Fair observation about web apps vs. desktop apps / systems. So maybe the browser should intentionally slow things down when using the device-specific previews to mimic real-world behavior, instead of just changing the window size? :)
In any case... the fact that you need so powerful machines to develop the app is also an indicator of waste at all layers. It hadn't cross my mind to showcase how even CLI tools have gotten sluggish, for example, but they have... Running 'aws', or 'az', or things like that show visible pauses at startup too. Furthermore, the tendency to depend on tons of services "for scalability" is also questionable in the majority of web apps.
It takes a lot of work to keep the development environment lean because it's easier than ever to pull in library and tool dependencies into them. It's doable, but usually also not a priority.
Edit: By the way, I do develop a few web apps on the side where I can be careful about dependencies and the like, and the resource needs are minimal. Running a database and web server on the local machine take almost zero resources. The heaviest thing of all is the JavaScript toolchain, which is... quite telling. And I can run the hundreds of integration/unit tests for the apps in milliseconds. It has taken care to get to this point though, and I have never experienced this kind of "lightweightness" in a corporate project. Here is a post that provides some background on just one aspect (https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/iii-iv-task-queue.html), and I'm working on another one to describe the testing process in detail.
> So maybe the browser should intentionally slow things down when using the device-specific previews to mimic real-world behavior, instead of just changing the window size? :)
I pulled up Chromium's DevTools and I do see settings for throttling in the device-specific previews. Whether they're actually used by developers is a different story.
In any case... the fact that you need so powerful machines to develop the app is also an indicator of waste at all layers. It hadn't cross my mind to showcase how even CLI tools have gotten sluggish, for example, but they have... Running 'aws', or 'az', or things like that show visible pauses at startup too. Furthermore, the tendency to depend on tons of services "for scalability" is also questionable in the majority of web apps.
It takes a lot of work to keep the development environment lean because it's easier than ever to pull in library and tool dependencies into them. It's doable, but usually also not a priority.
Edit: By the way, I do develop a few web apps on the side where I can be careful about dependencies and the like, and the resource needs are minimal. Running a database and web server on the local machine take almost zero resources. The heaviest thing of all is the JavaScript toolchain, which is... quite telling. And I can run the hundreds of integration/unit tests for the apps in milliseconds. It has taken care to get to this point though, and I have never experienced this kind of "lightweightness" in a corporate project. Here is a post that provides some background on just one aspect (https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/iii-iv-task-queue.html), and I'm working on another one to describe the testing process in detail.