Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 <table> by now.

Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be.

We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

You are describing Wirth’s Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Resources have certainly been squandered, but there are also a lot of apples vs. oranges comparisons that overlook advances in UX/DX and security.

I think we aren't far from AI being able to solve this sort of problem too.

Imagine you are Apple and can just set an LLM loose on the codebase for a weekend with the task to reduce RAM usage of every component by 50%...

YouTube will literally resume back to exactly where I was, then seemingly noticing that I switched back to it, go ahead and close the video I was watching. With all sorts of animations too, it's not just a case of having showed a cached screenshot. YouTube seems to intentionally forget where in a video I was, often after having been paused in the background for only a minute or two.

Why??

I feel like that's definitely a choice for Facebook at least - there's no technical reason the app couldn't remember at least the post you were looking at. I think they literally don't care if you were halfway through reading something when you flicked out of the app and go back in - refreshing the page and showing you all new stuff is probably measurably "better for 'engagement'" by whatever silly metrics they use.

Youtube/Google just make these shitty small annoying decisions just to make the iOS experience that little bit more annoying than it has to be.

Case in point — Youtube background play doesn’t pause when Siri makes an announcement, so if you’re listening to something you get two voices over each other.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt and figure it must be some kind of iOS thing, until I was listening to Audible one day and it paused automatically. So it’s just a google thing, not a third-party apps thing.

i have the same issue with the Youtube queue — this is something that could easily be persisted, but they just choose not to.

Brave is a very good YouTube app. You can download videos for offline viewing, build a local playlist of said videos, and bypass ads all in one go.

Too slow to edit. But also now playing just seems to go away after a while. Why isn’t this written to some nonvolatile place and just preserved? It feels like it must be on purpose but I wonder what the purpose is.

I find myself saving a ton of stuff to my Watch Later list, because I can’t trust the Back button when using YouTube. This issue exists on the phone, web, and AppleTV. YouTube just likes to randomly refresh everything. It’s the most annoying “feature”.

Even system apps like Photos have completely given up on state restore. I'm deep in an album comparing a photo to something on the web? Sorry, Safari needs all that RAM, Photos all is kicked out, and Photos can't possibly remember you were inside an album (despite, you know, all the APIs Apple specifically has to manage this [0]). They USED to care about these things and made it seamless enough that you weren't supposed to know that the the app was killed in the background, but they just don't seem to care anymore

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/restoring-...

Now is bad too, but my recollection is that the iPhone 3G-era task killer was EXTREMELY aggressive and required "tricks" to keep your state in the one app you could run

I feel like this might be intentional to a certain degree, at least on YouTube or Facebook.

If you switched off the app while looking at a certain post or watching a certain video, that's a negative engagement indicator, so the app wants to throw you back into the algorithmic feed to show you something new instead.

On a tangent how about those sweet app updates with patch notes reading bug fixes every week or so from the likes of Xiaomi and Anker weighing in at 600-700mb.

It's all gone to $hit, efficiency is gone it's just slop on top of more slop.

I had a China phone with amazing specs but it KEPT KILLING EVERYTHING.

Hardware is pretty useless if the software that drives it is useless. I don't know it probably works better in China all I know is that I went back to good old Samsung.

> iOS I think has really aggressive background task killing, and it also drives me insane. I know they do it for battery life but I'm about ready to switch to Android, and would have a long time ago if I that didn't also mean replacing my watch, headphones, etc.

Android does all sorts of wacky stuff with background tasks too... Although I don't feel like my 6 GB Android is low memory, so maybe there's something there, but I also don't run a lot of apps, and I regularly close Firefox tabs. Android apps do mostly seem well prepared for background shenanigans, cause they happen all the time. There's the AOSP/Google Play background app controls, but also most of the OEMs do some stuff, and sometimes it's very hard to get stuff you want to run in the background to stay running.

I dunno about watches, but Airpods work fine with Android, as long as you disconnect them from FindMy cause there's no way to make them not think they're lost (he says authoritatively, hoping to be corrected).

I recently started learning how to do iOS apps for work and the short answer is: you don't.

Apple seemingly wants all apps to be static jpegs that never need to connect to any data local or remote, and never do any processing. If you want to do something in the background so that your user can multitask, too damn bad.

You can run in the background, for a non-deterministic amount of time. If you do that, iOS nags your user to make it stop. If you access radios, iOS nags your user to disable it.

It's honestly insane. I don't know why or how anyone develops for this platform.

