Not if each "collapse" link reloads the page and at the same time stores the preference in the backend against your username so that subsequent page loads know what to hide (:
In 1999 I had a cable modem connection that could pull down 2 megabytes per second and ping up and down the west cost well under 50ms.
But forum servers were slow. Like, really really slow. When Sites like Reddit finally came to, 15 or so years later, with inline replies, they were a breath of fresh air.
Back in 99 Slashdot had massive resources put into making it responsive, lots of servers thrown at it, and it was still laggy and slow compared to Reddit now days.
Everyone arguing about "time to first draw being under 100ms" forgets that just a short time ago, web servers took more than 100ms to respond to a connection.
Yeah you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t consider that 100ms, or even 500ms, “expensive”.
In 1999 I would have been jealous of your internet connection — I still had a 256kbps ISDN line, and there were fast forums even then (but mostly not). I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.
Page reloads only got expensive when we decided that they would do a bunch of other shit besides that.
> Yeah you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t consider that 100ms, or even 500ms, “expensive”.
100ms is noticeable, 500ms is bad.
The old dial up BBSs may have been slow enough that you could watch character appear, but they were responsive! Those characters started printing right after your keypress happened. Of course it helped that it was likely a local phone call.
I imagine HN ever had a 500ms response rate, the engineers behind it would consider it a failure!
(Even reddit is under 500ms for many operations, and it is super heavyweight)
> I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.
Yeah Perl didn't help the 90s web at all. It made stuff possible, but wow, the performance was bad.
Then again web server software design back then was also a long ways away from what we know to do now.
> just a short time ago, web servers took more than 100ms to respond to a connection
And yet, once you wait that 100ms or however long it takes for the server to respond, your page is fully loaded and interactive. During the loading process, your browser remains responsive and your CPU is not loaded.
Nowadays, we still wait the same amount of time for the initial load, but now your CPU is at 100% parsing megabytes of shitty Javascript, and once the initial load completes, you're still not guaranteed the page won't slow down/overload your CPU again because some stuff can be asynchronously loaded (supposedly for performance reasons, even though doing it on the backend as part of the initial load would be faster in the vast majority of cases).
> Nowadays, we still wait the same amount of time for the initial load, but now your CPU is at 100% parsing megabytes of shitty Javascript, and once the initial load completes, you're still not guaranteed the page won't slow down/overload your CPU again because some stuff can be asynchronously loaded (supposedly for performance reasons, even though doing it on the backend as part of the initial load would be faster in the vast majority of cases).
The new reddit site is fast. Yes initial load time is like 2 seconds, but after that, everything else is instant. Click comments, escape out, go back to feed, load comments of a different story, it is quick.
Yes crappy JS abounds everywhere, NYT is an offender recently (they used to be good!), lots of sites suck in this regard, but when modern web dev is done well, it works really well.
Though having read the Reddit engineering blog posts, they throw a ton of resources at ensuring Reddit is fast.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica loads things almost instantly, but for the last year or two (!!) their article pages have leaked memory and CPU, eventually taking up all my CPU and gigs of memory.
Not sure how even. Great load times, responsive site, keep that background tab open and watch the CPU start to melt down.
> The new reddit site is fast. Yes initial load time is like 2 seconds, but after that, everything else is instant.
Disagree. I just gave it a try on a desktop (!) browser – when switching from the thread list into a particular comment thread, "new" reddit is definitively slower than old.reddit.com, both visually (after the thread page as such displays, it spends another second or two loading the actual comments, whereas on old.reddit.com everything renders instantly), and measured end-to-end (from clicking on the "comments" link to the moment the comments actually appear) as well.
On my underpowered phone, "new" reddit fares even worse, and never mind all that additional "you can only view this in the app"-crap that was thankfully never backported to old.reddit.com.
It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion but page reloads are pretty fast these days with http/2. Maybe there's ways of submitting a form in the background for the same effect, no reload needed! now we're surfing.
[-] should collapse subthreads. Caveat is that the browser doesn't remember which subthreads were collapsed due to no-JS.