So I'm working on an CLI right now that fetches data from a website and downloads other stuff based on that data etc bla bla. And since its async it can fully taste my whole internet speed (130Mb/s).

So everything's good and I started working on a new feature. I started the app and it worked... For 3 minutes. After that it just stopped. It didn't even freeze or anything. After 2 hours of debugging and 3 cans of coffee I was so frustrated I just wanted to watch some YouTube and relax. That's the moment I realized I didn't even have internet. I hate my ISP...

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

Google, will you ever manage to fix YouTube so it actually doesn't fucking break every day?
This "feature" where the page doesn't reload when I click reload is neat until I want to, you know, reload to see new content. Or reload because you failed to load a single video thumbnail. But no, you managed to combine the shit of both worlds and give me a loading progress bar and then don't change anything.

Also YouTube is the prime example why you don't try to reinvent text input fields. I can't remember a single instance in the last 5 years where the comment fields didn't have at least one weird bug.

Why do tech companies build the shittiest websites?

Right.. I spent the hours leading up to the year change by adding a YouTube to MP3 downloader into my Telegram bot. After a bit of fiddling it turned out okay, and the commit for it was mentioned to the last for the year 2020.

I mentioned this in one of my chats, and users came in with more issues. Told them it's the last commit for the year and I'll keep myself to it. I did adjust the code a bit though to fix those issues, awaiting a commit after midnight.

Midnight passes and 2020 turns into 2021.

I commit the new features, and quickly implemented another one I already thought of as well, but needed its own commit.

Quickly afterwards it turns out that the /mp3 feature actually breaks the bot somewhat, especially on long tracks. Users add a slew of 10h songs into what essentially became a long queue of single-threaded bot action (or rather lack thereof).

I made the /mp3 command accessible to myself only like I did with some other administrative commands already. Still no dice, the bot rejected the commands but executed part of the /mp3 command anyway.

I look a bit further into the code and it turns out that while I was restructuring some functions, I forgot to make the admin() function exit the script after it sends the rejection onwards. This was a serious security issue and meant that all authentication was void. Fortunately the chat did not realize this - one of the commands that became available as a result was literally a terminal on the bot's system.

I fix the issue in 7 commits after midnight total, 3 of which were related to /mp3 and admin(). We're now 1 hour after midnight.

Happy New Year everyone... :')

So I'm not sure on how much Youtube can fuck up so much in a short time, but I'm actually suprised.
And I'm not just tslking of all the shady/bullshit bahavior and reasoning on content creators, but also on how this shitty new app is just one clusterfuck of not working shit.

One if the easiest features there is - the damn shuffle feature for a damn playlist - doesn't properly work since the first day it went live. Are you shitting me? Even after a felt decade they are still not able to fix it. Yet alone showing more than 200 in the playlist items (when a video is already playing)

But a simple feature which is useful to nearly everyone and which worked before is surely no problem when the damn service itself would work.
Aside that the app sometimes randomly crashes when leaving fullscreen mode (desktop) and making it for some magical way impossible to interact with the browser (WTF?!) until you resize it or wait for an eternity to relase you from that suffer.

On top of that pile of garbage, the videos don't load properly anymore. Whats the fucking point of showing how much of a video is supposidly loaded when you skip forward for 5sec and it has to buffer for 10 to continue?

Well, if that were to at least only happen when the video is skipped forwards/backwards. On some strange occasion (Probably when the stars arrange properly) than your connection to the servers is back in the stoneage. Because otherwise I can't explain how the fuck it has to lower the resolution down to 360p and STILL buffer. I have a fucking 10MByte/s+ DL rate, ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!

Now after over 1.5k chars I notice I maybe a bit over the top ... BUT FUCK IT. I mean, it's fucking youtube ffs. If the biggest videoplatform can't even create a properly working webapp, then what the fuck are you doing google?

TL;DR: fuck shitty algorithms!
The Youtube app seems to have a highlights option for your subscriptions. Found out because it activated itself.
Firstly: NEVER FUCKING EVER CHANGE MY FUCKING OPTIONS BECAUSE YOU ADDED A NEW FEATURE. YOU MAY NOTIFY ME AND IF I WANT IT ACTIVATED I AM PROBABLY ABLE TO TOUCH ME SCREEN TWICE AND ACTIVATE IT!
Secondly: Why can't people understand that I don't want any fucking neural networks (except sometimes devrant because the algo is the algo) to tell me what I want to look at, especially if it's on fucking YouTube where I only have to go through a few videos a day? But hey maybe I want to watch that video I didn't want to watch 5 days ago!?
Thirdly: I subscribed to more than two channels and there might be a fucking reason why I subscribed to these channels. Don't show me 5/6 videos not only from the same creator but it's just the last 5 videos from the same series.