It is extremely annoying that all of this sudden discovery that http2 push didn't work hasn't come with some kind of apology to everyone out here who had tried to explain before why this wouldn't work and why it would be a dangerous waste of time just to be shouted down for years by the people insisting it was going to be epic as the much-smarter people at Google knew what they were doing and really needed this so we should just let them ram it into the spec. We should be extremely conservative about what we put in the spec and stop just throwing in speculative stretch goals because some people at Google thought it's a good idea.
Trying to improve HTTP and Web performance strikes me as pretty pointless when I have enough bandwidth to stream 1080p video, low enough latency to play real-time games, and a CPU 1000x more powerful than the one I first went online with.
The only thing slowing browsers down is the mind-boggling amount of ads, trackers, and junk weighing down most sites. And the tech I use to fix that issue is uBlock Origin, not anything that Google invents.
Everything Google forces into Web standards these days isn't for ordinary developers like us. It's so they can cram more ads in our faces or save 0.1% on their datacenter budget.
Slightly tangential rant — I use an application firewall to actively allow/deny network connection attempts. It takes a bunch of tuning for the first month or so, but it’s then far less intrusive. It’s worth a week of click-ops’ing all of your network usage.
Paired with DNS adblocking and enabling JavaScript on a per-domain basis, I am continually astonished at how garbage ridden the Internet has become anytime I’m outside of my network moat.
I don’t think there’s any one answer, but I think a lot of it is laziness, greed, and a lack of care.
Seriously, why is Stripe on (figuratively) _every_ page? Maybe that’s just lazy development. But why does Azure’s US marketing/pricing site load Google Brazil includes? Why does the 1Password web vault need to connect to marketing clouds?
I was visiting a site yesterday where the mobile experience was basically top to bottom ads, and then when you start scrolling one of those annoying “Login or sign up with your Google Account” popups took up the whole bottom half. The site was basically unusable.
As currently there are more new browsers coming along, maybe it's time for a new spec, exclude big corps & start from scratch with all the good stuff. I mean the sad reality is, the best thing that could happen is for mozilla to die. Then google would get into monopoly issues & we'd end up somewhere similar. Just now, the people who really care, have the chance to lead it & mozilla mustn't die..
20 years ago we were playing with lower latencies than a typical modern AAA online game today.
People simply played servers that were actually local - their country or even neighborhood. You could do have a constant 15ms ping on quake easily for a public server, or sub 5ms if it was friends from same uni or similar network.
Modern AAA just puts it in "Europe West" cloud region and is done, which means realistically 50ms+ for everyone (35ms being great result) and constant raging because of huge peakers advantage and mechanisms compensating that.
Servers were truly were people were. Partially because server software were available for the players to selfhost. Large centralized modern approach was supposed to solve many things like cheating on amateur servers but that was a failed promise.
"... just to be shouted down for years by people insisting it was going to be epic as the much-smarter people at Google knew what they were doing and really needed this so we should just let them ram it into the spec."
In the past when I have expressed satisfaction over decades in using HTTP/1.1 pipelining for non-graphical web use, e.g., fast, non-interactive information retrieval, instead of HTTP/2 which is slower and poorly suited for the task, I have been downvoted and received snarky replies on HN.
HTTP/2 is a fine example of how this one company acting as one would expect in its own self-interest is continually seeking to exercise control over public access to a public resource (the www). HTTP/2 may as well be "HTTP/Chrome". If someone uses Chrome then they will be attempting to use HTTP/2. The same company controls the gateway to content (search engine), the hardware, the software (browser) and now the network protocol, to mention only a sample of all the pieces they control.
Let's see if this comment draws more downvotes and snark from the HTTP/2 promoters.
I’ll bite. I like HTTP/2. It may be too complicated for what it was designed to do, i.e serving web resources, but it’s really good at doing things that it wasn’t designed to do.
If you need something more complicated than what a browser does with HTTP, with a lot of bidirectional communication, then HTTP/2 makes for a great alternative to WebSockets. HTTP isn’t just used in browsers but also for server-server, mobile-server, IPC, etc. HTTP/1.1 isn’t always good enough for that.
I agree with your sentiment. We were excited by HTTP2 at the time for use in embedded/iot devices (e.g. out of order responses to relax buffering, compression to save bandwidth) until we understood it is close to being unimplementable. To me the realisation hit hard, realizing webtech is all about CDNs and large plattforms being accessed with Chrome not about enabling HATEOAS for everyone.
This is a very obvious example of where it doesn't.
Everyone: HTTP2 is the bee's knees
GP: No it isn't that great.
time passes
Everyone: Oh yeah, HTTP2 isn't that great
GP: You see? I told you that first
Everyone: Well being early is the same as being wrong.
You see how that's not an argument here? GP was right. They were early and right. In financial markets the saying holds because if you invest too early you just lose money while the market's understanding catches up with you but here we're talking about implementing a standard (which comes with a cost). Everyone who jumped on the HTTP2 bandwagon incurred that cost. People who stuck with HTTP1.1 did not. Now everyone admitting they got it wrong have to back HTTP2 stuff out have to incur a second transition cost. The people who were early and right don't pay that either.
