You might give ActiveCollab a shot. I've spent 16 years going through various project/product management systems and it's one of the only ones that springs to mind when you mention sharing client access like that and trying to keep things user-friendly.
That said, if you're using the service desk stuff from Jira I might stay with it. I understand the pain of having to administer Jira and how it creates project-specific EVERYTHING on the backend (workflows, et al.) but it's great for end users and it's super flexible.
There's a CSS & FP Working Group note that listed variables--or more specifically, symbolic constants--as a proposed future extension to CSS2 back in 1998,[0] and I'd assume that there are even earlier discussions on the matter as well. The idea of using variables in CSS isn't new by any means. If you read this 2008 essay by Bert Bos[1] against extending CSS to include variables Bos makes a really intriguing comment that "macros help for authors, not for the semantic Web" in his conclusion.
Perhaps I'm reading into things, but it seems rather illuminative in terms of understanding how at least some key figures in the development of CSS may have viewed things. If you consider CSS in terms of two distinct audiences--authors/maintainers and users who consume CSS-styled documents--then at least some of the decisions with the CSS specifications seem to make a bit more sense. In which case, it's not so much that CSS didn't need the listed functionality as it is that other goals for the specifications were prioritized over the benefits of variables and other functionality. Reusability, modularity, and simplicity were some of the main priorities. They still are, but I think we've seen a redefinition of those terms with the direction front-end development has taken in the past decade; I also think that improvements in the uniformization of browser implementations and development of better debugging tools has helped erase some of the concerns given in the essay.
> other goals for the specifications were prioritized over the benefits of variables and other functionality.
That's what I said. Until marketing forces clamored for such things, other less interesting things that weren't sparkles and lollipops took precedence.
1: Find logos you like, and a few from your industry.
2: Pick a few colors you like, and a few in your industry.
3: Pick a few fonts you like, and a few in your industry.
4: Find icons/shapes related to your business (google images: "[business type] icon" as a start, then branch from there based on what you find).
5: Mash it all together as many different ways a possible.
6: See what you like/dislike. Repeat as needed.
That's it, that's the secret. Get stuff you like and stuff that works and mash it together to see what happens. Then take your mash-ups and keep mashing and playing until you find something that fits. You don't have to love it, just get something that works. A lot of folks don't like their branding initially.
What designers won't tell you is that the process is sometimes just brute-forcing creativity and that's totally okay. You can't always feel inspired or have that "one perfect idea" and you've still gotta get stuff done.
After spending too many hours unable to decide on a color theme (those color theme designers are not all that great IMHO) I saved myself the time and trouble and paid a real designer a good chunk of $ to get an actual logo, a great color scheme, and a PDF of design language guidelines.
I'd rank it as the single best decision I've made for my startup. With the design language guidelines I can throw together UI screens super easy, I just need to assemble the parts I've been given in an appropriate way. The logo receives constant positive feedback, and having a good set of colors simplifies a lot of UI and UX tasks.
No way could I have done it myself to this level of quality in anything resembling a timely fashion.
A good logo and color scheme can had for ~$1000. Yes that is a lot of money for a super early stage startup. Figure it'll take multiple days to do it yourself, 20 hours, $50/hr, unless you seriously low-ball your time, just pay someone else to do it.
Honestly, if making anything resembling a consumer facing product, throw a couple thousand and get preliminary design work done up front. Ask for a few sample UI layouts based on whatever rough ideas for "functionality" exist. The important part is learning how information is going to be structured on a page/screen. Colors, font, font size, font style? What sort of grid is being used, how much white space, rounded or non-rounded UI elements, drop shadows yes/no, what do confirmation/cancellation buttons look like?
Have someone who is good at it make all of these decisions. Having the same person make all of these decisions means there will be a consistent look and feel to the product.
1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.
2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.
If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen.
Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the author thinks they do.
Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.
For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc.
Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.
But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters.
Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.
Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.
The expanded view with lines between comments and their parents which scroll independently is literally the worst website UI I have ever seen. And I recall some terrible flash abominations.
The pure white screen has a certain aesthetic appeal, but the total lack of content puts it considerably below the original. (I assume this must be an intended effect, given the complete absence of error messages.)
The medium redesign is also awful. Its inability to handle my portrait-oriented monitor did trigger a sense of childish amusement (truncating POOR to POO) but it's entirely impossible to read anything using it.
> Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility
That is, create a work of art (as opposed to utility). Okay, art is nice, too.
