Ugh, I hate it when technology takes a step backwards (youtube)

I've been watching youtube videos with the flash player for forever, and now they just decided to cut out the flash player completely, and I'm forced to watch everything with HTML 5. On newer systems, this doesn't make much of a difference, but I shouldn't need advanced hardware to play an effing video.

So I go from having no to little framedrops to videos freezing every 3 seconds, audio/video going out of sync, etc, and from my CPU being at 15% to 65% with lower quality video. I hate these technological "upgrades."

I can't stream 480p video on youtube's crap html5 player, but I can play a 1080p video file and it runs flawlessly.
/rant

 

Use VLC like it was intended

 

I hear you, I remember when my C2D 1080p Laptop could watch 1080p Youtube videos flawlessly. Then all of a sudden it's a stuttery mess. Meanwhile, I can play a 1080p video file in VLC on a computer half as power as it, easily. It pisses me off it takes so much damn resources just to play a video file on the internet now.

 

Download the video with youtube-dl (https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) and watch it locally with your favorite video player. It supports playlists.

 

Really? You want Flash? What is wrong with you?

Then again, it could always be worse.

 

I mean it's not only the video, but youtube also has all that bloated javascript and shit for the recommended videos and comments. Since when on the internet do comments need to load? That shit just appeared right away the second the page loaded.

 

Low-JS alternative: Hooktube.

 

Holy poop, now THAT'S how fast youtube should load. Most of the internet needs to adopt this behavior, that's amazingly quick.

 

Check the "programming" blog programming in the 21st century, loads faster than my mouse click. Beats freaking WordPress hands down.


To defend YouTube a little, 1080 used to work on your C2D because it was in MPEG-2. It took a ton of bandwidth for the same quality as current H264 MPEG-4. I know I couldn't stream full HD in my neck of the wood back then. They could have a fallback option for older computers though, in fact I assumed they had one.

 

A site with static content and no JS, minimal CSS and no images or other external file references is faster than one that has all that stuff? Who'd have thunk...
And yet it still provides you with all the info you want from it. (And also note how the "back" button actually works on that site.)

The "modern web" is full of shit.

 

Prog 21 is well made and has great content, that's why I shared it. IIRC there's an entry explaining how the pages are generated from their original source using Perl, it's an interesting read.

 

relevant articles: http://prog21.dadgum.com/77.html, http://prog21.dadgum.com/112.html
similar approach: https://github.com/jroimartin/sw

 

One last post criticizing modern web design. I found that and it's funny: Modern front-end development

 

I'm glad they finally got rid of flash, so many security issues.

 

I'm glad I have so many intelligent people agreeing with me, because I thought I was the only one who would bitch that modern websites are shit. On a specific version of opera, walmart.com gives me a BSOD. My dad's new laptop shouldn't freeze going to fucking aol.com. Who uses aol.com? He's old, forgive him. Going to the weather channel website on my tablet kills my internet browser until I restart the tablet. I then have to turn off the internet before going back into the browser, because it automatically goes to the last site I was on. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I made lots of money designing static websites for companies, 2,000 a week for one corporation that had dozens of websites, but they got bought over and that gravy train ended. My alternative is working for a web design company that will pay me like $12 an hour and turn around and charge a medium-sized company 10k a website. I would rather moonlight as a prostitute than be forced to use that monstrosity.

My sites are always W3C valiated with perfectly written html along with css and javascript. I cheat sometimes and use jquery. I use php only when I have to, and forget half of it since I only really use it for e-mail forms and such that I already have written, anyway. I also make sure my shit is compatible even with IE 6(I had to anyway, since that company still ran some old computers with that lol) None of this bullshit where you need the latest browser just released 12 minutes ago to visit our shitty website that's going to lock up your screen anyway and make your motherboard speaker squeak.

So I'm out of work with that shit because everyone thinks they're a web designer now using wix.com or whatever, where a single page with 3 large graphics takes about 3 full minutes to appear on my god damn screen.

 

Please don't turn off the internet. A lot of people use it daily!

That said, at one point developers got to stop supporting old hardware/tech. If their websites don't work on win98 with a pentium II, maybe it's because you can get better than that for 15$ and you shouldn't use that for modern stuff. Just playing the devil's advocate a little, you point about YouTube is fair. It's just that the case against flash is also valid.

 

The issue is not not supporting older tech, it's that they keep making the performance of doing the same task take more and more resources. Case in point, the original versions of messengers such as AIM and YIM would take a few megabytes of memory. Before they completely died, their last versions took 10x that, just to do the same thing. Winamp was a pretty good program until it got bloated and started using a lot of memory, as well as kept crashing. The music player I use today only uses 2.4mb of memory when I load it up, but by some mystical magic, it still is able to play all my mp3s flawlessly and has multiple features for using them! As opposed to itunes, which I'm pretty sure requires 2gb of ram by now, installs even more random services onto your PC without permission, and requires you to get a prostate massage every time you want to transfer a file onto your obsolete ipod.

I still remember when vista came out 10 decades ago and PC game system requirements stated you literally needed twice the amount of ram to play a title on vista than on xp, same game, twice the memory, because the OS was shit.

 

There's undoubtedly an inefficiency trend in computing. Mainly because the computers today are extremely powerful, so it's better to spend time creating stuff with them, rather than optimising a 0.1s rarely used routine into a 0.01s rarely used routine. Prog 21 does a great job at explaining that and why it's actually great in a way... if done properly and for the right reasons.

Now there's the problem of bloated softwares and badly integrated proprietary solutions, seemingly written by 3000 different teenagers. That also very true.

Food for thoughts: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks basically needing 4GB of ram to browse the internet on a computer today is ridiculous. With inefficient operating systems running inefficient web browsers running inefficient web pages, there's a whole lot of loss of performance that negates some of the advances in computing power.