
Ask HN: Why gmail and Facebook websites are so slow and buggy? - ttty2
gmail is crazy slow.
Facebook has some weird bugs all the time.<p>What is going on with these companies?
======
cimmanom
They have too many software developers and their middle management needs to
justify the headcount. So they spend their time rebuilding interfaces that
were just fine to begin with.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
That's more or less clear, but the big question is: do the people higher up
don't realize what is going on? Especially Gmail is losing its competitive
advantage - it's still usable, but slow enough that the competition looks
blazing fast. If anything, they should focus on things that make it more
difficult for other startups to compete with Gmail - but by the recent update
they just made it easier!

There must be some business people at Google knowing this, I can't believe
they're all patting each other backs saying the new Gmail works better than
ever, there must be some folks with some common sense in the upper management.

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throwaway2016a
I may be unusual but those sites both work great on my 7 year old Macbook Pro
running Google Chrome on a 5O Mbs internet connection.

Which brings up the point someone brought up is that the developers, QA
testers, and managers at those companies probably have more modern computers
and even faster network. But there are some ways around that like VMs and
virtual network interfaces that intentionally throttle the speed and
performance and I would be surprised (although not TOO surprised) if no one on
the QA teams at those companies used them.

Another thing as others pointed out is that these apps are insanely
complicated. They have live updating, undo, advertising, inline preview of
links, search, autocomplete, etc... tons of features that many users will
never use.

And that's just the client-side complexity.

Part of that is due to user demand and part of it is due to the app just
slowly getting more complicated over time (call it feature creep and technical
debt). And part of that may also be because as one cynical (albeit probably
not wrong) person put it, there are huge teams working on many of these
features[1] that need to justify their budget by showing "results."

You may also be assuming that 1000 features that are easy to build, maintain,
and keep bug free scales to a single system that is easy to do those things.
It rarely works that way because components need to interact with each other
and by necessity you have multiple people (multiple teams in fact) who need to
integrate their stuff together.

[1] Some of the features I'm sure have more team members than my entire
startup company just to build one feature.

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beezischillin
I haven't used the web gmail in ages, however I have to agree that Facebook is
slow and terrible to use.

I have not yet found a computer and browser combination that's capable of
handling their site for an extended period. Simply put, if you use it for a
long enough time, visit groups you're a member of, scroll through the messages
there and talk in group chats the Facebook tab will eventually slow down so
much that after a while even your keyboard input will become laggy. Whether
that's on a year old 15" MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16 gigs of ram in Safari
or a full Windowe 10 desktop with 32 gigs of ram, you'll eventually run into
having to close and reopen the tab again.

They just seem to be generating incredibly complex dom trees for the simplest
of components for no discernible reason whatsoever. A friend in a similar
situation permanently shifted his Facebook usage to exclusively using
Messenger.com partly because of this.

~~~
cimmanom
The downside of giving developers top of the line hardware to work with is
that they’re liable to produce work that’s performant only on top of the line
hardware.

------
sys_64738
I use the following to view FB:

[https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com)

This link to view GMail as HTML only:

[https://mail.google.com/mail/h/](https://mail.google.com/mail/h/)

Definitely speeds things along!

------
aequitas
Sorry for the blunt answer but: just open your browsers dev tools and start
debugging: [https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-
devtools/netw...](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-
devtools/network-performance/)

Determine if it is external factors (your connection/computer) or the site's
fault. Learn something about web dev. in the process.Otherwise I would suggest
not to complain on HN but with the supplier that you pay for the quality of
this product.

------
drinchev
Because software these days is crazy complicated. You would expect lots of
features from any web app that you visit :

\- Autocomplete for most used items ( emails, users, etc. )

\- Some real time tagging / categorising feature

\- Confirmation blockers on dangerous actions

\- Undo button for almost any action

\- Fine-grain privacy related functionality

\- Text editor with features, which renders whatever you type nicely formatted

\- Tons of helpers, video playback functionality, photo gallery, photo
uploads, etc.

\- All of the above free and because of that, tons of analytics included in
the page, which show you a relevant advertisement.

Yeah if you don't like all this you can replace Gmail with Mac's mail app or
any other program that sends / reads mails.

You can also replace facebook website with the app on your phone.

But you can't have all those features run fast on slow computers and a slow
computer for me these days is something < 16GB RAM or < i7.

------
AnonC
I find Facebook on the browser (Safari or Firefox on macOS) quite slow in many
interactions. Even looking at the list of notifications takes a long time on a
high speed connection. I’ve concluded that Facebook doesn’t do much
performance and responsiveness testing on browsers...which is not logical
since this is the same company that tries to get people on 2G connections and
slow 3G connections to use its platform.

Another guess is that the development and testing targets mainly (or only)
Google Chrome, which I don’t use. I’m not sure if long running browser
sessions (without restarts) cause more issues. But the Facebook pages are
heavy, and rendering is a lot slower than it used to be a few years ago.

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jamesrcole
Just one person's experience, but I don't find them slow or buggy. This is on
an ~4 year old Macbook Air.

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lalos
Performance is an after though, users notice new and shiny features but
performance gains are not seen as a feature. Plus, developing code that is
functional and performant is actually a challenge, which few can do and still
deliver on time.

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peterbraden
Part of the problem is that they are developed and tested on top of the line
laptops on internal networks. Even if they are also performance tested on
other devices, the developers rarely feel the pain

------
Rjevski
Because Javascript. Not the language itself actually, but the developers
(ab)using it.

------
supratims
Welcome to the world of buggy software.

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danso
So you're attacking the technical chops of FB/Google by filing the kind of
vague bug reports made by non-technical users?

~~~
detuur
If even non-technical users can point out flaws in your product, consider it
flawed.

~~~
danso
OK, I guess we can all agree that every product/service ever created in this
world is flawed, because all of them are "crazy slow" and/or exhibit "weird
bugs" to someone. Doesn't make for a productive or useful discussion.

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moviuro
Maybe you're on an airplane? Or your ADSL line is so bad that anything on the
internet performs badly for you? Because your own machine is full of viruses
and other cryptomining malware?

You give us zero information, so best we can do is: guess you have the same
issues as our own parents and other non-tech lambda people.

[https://leantesting.com/write-good-bug-
report/](https://leantesting.com/write-good-bug-report/)

[https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/how-to-write-good-bug-
re...](https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/how-to-write-good-bug-report/)

~~~
danso
You said what I was thinking, and got similarly downvoted. OP makes complaints
with zero details about what their situation or what they've observed, leading
to half of the repliers commenting "Works fine for me", and the other half
just wanting an excuse to opine about how software and web development is
going to complete shit.

