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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

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752 points dceddia | 9 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.429s | source | bottom
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yomlica8 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:32 UTC] No.36447314[source]▶
It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

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sidewndr46 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:35 UTC] No.36447344[source]▶
Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.
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1. porphyra ◴[23 Jun 23 16:09 UTC] No.36448834[source]▶
And when you're about to click on something, something new loads and everything jumps unpredictably and you end up accidentally clicking on the wrong thing lol
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2. YoukaiCountry ◴[23 Jun 23 16:33 UTC] No.36449167[source]▶
This is honestly the worst part of it to me. It happens quite a lot!
3. dghughes ◴[23 Jun 23 17:03 UTC] No.36449545[source]▶
Yes, in Windows 50% of my day is fighting with something obscuring my view or taking focus. Something pops up just as I was clicking or pressing Enter. I have to sign into multiple systems in the morning and sometimes it takes four attempts to enter creds for one login because I keep getting interrupted. It's infuriating.
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4. smegger001 ◴[23 Jun 23 21:11 UTC] No.36452207[source]▶
you would think they could figured out that programs not directly opened by the user shouldn't be able to steal focus from the program the user is currently interacting with. seems like basic UX/UI failure
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5. causality0 ◴[23 Jun 23 23:37 UTC] No.36453697{3}[source]▶
You're talking about people who haven't figured out you should be able to edit the options on the right click menu from a single settings menu and that the task bar should expand and contract dynamically with the number of open windows. Microsoft stopped improving the Windows UI around 2006.
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6. eviks ◴[24 Jun 23 04:40 UTC] No.36455637[source]▶
Stealing focus should be a misdemeanor!
7. Aerbil313 ◴[24 Jun 23 13:03 UTC] No.36458357{4}[source]▶
You’re talking about people who use Macs.
8. smegger001 ◴[25 Jun 23 23:48 UTC] No.36473884{4}[source]▶
desktop user interfaces on all 3 main operating systems peaked by 2010, at that point everything became aimed at clueless cellphone users.
9. account42 ◴[26 Jun 23 10:01 UTC] No.36477728{3}[source]▶
This is actually pretty hard to get right. Just yesterday I was confused why opening my text editor under KDE didn't pop up a window. Turns out some update to KDE's focus stealing prevention (or some other involved component) changed things so the new text editor window got pushed behind existing windows.

This isn't an argument for not trying though.