[lucasmullens]

I remember learning that you get about 100ms for a basic UI interaction before a user perceives it as slow. And you get about 1s for a "full page navigation", even if it's a SPA, users are a bit more understanding if you're loading something that feels like new page.

Getting under 100ms really shouldn't be hard for most things. At the very least it should be easy to get the ripple (or whatever button animation) to trigger within the first 100ms.

[delta_p_delta_x]

It is mental just how different the video game and (web/desktop front-end) realms are.

In the former, one can have a complicated and dynamic three-dimensional scene with millions of polygons, gigabytes of textures, sprites, and other assets being rasterised/path-traced, as well as real-time spatial audio to enhance the experience, and on top of that a real-time 2D UI which reflects the state of the aforementioned 3D scene, all composited and presented to the monitor in ~10 ms. And this happens correctly and repeatedly, frame after frame after frame, allowing gamers to play photorealistic games at 4K resolution at hundreds of frames a second.

In the latter, we have 'wew bubble animation and jelly-like scroll, let's make it 300 ms long'. 300 ms is rubbish enough ping to make for miserable experiences in multiplayer games, but somehow this is OK in UIs.

[npunt]

Agree it's like two separate worlds. Games and web aren't 1:1 tho in relation to whether visual responsiveness is blocking a task.

Games need ultra-responsiveness because rendering frames slower is essentially blocking further user interaction, since players are expected to provide a constant stream of interaction. Being 'engaged' is essentially requiring constant feedback loops between input/output.

On the web the task of reading a webpage doesn't require constant engagement like in games. UI (should) behave in more predictable ways where animation is only there to draw association, not provide novel info. Similarly UI animations are typically (or should not be) blocking main thread responsiveness and (should be) interruptible, so even low frame rates are not breaking the experience in the same way.

But still, your point stands, its crazy what we've come to accept.

[crest]

I also expect my everyday tools to be responsive e.g. if a "desktop" application lags while typing I'm uninstalling that shit (if there is an alternative sigh).

[PlunderBunny]

I find VS Code unusable for this reason - typing is like communicating with an app in a parallel world.

[lazide]

It’s a good thing we don’t talk about Eclipse, hah.

How can a UI framework be abused so heavily that it’s that frustrating to try to use?

[filleduchaos]

> It is mental just how different the video game and (web/desktop front-end) realms are.

There is absolutely nothing mental about it, and I'm saying this as someone who's worked on a couple of game projects myself.

Somehow people making these comparisons are never willing to put their money where their mouth is and give random web pages the same level and amount of access to system resources as they give to those "photorealistic games at 4K resolution at hundreds of frames a second".

[lazide]

Usually these issues are caused by doing work in the UI thread (easy, when it’s ‘cheap’) synchronously.

All UI thread frameworks end up doing the UI interactions on a single thread, or everything becomes impossible to manage, and especially if not careful, it’s easy to not properly setup an async callout or the like with the correct callbacks.

It is easy to make a responsive, < 100 ms UI, it’s often harder to keep it that way.