←back to thread

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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 1 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.301s | source
Show context
verall ◴[23 Jun 23 14:36 UTC] No.36447353[source]▶
A lot of people are bringing up Wirth's law or other things, but I want to get more specific.

Has anyone else noticed how bad sign-on redirect flows have gotten in the past ~5 years?

It used to be you clicked sign in, and then you were redirected to a login page. Now I typically see my browser go through 4+ redirects, stuck at a white screen for 10-60 seconds.

I'm a systems C++ developer and I know nothing about webdev. Can someone _please_ fill me in on what's going on here and how every single website has this new slowness?

replies(16): >>36447462 #>>36447463 #>>36447473 #>>36447749 #>>36447944 #>>36448057 #>>36448342 #>>36448778 #>>36448926 #>>36448930 #>>36449089 #>>36449478 #>>36450517 #>>36450908 #>>36453785 #>>36460900 #
1. marklar423 ◴[23 Jun 23 19:02 UTC] No.36450908[source]▶
That would be OAuth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth.

It's a standard meant for system A to authenticate a user with system B. Ever logged in to a website with your Google account, or seen those permission screens asking you if you want to allow a third party website to access your Google account? That's OAuth.

Now, as to why many websites do this even when you login with credentials for that system (and not third party auth) - my guess is the system has separate teams for each subsystem, each hosted on different subdomains. In order to transfer auth state from one subdomain to another, you need something like OAuth since cross-domain cookies are forbidden by the browsers.