But mixing artistry and utility is quite hard. Designing a nice, livable house, or a store, is a craft. Building fancy sand castles is a (pastime) art. But mixing the fancy free-form with being actually usable by thousands takes lots of work, resources, and time, because what you'd have to build is a cathedral. (If you think modern technology makes it simple, look at the history of building the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.)
Actually wouldn't be terrible if the comments appeared in a more orderly fashion. Right now, they spawn randomly and can even overlap which makes it actually unreadable.
They don't care about people with disabilities. They don't even care about people without disabilities. It's not usable for people who are not differently abled.
Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven, the line ends become harder to distinguish, and more words are broken by hyphens. But it's higher status because when all books were hand-written it took more skill to produce.
Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).
Huh. I always thought non-justified text existed because people are lazy; I absolutely consider fully justified text to be easier to read, not harder. Non-justified text is distracting.
I'm sure it varies from person to person. I believe, though, the bulk of the studies have found that, while people generally find justified text to look nicer, reading speed and comprehension tend to suffer for it.
Same for contrast. If you're not actually trying to read, low-contrast is more appealing. Thus, the CEO who has read their marketing blurb a thousand times likes low-contrast, even though it's counter-productive.
> "I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens)."
Perhaps. But I always presumed the good eyes, good screen, and lack of empathy belonged to the designer. These same site too often seem to have experiences based on an ultra-fast connection, as opposed to a wonky 4G (at best) connection.
You might be right. But I've sat in meetings and/or shared office space with low-UX-IQ designer / frontend types.
I think the low contrast thing is simply a symptom of a general trend twoards form over function, which though it may seem cool, in the end turns out to be cheap. Its the equivalent of putting dark plastic tint on your car windows. It happens in a lot of fields. The truth is most people don't know what they are doing (and we all didn't know what we were doing at one point).
> Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven
That should barely be the case with a good layout and hyphenation algorithm (or a competent printer in the old days). What word processing software does is not necessarily the best possible way to produce an even justified layout.
Yet most books have awful spines that prevent the pages lying flat when open. Not because it's useful or logical but because it's cheap and easy for the publisher.
> Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.
True, but print media formats got even more simplified in web. The reason? Responsiveness constraints.
Many times I've seen great advanced "article-like" designs for desktop from ambitious designers. It turned out that making them easy to manage in CMS, stable in all possible combinations (or implementing good validators) and at the same time logical and good looking on mobile was extremely hard and not worth it.
This led to further simplifications...
... and then Medium looks like Medium.
There's not much place for creativity on mobile. And this is where most of the "fast content" is read.
I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.
Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.
Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.
That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
And you consider that different from the current generation of sites how?
All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.
> it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever.
My experience of flash is that it mostly didn't work, and I had to spend an hour after every new OS install trying to get flash to work.
And copy and paste doesn't work, you can't right click to save images, etc. Unless you're trying to make an animation, or a game, flash gives a really lame user experience, I don't know why you like it so much.
The objective of most websites is not and should not be cool and interesting design, unless it happens to be a site about design.
At the end of the day a site is there to serve a purpose. And, generally speaking, that demands familiarity with the UI and ease of use. If every site demanded increased cognitive load from the user the internet would be a horrible place.
I get that designers want to design cool stuff. Love it. But when all the smoke and bull clears out the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information. Craigslist and good black and white movies prove that good and useful content is what people are after, not award-winning design and cool web tricks.
> the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information
But why? What about a site about art? What about a site about me? What if I don't want you to get "information" about me, but to see the world through my eyes, with the website as my lens? Sure, I guess I could post my non-interactive photos to Instagram, but that seems so... uniform.
Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive. And I'm not saying it's impossible to do in 2018. I'm just saying it was a much more creative-friendly experience 10 years ago, and when we killed Flash, we lost it.
> Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive.
This is exactly how I remember the best Flash sites of the 2000s. They weren't creating interactives to drive some lead gen campaign, or sell their blockchain-based SaaS or whatever; it was made purely because it was cool and fun to use. Some portfolio websites for UI and FE developers still have this feel.
> We did gain apps though. So I guess there's that.
I get the sarcasm, but IMO, I'd rephrase and say "We did gain Codepen". Lots of cool visual stuff there, but I guess it would be mostly of interest to developers, and not the wider public. Still, I see stuff in Codepen daily that would never make it into a "production environment" because it didn't fit the CMS template, it wasn't responsive, or was using new tech like CSS Grid, or a multitude of the other reasons why websites stopped being cool.
not OP, but I think the fundamental difference is design vs art. Designing for use will drive you to create a site similar to what's out there. Creating art for expression leaves you plenty of room to communicate the aesthetic, mood and so on that you want to share.
