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by tristanj 26 days ago
Both apps you mentioned (safari and camera) have been almost completely rewritten in the past few years. The software is designed, written, and tested on latest generation hardware. It is then backported to older devices. Apple developers don't daily-drive 7 year old devices, they don't encounter this sluggishness and have little incentive to optimize old devices.

The software is optimized for devices with 2x the performance and 3x the RAM. It's no surprise at all that it's slow.
1 comments
fsflover 25 days ago
Why didn't the same happen with Firefox or Chrome? They still work fine on older devices.
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tristanj 25 days ago
Both of those apps feel slower, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.

Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.

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fsflover 25 days ago
It hasn't happened to Firefox. Sent from desktop Firefox running on my GNU/Linux phone announced in 2017.
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handedness 24 days ago
Sometimes you endorse Firefox on the Librem 5 as a good experience, sometimes you indicate that due to it being fairly underpowered, JavaScript needs to be disabled on a number of sites in order to have a usable experience.

Setting aside the functional implications of disabling JS, can you help me square the two?

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fsflover 24 days ago
The browser itself did not become slower. JS-heavy websites did. But a lot of other websites still work fine, including HN. This confirms that there is no need to make newer software slower. It's the bloat that makes software and websites slow, not new features.
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handedness 23 days ago
They already addressed that:

> ...webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade...

I don't think anyone is arguing that modern browsers can't load old web pages quickly. And HN still loads plenty fast on an old iOS device.

One minute it's "they still work fine on older devices", the next minute it's 'I have to disable JS for the modern web to be usable'.

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tristanj 24 days ago
This discussion is about iOS and your Linux phone is irrelevant to this conversation.
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fsflover 24 days ago
It is relevant. I gave a counterexample, demonstrating that the software must not become much slower with improvements, unlike what Apple fans want to believe.
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tristanj 17 days ago
No, you pivoted to talking about your Linux phone, because your claim of "look at Firefox it's not becoming slower" is demonstrably false on iOS. The latest version of Firefox for iOS is pushing 400MB, over a 10x increase from a decade ago. I doubt they added 10x as many features. The developers of Firefox iOS chose to make the app larger and more bloated.

Firefox on iOS today is far more bloated than the version released a decade ago. It has more features, more bloat, and will run slower than the version released years ago. Claiming "It hasn't happened to Firefox" is a lie and that's why you deflected.

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