It's a question of having it or not at all. Poor salad is better than no salad.

eloisius · on April 1, 2022

As far as I can tell, it's a question of having or not having whizbang bloated apps like Slack, but we had perfectly acceptable word processors, spreadsheets, 3D modeling tools, etc a long time ago. The current gen, JS-powered versions of those tools (Google Drive, Quip, Notion) all feel slower. Sure, there are fewer BSODs now so it probably evens out, but the extremely low latency UX of those tools back in the Windows 2000/XP days is lost.

whywhywhywhy · on April 1, 2022

Yet Figma blows Illustrator and Sketch out of the water.

A lot it’s really just down to developer talent and how much they care about it. Examples exist in the world proving it’s possible. Illustrator is slow for the same reasons, no one working on it cares about what they’re building. But still it would need 10x speed improvements in multiple areas to beat Figma now.

eloisius · on April 2, 2022

And Office360 is about as bad as Google Docs. It's honestly probably not a JavaScript problem. Some mixture of businesses not giving a damn about quality because it's more profitable to play the acquire-integrate-exterminate game than make quality software, lower barrier to entry meaning we get more developers who are productive because of better tooling, but probably in over their heads making performance-critical things like input controls in JavaScript, and piles of new abstractions without the old abstractions ever going away.