I believe I did cover your scenario when said there was an exception if the site is about design. If showcasing art, design or a specific personality is the objective then usability might have to take secobd fiddle, and that’s fine.
I'm not disagreeing that flash was easier but are you sure it isn't just you got jaded? The things you though were cool 20 years ago in Flash just aren't as cool?
The nature of how we browse the web has fundamentally changed since the days when Flash was king. What is the point of investing in a gorgeous website if the audience has moved over to FB/Twitter/Insta and are now acclimatized to scrolling through endless content feeds for a slight hit of dopamine.
By Googling "cool sites", you've stumbled upon the crux of the issue. The site that ranks at the top is the SEO-optimized, but incredibly cookie-cutter, template-heavy Awwwards, which is a back-patting congratulatathon of creative directors at design agencies. So of course the websites featured are their own.
I'm sure at some point they wanted to feature real client websites, but chances are those were mini-sites created for specific campaigns, and were taken offline after the campaign ended.
There's a lot to be said for Flash. It's a good visual design environment. It certainly beats the horror of CSS/Javascript/WebAssembly/WebGL we have now.
(Giving page designers total control over scrolling was a huge mistake.)
> I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.
The thing is, all that's been replaced with JavaScript, which has all the downsides (well, it's not really proprietary, but JavaScript-heavy websites aren't really usable as something to learn from & modify, especially once minification comes into play) and has the great new flaw of not realistically being disablable, unlike Flash tended to be.
We even saw this week Google deciding not to support non-JavaScript browsers.
JavaScript is a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
I'm not even talking about the consumption side of Flash. I'm just talking about the tooling for creating Flash content.
Did you ever use Flash? It was incredible. Draw right there on the canvas with basically Illustrator-esque tools (or just File->Open whatever .jpg you want). You can add a keyframe in the timeline, and just drag the image to wherever you want. Then you hit play, it looks right, then you hit publish, and it would play exactly the same in any browser ever.
Also, ActionScript 3 was basically typed javascript, back in like 2004.
I'm with you. I used to be able to crank out a Flash game, with art, in a or two in my spare time, no big deal, not have to look anything up, I knew exactly how the whole system worked (I literally made games completely disconnected from the internet the entire time, my productivity was crazy high), never had to waste a bunch of time fighting frameworks or seeing how things interacted, and could get it to sing (although it had definite limitations. Everything existed in a movieclip object, for example, so when I was asked to port a C++ game that had 900+ objects on the screen at a time it really slowed down).
With Flash, I once ported a game to Flash, from scratch, with art (but no sound...although I could have added sound), in the span of 12 hours, and while it wasn't my most popular game or anything I still get people telling me how much they enjoyed it 15 years later.
In fact, the most popular game I ever designed and released, Proximity, I designed and released in a single week of work (in my spare time).
I have never been able to match the speed and flow of development that I got with Flash since with any game engine since then, and I've tried a whole bunch trying to find something.
The closest thing to it now seems to be Unity but that's a much bigger beast that I don't have a full grasp on and have to look things up or download various things from the asset store. It's possible to make games quickly, but they'll probably play and look like garbage if you don't take your time with them and hire a proper artist, judging by the flood of garbage Unity games released on Steam.
Pico-8 is also fun to program with (it includes a built in sprite editor, level editor, and music editor), but it's a little too limited for my tastes, since I can't really make a commercial product with it, and I'm not that great at doing 2d pixel art. But I still spent some time doing most of a port of Proximity while playing around with it and for people who can do pixel art it's a lot of fun to use.
These same tools exist now for generating similar content sans Flash. Heck, the company behind Flash (well, the acquiring company behind Flash) even makes some of said tools.
Flash did use JavaScript. More precisely, ActionScript, which is the abandoned JavaScript 4 with classes etc. very much like Java. What Flash had was a usable scene graph + synced audio, though, rather than half-arsed attempts to use the DOM/CSS, canvas (immediate mode 2D), undermaintained SVG, or WebGL. I wonder why we were so fast to kill Flash (myself included); maybe it would have been worth to try and open-up Flash. Many, many more designers could author Flash and create valuable content compared to the schizophrenic web stack we have today.
I wasn't really around in its hayday but it had a very low barrier to entry - I remember lots of cartoons being spread years before youtube, you couldn't stream video, but you could wait a minute and then watch a flash animation. You didn't have to be a programmer to make content.
