I always think it’s unfair to compare things to video games. Video games are so inefficient they had to invent a separate processor with hundreds of cores just to run them. Of course they end up running well.
If cheap phones had a 128-core JavaScript Processing Unit, websites would probably run fast too.
I’m a web dev and yes they could. It’s annoying that web devs get blamed for it though, the reason for all the javascript is mostly business decisions out of our control.
Mainly the tracking scripts which the marketing department adds against out will. But also it’s a lot cheaper to have a client-rendered web app than a traditional website (with client side rendering you can shut off all your web servers and just keep the api servers, our server side processing went down 90% in the switchover). And it’s more efficient for the company to have one team working in one programming language and one framework that can run the backend and frontend, so the frontend ends being a web app even if it’s not really necessary.
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What happened was, up until the early 2010s a lot of frontend developers were essentially designers who could write HTML/CSS templates, but not programs. When the industry shifted to client side SPAs they couldn’t follow, so there was a big backlash against the new “complicated” tooling, even though it’s no more complicated than any other domain.
I always wanted to write a response post, “How it feels to learn JavaScript in 1996”. Because yes, webpack is harder than flat JS files. But you have 1 billion tutorial videos to help you do it, and open source project skeletons to start you off, and Q&A sites to fix your problems for you.
Some of us learned JS before YouTube or StackOverflow or even W3Schools existed. When I got my first job browsers didn’t even have developer tools! If your code didn’t work you just had to guess why!
Also since companies are adding AI to everything, sometimes when you think you’re just doing a digital zoom you’re actually getting AI upscaling.
There was a court case not long ago where the prosecution wasn’t allowed to pinch-to-zoom evidence photos on an iPad for the jury, because the zoom algorithm creates new information that wasn’t there.