Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by asark 2524 days ago
> The real reason in vast majority of cases, why most of our software seems slow is not because someone used Javascript instead of Win32 C or something else programming language related.

On the PS3, I bought way less stuff in their store than I might have otherwise, because it was so damn slow, crashed so much (out of memory, felt like, but might have been something else), lost state all the time, and so on. It definitely felt like they were using a web view of some kind, probably with scripting enabled and in use, not just HTML+CSS for layouts & formatting or something. I'm sure that made publishing and adding rich content features ("just have a JS dev do it!") convenient. It also cut the amount of stuff I bought on there by at least half. There's no way I was alone in that—it was so, so bad.

Even on the much faster PS4 their store's unpleasant, though—barely, for now, until they bloat it with more JS as we approach the PS5—usable.

[EDIT] point being it wasn't the network requests ruining everything in that case, it was memory and processor hogging webtech on a machine that couldn't handle it yet should never have felt slow, going by specs, unless someone'd screwed up bigtime (say, by putting webtech on it).

2 comments

The PS3 should be bored out of its mind running a shop front consisting of a few text labels and images. It is a kind of machine where one would think that it takes deliberate effort to write a simple UI that is actually slow.
Funny thing is the Wii U, which was still less powerful than the PS3, has a delightful shop. It wasn’t necessarily fast, but it didn’t shit itself loading a JPEG — AND has charming music and animations!