You're confusing mass production with adoption of similar artistic concepts.
Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.
There's a decent amount of research that has found that putting things in non-standard locations impairs most users' ability to accomplish what they want on your website.
The Nielsen Norman Group is a decent place to find some of this research. There's some decent information here about how conventional layouts tend to be more effective:
and the reason all of this matters is that the computer skills of a typical person using your website are probably far, far worse than you think they are:
so if you deviate from the "standard" layout too much, you'll hurt your website's business value because people won't be able to use it effectively.
I think there's still lots of room for creativity within a standard layout. But too much creativity might result in a site that looks better from an aesthetic standpoint but is less effective at actually delivering business value.
> Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ...
> Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have.
> Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations.
Menu on the bottom is obviously pointless, but sticky menu on the bottom would be so cool, most of the mobile apps moved to tabbar.
Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring).
On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention.
Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.
Because on mobile the primary interaction point is your right (or left if you're a leftie) thumb, which naturally falls over a tab bar at the bottom of a screen. Whereas on the Web the primary click zone where your cursor focus is, is at the top of the browser window where the navigation elements are.
There's also the obvious stuff about top-to-bottom reading order making such a layout making the navigation much more obvious when you first look at a site (which is probably want you want for most things, although not all, which is reflected in things like blogs often putting ancillary navigation elements in the page footer).
I don't think this is a broken thing that needs fixing.
I'll also note that it has taken mobile UX designers YEARS to start moving navigation elements to the bottom of their apps, driven by larger and larger screens making elements at the top of the screen quite uncomfortable for one handed use. It's required that to become sufficiently cumbersome that the trade-off in immediate discoverability becomes worth it. And you'll note that the most popular mobile apps such as WhatsApp still have all their navigation elements at the top, regardless.
It's not mass production that causes this though, it's the constraints (the things that make the process "design" instead of "art") that come from how they are used -- and while some of those have solidified into technical or legal constraints, many are simply matters of convention.
Similarly, any user experience study of a website isn't going to find that you should make your menu some diagonal shimmering nonsense, or try to convey information on the side of a spinning cube or any of that sort of thing.
If designer is more interested in fulfilling his artistic/creative ambitions than business value for client (making things great looking, stable and reasonably easy to implement -> in budget), he shouldn't even touch digital today. It's too complex and filled with too many constraints.
But if same designer wants to make decent money, well...
It's not a cargo-cult mentality. It's the convergence on a set of best practices "illuminated" by analysis of user-behavior data, as well as the application of basic graphic design principles (like the use of white space to create a visual hierarchy).
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
With tablets like the iPad, the monitor is the keyboard, and your arm does block your view. Maybe it is 'silly' but a whole lot of people buy and use them.
There's been lots of other laptop designs, and they seemed much less silly to me than tablets. Compaq used to put the trackball on the right side of the case (even lefties I know mouse right-handed). HP made a laptop with a little pop-out mouse, which didn't even require a surface to place it on. IBM made a keyboard wider than the case, which unfolded when the lid was opened.
Everyone I know who tried or owned these laptops loved them. Why did they die out?
We were actually talking about something else in the office today that seems similar: Apparently around 2009-2011, several companies were coming out with dual-monitor laptops that folded out when open... Which then died out and disappeared.
Are we talking like Razer's concept from a couple years ago at one of the tech shows (CES? I don't remember, honestly) or something like Acer's Iconia dual screen tablet/notebook?
I had the Thinkpad W700 with the pop out side screen, not to mention the wacom tablet built into the right of the touchpad. It was a great parlor trick, and genuinely useful for running a terminal or a music player to the side of your main workspace.
They demoed it and apparently the unit they demoed was stolen when they were leaving the show.
Not going to lie, I’d love an Acer Iconia style portable at this point. Wouldn’t use it for desktop publishing or probably anything with heavy typing, but just seems like a fun form factor.
Bob Lutz, the car guy (senior positions at BMW, GM, Ford and Chrysler), once commented on this. He noted that his designers liked Bang and Olafson design, with black on black buttons and unusual form factors. This was all wrong for a car interior.
Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
I have to disagree with this. Websites loaded slower because our connection was much slower. You’re comparing network speeds to page load times, which are different.
With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.
What you're describing is not a web site, but an application delivered through the web browser. Sites in the past were smaller and faster because they were just web sites. Today we have a whole host of applications delivered through the browser, with the Internet as the hard drive they're loaded from.
It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.