Not to mention the fact that you have to spend $5k minimum just to put hello world on the screen. I can't believe that apple gets away with forcing you to buy a goddamn Mac to complile a program.

It's the js that does it, because so many webpages are terribly optimized to integrate aggressive ad waterfalls into them. Or have persistent SPA framework's doing continually scope checks.

That being said, there's no reason the Safari context shouldn't be able to suspend the JS and simply resume when the context is brought back to the foregrown. It's already sandboxed, just stop scheduling JS execution for that sandbox.

Obviously it depends on what you're consuming, but popular sites are rarely static web pages.

Safari suspends backgrounded tabs. I think that's what we're observing here rather than strictly memory pressure.

Web pages that make sense are mostly static. But these days articles need to load each paragraph dynamically, so in order to save 3kb in case you wouldn't finish the article you need to download 5mb of js to do that, plus a bunch of extra handshakes.

You're just adding a step that doesn't fix the primary issue (you can already manually save any page you want without adding it your reading list). Someone should be able to go to their translate app, then their photo galley, and back to Safari without it needing to refresh the context.

That doesn’t save the current dynamic state of the page. It’s at most useful for static content, but even on a Wikipedia page you’ll lose your current state of expanded/collapsed sections and hence your reading position.

> My understanding was that market research showed a lot of users were turning off the 3D stuff anyway

It was also because young children weren't supposed to use the 3D screen due to fears of it affecting vision development. You could always lock it out via parental controls on the original, but still that was cited as a reason for adding the 2DS to the lineup.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/28/nintendo-announces-2...

> Fils-Aime said. “And so with the Nintendo 3DS, we were clear to parents that, ‘hey, we recommend that your children be seven and older to utilize this device.’ So clearly that creates an opportunity for five-year-olds, six-year-olds, that first-time handheld gaming consumer."

Mine (Android Firefox) does it when I have a YouTube video paused and do something else for a bit. Whenever I stop watching a video, I have to screenshot it so I know the timestamp to try to get back to later :-/

App battery usage is unrestricted, so it's not that.

With dram, you have to refresh every cell within a periodic interval. Usually this is handled in hardware. It would be a crazy optimization if unused pages weren’t refreshed. There would have to be a decent amount of circuitry to decide that.

I can't imagine the iphone is entirely powering down memory. Otherwise just unallocating memory won't change the power consumption.

This is an argument for having less memory on a hardware level. But once the DRAM is there, it uses power, whether or not it stores useful data or useless data.

There's a reason why we say unused RAM is wasted RAM.

The message with AI from execs is that you have to go fast (rush!). Quality of work drops when you rush. You forget things, don’t dwell on decisions and consequences, just go-fast-and-break-things.

The average LLM writes cleaner, better-factored code than the average engineer at my company. However, I worry about the volume of code leading to system-scale issues. Prior to LLMs, the social contract was that a human needs to understand changes and the system as a whole.

With that contract being eroded, I think the sloppiness of testing, validation, and even architecture in many organizations is going to be exposed.

It might actually turn out like that. A lot of bloat came from efforts to minimize developer time. Instead of truly native apps a lot of stuff these days is some react shaped tower of abstractions with little regard for hardware constraints.

That trend might reverse if porting to a best practice native App becomes trivial.

Considering that AI still can't even reliably get basic programming tasks correct, it doesn't seem very likely that turning it loose will improve software quality.

Considering how many companies that have adopted AI led to disastrous bugs and larger security holes?

I wouldn't call it an idealist position as much as a fools one. Companies don't give a shit about software security or sustainable software as long as they can ship faster and pump stocks higher.

I have a personal 16 GB M4 Macbook Air and my wife’s work computer is a 24 GB M4 Macbook Pro. My laptop runs circles around her work’s.

Companies install so many invasive shit in the name of security theater and employee control that there is lots of waste going on.

24GB is not enough, it will keep swapping, compressing etc. I had such device at work. 32GB is a night and day difference. That said my workflows are such that I need at least 128GB now...

> Removing docking functionality could possibly reduce RAM usage by never enabling 4K screen output. This would be similar to the switch lite.

Every version of the Switch 1 had 4GB of RAM, they didn't cut that on the Lite. Going back and patching every game to ensure it ran on less RAM it was originally designed for would have been a nightmare.

> (e.g., AYN Thor Max is $450 with a 16GB/1TB configuration).

AYN just announced that the Thor will get a price increase soon for obvious reasons.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/1rf5gxq/to_thor_...