[Rohansi]

My point was more that rendering a few widgets at 60+ FPS is nothing for anything with a GPU, and everything has a GPU these days.

Anyway, something like this only needs to paint when states change or animations are running. That's an easy optimization to make here if it doesn't do it already. And games don't even bother with it, they repaint all UI even if it doesn't change.

[dxdm]

Waste the cycles, everyone has too many cycles, is it even waste if the cycles would just go unused, GPUs are expensive, they better do their bit, who's got no GPU, go play somewhere else without your GPU, pal. It's all a game, anyway.

Point being: your comment made me sad and I needed to lighten myself up a bit.

[Rohansi]

Yes, visual effects and animations in UIs burn cycles just to make it look nicer. Doesn't matter if it's a website or the native system UI.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's fine to constantly render when you know nothing changed. I'm saying the load from this should be very small. Most of the performance issues from this page are actually from the header animation, which you can delete in the inspector to see a significant drop in usage (mine went from ~35 to ~6.6 CPU).

[bmitc]

What happens when you have 50 tabs open using this "engine"?

[Rohansi]

Nothing? I actually measured it incorrectly in the comment you replied. With nothing happening on the page Chrome's task manager reports ~0.1 CPU usage for the tab. Almost all of the overhead on this page is from the header and footer animations [1] and not the widgets. Browsers limit things like `requestAnimationFrame` in inactive tabs anyway so even if it was bad it wouldn't be devastating.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986612

[bmitc]

Interesting. Thanks for the details.

[yesithinkso]

> GPUs are expensive

Do you know that regular HTML and CSS use GPU all the time?

[dxdm]

Nothing wrong with browsers using resources to do useful work. I'm just not a fan of bloat that eats resources because they're assumed to always be available.

That's what this thread is about, I thought.

[altairprime]

Video games only get away with this because their energy draw is obvious: one launched the video game, so one expects the power draw. Visiting a web page does not have that action-reaction causality in people’s minds. Having a random web page introduce maximally-inefficient repaints also leads browsers to start reducing timeslices — especially those with any sort of power drain cognizance, such as Safari — which, here, leads to hella janky animations that can’t cope without their inefficient repaint loop.

All this work to replicate the animated blobbiness of Liquid Glass. I thought everyone hated it! So, then, why is this a thing?

[TheDong]

> Visiting a web page does not have that action-reaction causality in people’s minds

It does in my mind. I fully expect visiting any of reddit.com, github.com, notion.so, or meet.google.com to have the chance to pin a cpu core at 100% for as long as the site is open.

At this point, I expect the average webpage to use more CPU than any of the video games I play. The only reason I had to upgrade to my current machine is because a 2021 CPU (intel gen 11) wasn't capable of running notion.so or google meet anymore, it still ran all the video games I care about just fine.

[altairprime]

As a web developer, I am not included in the perception difference I describe. I am also 0.000001% and not a representative sample of People As A Whole Or Even As A Majority Or Significant Fraction. So while my personal awareness is akin to yours, extrapolating from that towards the masses is a dead end exercise.

CPU bound games examples: Chess, Go, Final Fantasy XIV, Elite Dangerous, and any competent Civilization / 4X or turn-based strategy game. Yes, you can dial up the graphics on these to force them to be GPU bound, but they’re each CPU bound in their own unique ways. Perhaps none such games appeal to you, but as with above, extrapolating from personal preferences is a non-starter.

Non-tech people teach each other to force-quit apps to stop their battery drain. Websites aren’t apps, so their phone ‘randomly’ gets hot sometimes and they either have no idea why or just try closing all tabs in a vague hope that it works. Sometimes a webpage uses up all their data for the month downloading ads and so they stop using the web over cellular at all.

This is the baseline level of competence that improving the web must be aiming for — not ‘web developers will understand that the tab is using lots of battery and must be closed’. Making the web better is not about making the web significantly more battery-hungry, no matter how pretty it might seem. No visual advancement in radio button UX is worth a continuous repaint in JavaScript.

[TheDong]

If the geneva convention didn't ban torture, I'd say that web-developers should be forced to actually try and use the apps they develop.

The websites I mentioned use more cpu and memory than most games in Civilization the series, which are largely competently developed. My previous laptop could play civ 5 at a higher framerate than it could scroll github diffs or notion pages. Civ 5 handled full-speed keyboard input, while notion doesn't let me input text at my roughly 100 wpm typing speed.

I agree that we shouldn't be expecting users to figure out how to close the right tab, however I'm reporting the way things currently are, which is that webpages are poorly optimized messes.

[qurren]

They should also be forced to walk around town with a GDPR cookie banner pasted over their face covering half of their field of view. And then although automatic doors open for most people, for them specifically, the automatic doors shut. The doors are postered with "would you like to subscribe" newsletter ads. They have to manually open each one of them.

[pibaker]

This is like saying "I fully expect visiting that neighborhood to have the chance of getting mugged." A true statement and an incredibly sad one.

[lexicality]

Is your browser running the javascript event loop on the GPU? Because mine isn't