[incorrecthorse]

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions.

How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

[mossTechnician]

Hacker News comment sections are the only part of the internet that still feel "impossibly fast" to me. Even on Android, thousands of comments can scroll as fast as the OS permits, and the DOM is so simple that I've reopened day-old tabs to discover the page is still loaded. Even projects like Mastodon and Lemmy, which aren't beholden to modern web standards, have shifted to significant client-side scripting that lacks the finesse to appear performant.

[bombcar]

The modern webbroswer trick of "you haven't looked at this tab in an hour, so we killed/unloaded it" is infuriating.

[o_m]

Back in 2018 I worked for a client that required we used Jira. It was so slow that the project manager set everything up in Excel during our planning meetings. After the meeting she would manually transfer it to Jira. She spent most of her time doing this. Each click in the interface took multiple seconds to respond, so it was impossible to get into a flow.

[ben_w]

Hm. While I'm not even remotely excited by Jira (or any other PM software), I've never noticed it being that bad. Annoying? Absolutely! But not that painfully slow.

Were some extras installed? Or is this one of those tools that needs a highly performant network?

[integralid]

At this point I think I would try to automate this pointless time sink with a script and jira API.

[impulsivepuppet]

Looking at the software development today, is as if the pioneers failed to pass on the torch onto the next generation of developers.

While I see strict safety/reliability/maintainability concerns as a net positive for the ecosystem, I also find that we are dragged down by deprecated concepts at every step of our way.

There's an ever-growing disconnect. On one side we have what hardware offers ways of achieving top performance, be it specialized instruction sets or a completely different type of a chip, such as TPUs and the like. On the other side live the denizens of the peak of software architecture, to whom all of it sounds like wizard talk. Time and time again, what is lauded as convention over configuration, ironically becomes a maintenance nightmare that it tries to solve as these conventions come with configurations for systems that do not actually exist. All the while, these conventions breed an incompetent generation of people who are not capable of understanding underlying contracts and constraints within systems, myself included. It became clear that, for example, there isn't much sense to learn a sql engine's specifics when your job forces you to use Hibernate that puts a lot of intellectual strain into following OOP, a movement characterized by deliberately departing away from performance, in favor of being more intuitive, at least in theory.

As limited as my years of experience are, i can't help but feel complacent in the status quo, as long as I don't take deliberate actions to continuously deepen my knowledge and working on my social skills to gain whatever agency and proficiency that I can get my hands on

[esafak]

Stockholm syndrome

[jitl]

A web request to a data center even with a very fast backend server will struggle to beat 8ms (120hz display) or even 16ms (60hz display), the budget for next frame painting a navigation. You need to have the data local to the device and ideally already in memory to hit 8ms navigation.

[ahofmann]

This is not the point, or other numbers matter more, then yours.

In 2005 we wrote entire games for browsers without any frontend framework (jQuery wasn't invented yet) and managed to generate responses in under 80 ms in PHP. Most users had their first bytes in 200 ms and it felt instant to them, because browsers are incredibly fast, when treated right.

So the Internet was indeed much faster then, as opposed to now. Just look at GitHub. They used to be fast. Now they rewrite their frontend in react and it feels sluggish and slow.

[dustingetz]

actually if you live near a city the edge network is 6ms RTT ping away, that’s 3ms each direction, so if e.g. a virtual scroll frontend is windowing over a server array retained in memory, you can get there and back over websocket, inclusive of the windowing, streaming records in and out of the DOM at the edges of the viewport, and paint the frame, all in less than 8ms 120hz frame budget, and the device is idle, with only the visible resultset in client memory. That’s 120hz network. Even if you don’t live near a city, you can probably still hit 60hz. It is not 2005 anymore. We have massively multiplayer video games, competitive multiplayer shooters and can render them in the cloud now. Linear is office software, it is not e-sports, we’re not running it on the subway or in Africa. And AI happens in the cloud, Linear’s website lead text is about agents.

[delusional]

I can't help but feel this is missing the point. Ideally, next refresh click latency is a fantastic goal, we're just not even close to that.

For me, on the web today, the click feedback for a large website like YouTube is 2 seconds for first change and 4 seconds for content display. 4000 milliseconds. I'm not even on some bad connection in Africa. This is a gigebit connection with 12ms of latency according to fast.com.

If you can bring that down to even 200ms, that'll feel comparatively instantaneous for me. When the whole internet feel like that, we can talk about taking it to 16ms

[andrepd]

What does web request latency have to do with it? News articles or simple forms take 5 seconds to load. Why? This is not bounded by latency.

[andy99]

I also winced at "impossibly fast" and realize that it must refer to some technical perspective that is lost on most users. I'm not a front end dev, I use linear, I'd say I didn't notice speed, it seems to work about the same as any other web app. I don't doubt it's got cool optimizations, but I think they're lost on most people that use it. (I don't mean to say optimization isn't cool)

[brailsafe]

> I'd say I didn't notice speed, it seems to work about the same as any other web app. I don't doubt it's got cool optimizations, but I think they're lost on most people that use it.

