[faresahmed]

Off topic, but Notion is a perfect example of how badly you can abuse web standards. This webpage, which is a document with some markup and links (the very thing the web was made for) takes ~600MB RAM, about 10 seconds load, and lags terribly. Just unusable.

[AngryData]

Wow it is horrible. I clicked on the link to load it, tabbed back to this comment page and read this comment, went back to the page to see how it was doing and got 99% blank page, scrolled for a solid 10 seconds and just as I was about to come back and say the page is broken for me it popped up a proper scroll bar for a window about 1/3 of my browser size. Scrolled through about 5-6 pages worth of that which still looked broken, then the window finally resized and images started popping in, but it still took another 7 seconds or so for those to load an actual image instead of just a placeholder icon while everything shifted around like mad.

[joseda-hg]

It would appear it waits until it's in focus to load/do certain things

[crystal_revenge]

Whenever I use Notion I can feel the PM working there being pushed to ship a new feature this quarter; you can almost hear the engineers asking “why are we building this?”

A few years back Notion was excellent modulo a few small UX things that could be improved.

Now those small things still haven’t been improved but there’s way more clutter worsening the UX notably over time.

[TremendousJudge]

How many years back? I worked for a company that used Notion for its docs in 2019 and it was already slow and bloated then.

[Aurornis]

Notion sites aren’t my favorite and this website has some annoying quirks (like scrolling to the top after fully loading)

But if this is what it takes for someone to generously share so much information with us for free then I really don’t care if I have to wait a couple extra seconds for a page load or if a tab takes up 600MB of RAM. I know this thinking makes the web purists angry, but the majority of people who visit these sites to learn aren’t going to be impeded or even bothered. Even on my older iPhone on non-5G cellular it loads in a couple of seconds.

[onoesworkacct]

If MIT were responsible, sure! But Notion is a $10b company that shouldn't be shitting up my device's free memory just to show a basic webpage. Very much the same deal with FB marketplace which is probably the worst offender.

Not everyone has a fast device also.

[xnorswap]

It's more than a few seconds. On a desktop with a stable fast connection, it takes up to 1GB of RAM and ~17 seconds to finish loading, including around 2.5 seconds of processing time.

On the network side it makes ~650 requests.

That's an exceptionally resource hungry way to load the content.

[Noumenon72]

This varies more than I'd guess by machine. On my Comcast Wifi, it takes 37 seconds to load on my tablet but only 4 seconds to load on my work M3 Macbook Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Maybe Notion developers are issued the latter.

[packetlost]

Notion has really great ideas though, it's just so poorly implemented that it really hurts my desire to use it for anything unless forced to.

[alwa]

It was such a breath of fresh air in the beginning, when it was simple, elegant, and focused. Shame they had to cram it to the gills with half-considered cruft.

[amelius]

Also, my screen is 20 inches wide, yet the website uses only 25% of that width.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

On 24" it looks ok at 150% with vertical tabs to the side.

[JimDabell]

That’s Notion in a nutshell really. Nice UX when it works, but no attention to quality. I’ve lost count of the number of big, obvious bugs I’ve tripped over that they seemingly have no interest in fixing.

[kogasa240p]

Site doesn't even work on Pale Moon, and judging from your comment that's probably a good thing.

[pavel_lishin]

Even the app itself is getting slower. I loved it, and I've been using it for about three years, mostly for taking D&D notes - and it's getting slower and slower on my laptop (though it's still quite good on the phone.)

[graemep]

Turn off JS.

Hit the back button whenever a page says JS is required, unless you want to read it badly enough to wait for it.

The web is much better that way.

[karanveer]

i have slighlty old iphone and boy the notion app is crazy laggy. You are right, i saw a video where the guys spent everything literally on UI design, even that video had comments saying, should have invested in an efficient backend.

[apt-apt-apt-apt]

Wait till you see my React Native <TextInput> chew through 2 - 3.8 GB RAM for a 1 MB string..

[Marciplan]

hate Notion but also it took 2s to load on iOS safari

[brcmthrowaway]

What if you used the app?