and a half GB and a slightly bigger screen is signaling his status. And if they've all got a gajillion to a gajillion and a half GB, Facebook can suck down a third of the available space and half the available battery for Messenger because fuck you, it's the only app you care about. And it's got to work with Instagram, and it's got to work with Whatsapp, and it's got to work with iOS, and it's got to work with Android, and two of those teams are in-house, and two of those teams are bitter rivals, and all of those teams are separated in space by a thousand miles or more, and so long as we're all using the same libraries we don't have quite the Tower of Babel problem we'd have otherwise, and when those libraries update we all update and the more modules we have the less updating we have to do by hand and the more we can just version this shit and see if it breaks and if it does there's a module for that, or at least there's a hack that'll work this week and if it's got a memory leak let's give it a couple versions and see if it sorts itself out on its own. JPEGs aren't going to get much smaller. The space will always be there. And if you code something efficiently to save space, whenever someone updates something it has to touch, you have to check it yourself. Pull something out of the repository? It's the repository's problem.
Hundreds of millions spent on salaries for the smartest Ivy league graduates designing the fb such that 2 billion people spend 5% more time a day on it doing this: