2024-08-03

In my last phlog I asserted that any computer that couldn't run a
modern browser and render youtube would be what I would consider
old and more challenging to use.

I've already got some great feedback from a fellow SDF member. I
won't replicate the entire post so you guys can read it here:

gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gallowsgryph/phlog/2024-08-03_OCC_and_youtube.txt

Based on that post I wanted to explore a little more into whether
rendering youtube is a good benchmark for whether a computer is
old and challenging to use (as I asserted) in my original post.

youtube is the #2 most popular website in the world according to
some random wikipedia table that I googled for. Speaking of which
google itself is #1 according to that same table.  (as an aside,
could there be 2 more different philosophies of websites owned by
the same company?)

If we wanted to take an easy way out, we could leave it at that.
If your computer can't render the #2 most popular website in the
world, then it can be classified as old and challenging to use
day-to-day.

But let's explore deeper than that. I stated in my original post
that I thought youtube would be a great proxy for the modern
javascript heavy web.

Is that actually true though? Does youtube accurately represent
the modern web we interact with day-to-day? or is it just a singularly
terrible website that just so happens to be extremely popular and
isn't really representative of the web as a whole.

In other words, am I too easily calling computers old and challenging
just because they can't render youtube alone? Can we shop, bank,
communicate, and do everything we need to do on the modern web
aside from youtube on old computers?

That's a really good question. gallowsgryph mentioned issues with
facebook rendering on pretty modern 2023 hardware (although low-end)
which could mean under my benchmark, I'd be classifying that computer
as "old and challenging." It may be challenging but it's definitely
not old.

facebook itself is famously bloated. In fact a lot of social
networking sites are quite bloated and challenging to render...but
they are also some of the most popular websites on the internet.

Is amazon.com a more realistic target? Amazon is famously disorganized
and does have a bunch of crap on its pages...but it also has has
a clearer profit motive to have things render fast enough and
compatible enough to get everyone to the checkout page as fast as
possible.

Office 365 online is a bloated terror (especially Teams) but it is
a major productivity web-app that millions of people use every day.
what about gmail or the google office suite.

Of course, at the end of the day  what one considers old and
challenging to use day-to-day use is extremely personal and based
on what you actually do day-to-day. Web-surfing is also very
personal. A person who is on old.reddit and hackernews (and SDF
:-P) and never uses youtube or facebook or a million of these other
bloated websites won't find computers I define as "old and challenging"
to be that way at all.

Extra edit: One of the retro-computing youtube channels I often
watch is Action Retro. In his retro computing challenges he
often uses running Minecraft as sort of a goal for the retro
computer.

Is that a better or worse benchmark? Hard to say. My current
daily driver laptop from 2011 struggles to run minecraft but easily
renders youtube in firefox all day long. But then again, minecraft
is a 3d game that takes advantage of gpu performance which my
laptop clearly lacks.

but then again, again. A lot of genuinely retro computers have 
specialized hardware that allows them to do amazing things
like real-time video/audio editing that my supposedly
much more advanced and newer computer completely sucks at.

but anyways, that's what makes retro-computing such a 
fun hobby.