Gmail in 2018 feels like I'm downloading Thunderbird every time it opens. Ideally I'd only need to load it all once and then it'll be cached for faster load next time. But maybe that's too much to ask when changes must be deployed multiple times a day.
And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.
In what is most likely a parallel universe that I inhabit, websites have been getting consistently slower for a while. No amount of edge black magic can compensate for the growing bloat of fonts, frameworks, multiple-dozen-megabytes background videos, and half a thousand requests to ad networks.
> Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
I had a cable modem 15 years ago. Pages loaded faster, even though I had 1/10th the bandwidth that I do now.
Could be that web servers don't have much more bandwidth per client. Or that they're actually cold starting VMs or lambda functions instead of running constantly. Still, I agree the overall feel of the web had gotten shower and jankier over time.
This reminds me of how disappointed I was in my adolescence by how all airports look the same. Only much later I realized that almost any kind of building has a common design and relies on familiarity and expectations in its potential inhabitants.
> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places...
That's not true at all. Buildings are often very different from one to the other in both exterior design and internal layout.
In my experience, even light switches in commercial buildings are often in very different spots to where you'd expect, relative to a normal residential house. This is partly due to lights being switched on from one central area, and not being something normal visitors or workers of the building need to use. These are fittings anyway, not "the building".
Actual building architecture and interior design is very diverse, so your analogy here using buildings is not a good one to compare with the often identical website layouts seen everywhere.
It's fun to see how <fields> start wild, people explore things as they feel. It's a jungle. Then <field> become a thing, optimization/laziness kicks in, people expect some concepts to be expressed in a certain way so they're predictable. No more jungle.
> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.
You may not notice, but ceiling height varies regularly from 7.5 to ~10.25 feet, with absolutely everything in between represented. Only in a relatively small subset of large, wood-framed houses is it somewhat standarized to 10-and-a-bit feet.
Lightswitches are crammed in wherever and are very often a case of "yeah, looks good." Often a contractor will have a height he has people put them in at, but it varies from person to person. 4' is the most common but there is no code for it like there is for walls or railings.
Light switches themselves are all dictated by standardized form factors because different companies make the boxes, switches and faceplates and all need to agree on where the screws go for anything to work. Software, particularly web dev, is hardly limited by that. Design rigidity and similarity is dictated by convention, not necessity.
> Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
Those two are laws. However specific shapes, measurements and ratios like hood height, hood length/windsheild size, and body shape are all extremely similar in order to very aggressively optimize aerodynamics and crash/pedestrian safety. That's a reasonable comparison to web development: webpages are made to understood principles of UI and UX design, and well understood design patterns.
> Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
As an electrical engineer, I personally hate this uniformity. I hate the experience of laptops in general. I would very much like to make a laptop with no (well, one) moving parts, entirely glass, plastic and carbon fiber. The only moving part would be a single, extremely robust and stiff 180 degree hinge. Both sides of the clamshell are low-bezel 1440p touchscreens with localized tactile feedback, matte finish, and the keyboard and mousepad light up with a border wherever. Reconfigure the UI components with pinch and drag. Tilt the keyboard 45 degrees to type in bed. Use it like a book, a tablet, a newspaper, a laptop, whatever.
Problems include typing fatigue, touch-typing, breaking the damn thing, battery life, yadda yadda. But someone could try something creative. Laptops are in a hellish halfway of standardized consumerism and unstandardized technology- so identical, but so unaccessable and so unexchangeable. So uncreative. Why are slow/fast chargers and external batteries so hard to find? Why is Microsoft making the most creative devices, like the surface? Ugh. Laptops suck.
I'm so tired of seeing this attitude. This isn't about being "cool" this is a visual system for Vue that includes Vue components. Meaning this isn't a collection of styles, these are components that have been styled.
Why do you feel the need to make sweeping generalizations about the author and the author's work? Just shitting on someone/something for the sake of it?
Enabled in FF Nightly 65.0a1 (2018-10-26) (64-bit) and it felt a little sluggish especially with regards to scrolling. I understand it's in beta but I guess I was expecting things to "feel" faster. Tried resizing larger sites/pages and things felt snappy but scrolling felt jumpy and off.
That said, can't wait for this to come out of beta!
Safari and Edge with touch scrolling are buttery smooth! If you’re talking about a smooth scrolling option imposed on a clicky mouse wheel, I’m not sure if it’s even possible it is to make that feel snappy.
I've experienced the exact same thing on latest thunderbird betas and nightlies.
Its a shame that GPU support by Mozilla products is in such abysmal state. Meanwhile Google has working hardware accelerated video decoding AND decent GPU support in Chrome.
