A stirring polemic but ultimately sophomoric - made up[1] a story to valiantly declare support, for something no one doesn't support, and disdain for those who do not support it.
If you have a 2 GB phone (2018 era) and expect it to fit a multitasking OS, and every web page to work always, bless.
(how do we know "Aw, snap!" means your phone is too old and/or out of RAM and if it does, its the sites fault?)
20 years ago I had a multi-tasking OS (Windows XP) that could run 64 player 3d games[0] at 1680x1050 resolution while voice-chatting with my friends, running a chat client that integrated with games (xfire) and another client to talk to normie friends (Trillian,Gaim/Pidgin), and playing background music, all with 1 GB memory as the recommended hardware (512 MB minimum). A modern low-end phone is wildly more powerful than a mid-00s gaming PC. From what I can tell, Android can't even play two audio streams at once.
The irony is also that it would be way cheaper for people to develop websites as basic, old-school, reliable HTML pages with forms. Literal children were learning the "frontend" skills necessary to do that in the late 90s. HTML is designed to be easy to learn in a few minutes.
> The irony is also that it would be way cheaper for people to develop websites as basic, old-school, reliable HTML pages with forms. Literal children were learning the "frontend" skills necessary to do that in the late 90s. HTML is designed to be easy to learn in a few minutes.
Cheaper to develop but who are you developing for? You won't have any customers. Customers demand JS-heavy sites by virtue of the features/interactions they ask for.
Devs don't care? No, users don't care and they will not reward you for making a HTML-only form website, no matter how they have complained about sluggish/bloated websites, they will continue to use them, even with alternatives available.
As an example, I recently had to pay for parking with a website because the card reader on the machine was busted. So I scanned the QR code and loaded up the site, had to fiddle to enable some of the scripts, and make my payment. After I was done, I saw it had used over 25 MB--4% of my data for the month--to collect roughly 30 bytes of information from me, assuming a naive encoding (16 digit CC, 3 digit CV2, 8 digit license plate #, 2 digit state). Maybe it also needed the billing address, so another 30 bytes or whatever. Point is the TLS handshake should've been 95% of the traffic.
If anything, I almost left to go look elsewhere because it was too much of a pain to get it to work on my phone and I didn't want to use up all of my data fiddling with it. No one is demanding a JS heavy site here. Customers are not demanding anything. It's a near certainty that no one has ever provided feedback to the parking lot owner about their payment form. I did actually leave digikey's store because I literally could not figure out how to get their payment form to work without blanket enabling all scripts (and they have a ton of third-party tracking scripts).
Sites that are for services that actually matter (e.g. banks, governments, utilities) also don't need to be flashy. You don't need to sell me on filing for my paternity leave or filing taxes or making a bank transfer or paying a bill. Just present the form. The absolute ideal website in such cases is a transcription of the paper form it replaces with a tiny bit of javascript to check constraints/field validation. The free tax filing website for the US is a decent inspiration for this: from a UX perspective it's just electronic versions of the paper forms with some ability to auto-calculate some fields.
> From what I can tell, Android can't even play two audio streams at once.
This is purely design-decision-based, it has nothing to do with the limitations of the hardware. A laptop with a weaker CPU than a flagship Android could probably stream and play hundreds of audio streams (no promise it'll sound coherent, though).
I'm 37, QBasic since 7, built my first Linux box at 12. (25 years ago. My god)
I have learned to appreciate, and let slide, a good hand-wavy "get off my lawn" formatted anecdote to relate history...if it owns it and isn't slippery in the process.
Here, we're sort of waving at "if websites weren't in JS, the imaginary phone would have loaded the imaginary page instead of saying "oh snap", which clearly indicated it was out of RAM"
Some errata:
Android can play more than 2 media streams at once.
A 2GB phone isn't a modern phone. I worked on Android and that was our Emerging Markets™ standard (read: dirt cheapest phone expected to work ok) in 2018, 7 years ago.
> Android can play more than 2 media streams at once.
From what I can glean that's only if the apps allow that, by not requesting the audio focus, and the documentation recommends to request it.
It's indeed very rare to find two (or more) apps that can play audio at the same time.
Not to mention that you can't set the volume of the individual apps (unless they have their own volume controls).
> A 2GB phone isn't a modern phone. I worked on Android and that was our Emerging Markets™ standard (read: dirt cheapest phone expected to work ok) in 2018, 7 years ago.
He might have meant 2GB of free ram, and so at least a 4GB phone.
If you have a 2 GB phone (2018 era) and expect it to fit a multitasking OS, and every web page to work always, bless.
(how do we know "Aw, snap!" means your phone is too old and/or out of RAM and if it does, its the sites fault?)
[1] "I made that up.", beginning of ¶2