We almost forgot that's the point. Speed is good design, the absence of something being in the way. You notice a janky cross platform app, bad electron implementation, or SharePoint, because of how much speed has been taken away instead of how much has been preserved.

It's not the whole of good design though, just a pretty fundamental part.

Sports cars can go fast even though they totally don't need to, their owners aren't necessarily taking them to the track, but if they step on it, they go, it's power.

[wooque]

Second this. I use Linear as well and I didn't noticed anything close to "impossibly fast", it's faster than Jira for sure, but nothing spectacular.

[jallmann]

Linear is actually so slow for me that I dread having to go into it and do stuff. I don’t care if the ticket takes 500ms to load, just give me the ticket and not a fake blinking cursor for 10 seconds or random refreshes while it (slowly) tries to re-sync.

Everything I read about Linear screams over-engineering to me. It is just a ticket tracker, and a rather painful one to use at that.

This seems to be endemic to the space though, eg Asana tried to invent their own language at one point.

[presentation]

Yeah their startup times aren’t great. They’re making a trade off by loading a ton of data up front, though to be fair a lot of the local first web tooling didn’t really exist when they were founded - the nascent Zero Sync framework’s example project is literally a Linear clone that they use as their actual bug tracker, it loads way faster and has similarly snappy performance, so seems clear that it can be done better.

That said at this point Linear has more strengths than just interaction speed, mainly around well thought out integrations.

[adregan]

I hate to be a hacker news poster who responds to a positive post with negativity, but I was also surprised at the praise in the article.

I don’t find Linear to be all that quick, but apparently Mac OS thinks it’s a resource hog (or has memory leaks). I leave linear open and it perpetually has a banner that tells me it was killed and restarted because it was using too much memory. That likely colors my experience.

[lwansbrough]

Trite remark. The author was referring to behaviour that has nothing to do with “how the web has become.”

It is specifically to do with behaviour that is enabled by using shared resources (like IndexedDB across multiple tabs), which is not simple HTML.

To do something similar over the network, you have until the next frame deadline. That’s 8-16ms. RTT. So 4ms out and back, with 0ms budget for processing. Good luck!

[wim]

Funny how reasonable performance is now treated as some impossible lost art on the web sometimes.

I posted a little clip [1] of development on a multiplayer IDE for tasks/notes (local-first+e2ee), and a lot of people asked if it was native, rust, GPU rendered or similar. But it's just web tech.

The only "secret ingredients" here are using plain ES6 (no frameworks/libs), having data local-first with background sync, and using a worker for off-UI-thread tasks. Fast web apps are totally doable on the modern web, and sync engines are a big part of it.

[1] https://x.com/wcools/status/1900188438755733857

[fleabitdev]

I was also surprised to read this, because Linear has always felt a little sluggish to me.

I just profiled it to double-check. On an M4 MacBook Pro, clicking between the "Inbox" and "My issues" tabs takes about 100ms to 150ms. Opening an issue, or navigating from an issue back to the list of issues, takes about 80ms. Each navigation includes one function call which blocks the main thread for 50ms - perhaps a React rendering function?

Linear has done very good work to optimise away network activity, but their performance bottleneck has now moved elsewhere. They've already made impressive improvements over the status quo (about 500ms to 1500ms for most dynamic content), so it would be great to see them close that last gap and achieve single-frame responsiveness.

[m-s-y]

150ms is sluggish? 4000ms is normal?

The comments are absolutely wild in here with respect to expectations.

[zwnow]

Web applications have become too big and heavy. Corps want to control everything. A simple example would be a simple note taking app which apparently also has to sync throughout devices. They are going to store every note you take on their servers, who knows if they really delete your deleted notes. They'll also track how often you visited your notes for whatever reasons. Wouldn't surprise me if the app also required geolocation and stuff like that for whatever reason. Mix that with lots of users and you will have loading times unheard of with small scale apps. Web apps should scale down but like with everything we need more more more bigger better faster.

[zem]

> a simple note taking app which apparently also has to sync throughout devices

that is the entire point of the app, surely! whether or not the actual implementation is bad, syncing across devices is what users want in a note taking app for the most part.

[andrepd]

It is definitely ridiculous. It's not just a nitpick too, it's ludicrous how sloooow and laggy typing text in a monstrosity like Jira is, or just reading through an average news site. Makes everything feel like a slog.

[tomwphillips]

Indeed. I have been using it for 5-6 months in a new job and I didn't notice it being faster than the typical web app.

If anything it is slow because it is a pain to navigate. I have browser bookmarks for my most frequented pages.

[captainregex]

one of my day to day responsibilities involves using a portal tied to MSFT dynamics on the back end and it is the laggiest and most terrible experience ever. we used to have java apps that ran locally and then moved to this in the name of cloud migration and it feels like it was designed by someone whose product knowledge was limited to the first 2/5 lessons in a free Coursera (RIP) module

[presentation]

Since it’s so easy then I’m rooting for you to make some millions with performant replacements for other business tools, should be a piece of cake

[OJFord]

I don't know if 'the web' in general is fair, here the obvious comparison is Jira, which is dog slow & clunky.