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by groomlake·7d ago·view on hn ↗
I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires.

In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

9 comments
YouTube too. And I'm not even talking about the video player. Displaying a 4x4 grid of thumbnails seems to be some kind of herculean task.
I think some of the Youtube thumbnail stuff is lazy-loaded, so depending on the speed of your browser and connection it can just hang there doing nothing for a while.
5800X3D and a 1gig symmetric line. I really don't know how much more system resource it wants.
Microsoft web apps are sluggish on my i7 with 64gb of RAM. But it's not performance issues, I think. It's networking, they have some crazy interconnected backend spread across about 20 systems and everything you do is going to need to wait for all of those to talk with each other. Switching HTML to canvas isn't gonna fix it.
The text entry of the Google AI is a catastrophe. Not scalable, sometimes text lines are half hidden, the cursor disappears on empty lines, it eats line breaks after sending the text. I reported it via mail, Google never answered.
Chatgpt makes teams feel like an optimized app. The azure website makes everything else feel like it's been optimized.

Especially in the era of AI, performance has been thrown out of the window

The Copilot Char got even worse.

The scrollbar is blocked on the bottom by the chat window. Keyboard navigation page up, page down, arrow up, arrow down only work if you are inside inside the answer window otherwise you get a totally different scroll behavior.

On Edge you can’t change anything of that per extension because MS block any change

This is appeal to authority and largely made out of the same cowardice that gives us "no one got fired by buy IBM".
Most Microsoft web apps are sluggish and horribly designed.

I was using Entra and Azure the other day and boy are they slow and clunky.

YouTube is a half working disaster.
All of their webapps are garbage.