Hardware accelerated video decoding is barely worth it on Linux. Crashes galore. Does Chromium even enable it by default?
The problem is not writing the "GPU support", but working around the mountain of Xorg bugs that it triggers. As an example just this week, I recently ripped out OS compositing support from WebRender on X because it was simply impossible to deploy without crashing. (It will still work on X, but energy usage will be worse.)
Glad to hear work this is something that's being worked on because Firefox is still losing market share. And that's not good news for all of us.
You may put GPU support in quotation marks, but Chromium is way snappier and faster than Firefox nightlies on my Linux box, and I suspect taking advantage of the GPU is a part of the equation.
I also suspect the whole pipeline is more optimized on Chrome. Firefox has ~3x the input latency[1] and unlike Chrome, also slaughters my CPU when watching youtube videos.
Its not like Mozilla is under-resourced. I think its just a matter of priority[2].
I'm putting "GPU support" in quotes because "GPU support" is such a broad topic that it's impossible to pin down precisely what you might mean by it. There aren't any areas I'm aware of in which Chrome uses the GPU whereas Firefox doesn't. If anything, WebRender makes it the reverse, though since Chrome uses Skia-GL it's more of a matter of which GPU features a browser uses rather than whether a browser uses the GPU (in particular, WebRender uses the Z-buffer and the early-Z functionality, which are quite an improvement).
I will say that, in my opinion, WebRender is generally better optimized for modern graphics hardware than Skia-GL as used in Chrome, due to the reduced overdraw via aggressive use of the Z-buffer and better batching.
Often times performance bugs are just that—bugs. The existence of performance bugs doesn't necessarily indicate that "the whole pipeline" in one browser is better than the other. Browsers are broadly quite comparable in terms of the script-layout-painting pipeline these days. In the case of Firefox, I'm personally confident in the IonMonkey-Stylo-WebRender trio.
You're literally talking to one of the main initial people behind the Mozilla project that uses the GPU for browser rendering more than any other browser, on the comments of a post about this stuff making its way to a release.
Webrender has a pretty large team working on it at this point.
> You're literally talking to one of the main initial people behind the Mozilla project that uses the GPU for browser rendering more than any other browser, on the comments of a post about this stuff making its way to a release
I don't see how this vague appeal to authority adds anything to the conversation.
> Webrender has a pretty large team working on it at this point.
I guess what you're trying to say is that Firefox and Webrender in particular is a high priority for Mozilla. I would like to believe that this is true, but take a look at what Mozilla allocates its resources to[1] - Firefox Reality, Firefox Monitor, Pocket, ethics in CS, women who tech, etc. All fine and dandy, but the problem is that time is ticking for Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox is not even at feature parity with Chrome, never mind performance parity. For instance, I filed a bug[2] on bad input latency a whole year and 7 releases ago, and its still not fixed. A devtools bug for a websocket frames inspector[3] was filed 5 years ago, and its still not fixed either.
The time it takes to fix bugs and ship all these features is inversely proportional to the dedicated manpower. By the time Firefox reaches feature/performance parity with Chrome, it will have an insignificant single-digit market share, down from ~10.5% now. And that is with the incorrect assumption that Chrome will remain static.
One must wonder, if Firefox might do better at being a browser, if they stopped chasing money by questionable integrations with tangential services and focused on their core competencies. It seems like hardly a week can go by without a new announcement that Mozilla has their fingers in some new also-ran company in a new market.
Honestly, I think it isn't worth it, as long as we're on X. X11 is not a reasonable protocol, and Xorg is not a reasonable implementation anymore. It's had a good run, but it's time to move on.
Will the situation improve with Wayland? It seems like Firefox is generally moving in the direction of natively supporting Wayland but it doesn't seem like a high priority for now.
I have some working preliminary Wayland integration for WebRender as of this week. However, there's a whole lot more than WebRender integration that needs to get done for Firefox to stand up on Wayland.
Thanks for the info. Obviously WebRender and Wayland integration are separate concerns but I was mostly curious if you had any idea if Wayland would address the issues you were running into with X11/Xorg.
Yes, Wayland is looking a lot better. The most important feature is transaction support, which is weird in Wayland but better than X, which has none at all.
>"Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons."
To be fair and a little blunt, this is about founders returning to their product and gives a backstory about those returning. Aaron can't really return, so it makes sense he's not mentioned in this article.
I believe he's mentioned in the book the article is excerpting, "We Are the Nerds".
