1gb of RAM used by Youtube tab is absurd (rant)

[poesu]

After amazing experience with Freetube (FOSS frontend for YT on PC), I'm baffled to visit Youtube directly. How? How are people eating this shit up? This bamboozling thirst for RAM popped up on the yet another shitty UI update that doesn't allow you to both see the playlist and view the video in the theater mode at the same time (not rolled out to everyone yet afaic).

I truly want every website to be worthy of our browsers.

But modern websites are not worthy. They’re slow, hard to navigate, and plagued with visual crap; pop-ups, bad typography, newsletter modals, and everything else imaginable. And that’s just the baseline. When I use a website on my phone I likely won’t trust it to show me the same information, I won’t trust interactions when I click buttons or fill in forms or even when I try to navigate elsewhere.

I don’t even trust the back button any more.

Why are websites embarrassing? by Robin Rendle

Websites are not usable without an adblocker. Search engines are unusable without uBlacklist. Well, it's true for me.

Do you still have patience for this kind of crap or know someone who does, if so, why? Man, I just feel like the "it's convenient" and the "alternative is hard to move to" is no longer the reality.

Besides the obvious (crapitalism), I think much of the problem is seemingly infinite amount of computational power. The browser is slow? Just get a new phone/PC/add more RAM/VRAM! Back then, you had to make the best out of limited resources. I strongly believe that limitations are a boon, not a bane. It gets the creative juices going, pushes you to adapt and grow and learn. And to respect people's time.

[shaggy]

The browser is slow? Just get a new phone/PC/add more RAM/VRAM! Back then, you had to make the best out of limited resources

That was actually the other way around. In the past - the 90s and early 2000s, if things got slow, you just got new CPU. CPUs back then had major updates due to clock increase. That just simple raw power increase. Today we can't increase clocks anymore, so CPUs must use different tricks to be better than previous one. That is much more challenging.

In the past, 5 year old CPU was REALLY old and dated. You couldn't play new games with it. Today? AMD 5800x3d is almost 5 years old now, but it's still pretty decent CPU that you can play all new games on. The whole DDR4 platform is very relevant today, even first CPUs are quite decent.

And I won't even start talking about RAM prices now.

But I agree companies just don't give a damn anymore. They tried more in the past. Now they write "start" window in react which hogs resources like a browser :P

I strongly believe that limitations are a boon, not a bane. It gets the creative juices going, pushes you to adapt and grow and learn

I can't fully agree. You are right you must get creative with limited resources. But is it good? Back in the old days - and I mean DOS era. People had to use a LOT of different hacks to fit into memory restrictions. Problem was, that when you use "creativity" and "hacks" and "smart" in your code, you will create something that is very hard to read and maintain. Today you can afford that 10% or even 20% performance penalty for the sake of better readability of code. Which will make code easier to maintain and extend if needed.

I will take readable design over "creative hacks" in source code every day ;)