6 ms·

PERCEPTUALLY slower. meaning, you click on something and you know instantly that at least it's processing, i.e. without perceptually detectable delay. Almost 10

PERCEPTUALLY slower. meaning, you click on something and you know instantly that at least it's processing, i.e. without perceptually detectable delay. Almost 100% of SPAs (including gmail and "electron" type apps) suck terribly at this, and they pay it with double- and triple- clicks from frustrated/clueless users Nobody does it worse than imgur.com . You upload something and there is no indication, no feedback, nothing

sokoloff 6y ago
The only perceptually faster feedback I can vividly recall my 1983 8-bit computer giving is "Oh, I know it took my input because now it's frozen."
- buboard 6y ago
  seriously? it's easy to tell that something is slow to respond, because you can compare the time it takes from the audible mouse click to the change you see on screen, and primates are very very good at perceptual discrimination
- pdimitar 6y ago
  To this day nothing can compare to the input snappiness of my Apple IIc and Dan Luu's article proves it [0]. [0] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    That's true but might also veer into the land of "technically correct". Dedicated hardware and font lookups for screen display means that screen updates happened on the next retrace. That doesn't mean the time between hitting Enter and the spreadsheet updating or the word processor re-wrapping the text was faster in 1983 than it is today. The first paid programming job I ever did was writing some relocatable machine code in a USR$ because the patron's BBS couldn't calculate the XMODEM CRC in BASIC fast enough to support the upgrade to his new 1200 baud modem. I know I got paid $20 and I think it was about 20 bytes of code. I wish I got paid $1/byte for code I write today! [0] - http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Wouldn't that be great. :D I mean, nowadays I am not very much into the "actually" arguments: I really don't deem it that important that older computers were better specialized for lower input lag. I just want that lower input lag back. Complexity in modern machines and OS-es has grown too much. I feel a next Linux-like revolution might be coming that addresses this -- although this time around it would be much slower and gradual so it might not actually constitute a revolution per se. More like evolution.
jfengel 6y ago
I think that just means that users expected nothing to happen very quickly. You push a button, and would instantly get a beach ball, so you could get up and go elsewhere while you waited to see if this time it would actually work. I'm all for fixing the million annoyances in modern UX. The Web was built by something even worse than a committee -- it was built by a thousand committees. But let's not have rose-colored glasses, either. Computers in 1983 and 1998 were immensely frustrating, and some of what makes computers slow today is also what makes them better than the half-baked, hard-to-use, fifty-pound monstrosities of the past. We can and should do better in the future, but not if we mis-remember the past.
- buboard 6y ago
  Computers were slower but i wouldn't call them frustrating. Windows start menu in 2000 was an 100% intuitive hierarchical menu. Today it takes me 10 minutes to remove the utterly useless spammy crap that MS ships by default. It used to be that software would get slower due to more and more baggage (or "technologies") it accumulates, but hardware would get faster at a higher rate. The past 10 years software keeps piling up more and more libraries but CPU performance is essentially stuck and even more, we have the shift to mobile, which means underpowered computers. This inevitably leads to bloated , slow systems , or "UX".

sokoloff 6y ago

The only perceptually faster feedback I can vividly recall my 1983 8-bit computer giving is "Oh, I know it took my input because now it's frozen."

buboard 6y ago
seriously? it's easy to tell that something is slow to respond, because you can compare the time it takes from the audible mouse click to the change you see on screen, and primates are very very good at perceptual discrimination
pdimitar 6y ago
To this day nothing can compare to the input snappiness of my Apple IIc and Dan Luu's article proves it [0]. [0] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- sokoloff 6y ago
  That's true but might also veer into the land of "technically correct". Dedicated hardware and font lookups for screen display means that screen updates happened on the next retrace. That doesn't mean the time between hitting Enter and the spreadsheet updating or the word processor re-wrapping the text was faster in 1983 than it is today. The first paid programming job I ever did was writing some relocatable machine code in a USR$ because the patron's BBS couldn't calculate the XMODEM CRC in BASIC fast enough to support the upgrade to his new 1200 baud modem. I know I got paid $20 and I think it was about 20 bytes of code. I wish I got paid $1/byte for code I write today! [0] - http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Wouldn't that be great. :D I mean, nowadays I am not very much into the "actually" arguments: I really don't deem it that important that older computers were better specialized for lower input lag. I just want that lower input lag back. Complexity in modern machines and OS-es has grown too much. I feel a next Linux-like revolution might be coming that addresses this -- although this time around it would be much slower and gradual so it might not actually constitute a revolution per se. More like evolution.

jfengel 6y ago

I think that just means that users expected nothing to happen very quickly. You push a button, and would instantly get a beach ball, so you could get up and go elsewhere while you waited to see if this time it would actually work. I'm all for fixing the million annoyances in modern UX. The Web was built by something even worse than a committee -- it was built by a thousand committees. But let's not have rose-colored glasses, either. Computers in 1983 and 1998 were immensely frustrating, and some of what makes computers slow today is also what makes them better than the half-baked, hard-to-use, fifty-pound monstrosities of the past. We can and should do better in the future, but not if we mis-remember the past.

buboard 6y ago
Computers were slower but i wouldn't call them frustrating. Windows start menu in 2000 was an 100% intuitive hierarchical menu. Today it takes me 10 minutes to remove the utterly useless spammy crap that MS ships by default. It used to be that software would get slower due to more and more baggage (or "technologies") it accumulates, but hardware would get faster at a higher rate. The past 10 years software keeps piling up more and more libraries but CPU performance is essentially stuck and even more, we have the shift to mobile, which means underpowered computers. This inevitably leads to bloated , slow systems , or "UX".