Neil Panchal writing in 2020 about a cool little page called diskprices.com:

The performance of this website is stellar. It loads almost instantly. And the list (although it’s not sortable) gets the job done, it is sorted by price already which is the most important attribute.

Diskprices.com deserves the UI/UX award of the decade. We’ve lost our ability to design user interfaces laser-focused on the user. Instead, we have purple gradients, scroll jacking, responsive bullshit, emojis, animations, and many other things designers do today. The utilitarian approach of Diskprices.com is refreshing, although the contemporary designers cast it off as ‘brutalist design’, thereby marking it as a statement of fashion.

But both the creators of the page and Panchal might be getting this wrong:

Do you need a graphic designer?
No. This site is designed to maximize information density, accessibility, and performance. More whitespace, colors, and icons won’t help.

I think this is incorrect. The creator of the page is a graphic designer, that just happens to be the perfect graphic designer for the job.

This 13-minute video from Wes Bos analyzes this today-almost-mythical McMaster-Carr website and figures out why it’s so fast.

It’s perhaps more technical than what I usually link to, but shows what can happen if someone really cares about performance. What’s interesting to me is that the author posits that it’s actually not an old website that is fast because it’s old… it’s actually kind of a melange of various techniques throughout the decades, from vintage solutions like spriting images, to more modern like JavaScript’s page history API, or pre-caching DNS.

Just visiting the website and clicking around can be inspiring because it reminds one that we gained a lot of computing power and network speed over the last decades, but most websites squander it. Not this one.

And it’s sad this kind of approach of a website appearing and not changing (no reflow, no pop-ups, no endless spinners, no infinite scrolls) feels so rare.

However, two caveats:

At around 7:35, Wes says “nothing else moves”… Oh yeah, it does. It’s perhaps my curse that I notice these things.

Also, the homepage now has an animated, delayed green banner you can see at the photo above. I hope they’re not losing their way.

Evergreen and inspiring from Craig Mod, a 2019 plea for fast software:

Google Maps is dying a tragic, public death by a thousand cuts of slowness. Google has added animations all over Google Maps. They are nice individually, but in aggregate they are very slow. Google Maps used to be a fast, focused tool. It’s now quite bovine. If you push the wrong button, it moos. Clunky, you could say. Overly complex. Unnecessarily layered. Perhaps it’s trying to do too much? To back out of certain modes — directions, for example — a user may have to tap four or five different areas and endure as many slow animations.

Funnily enough, I feel that way about Apple Maps. I abandoned is since small things felt heavy, mired in superfluous swipey animations that felt like driving a 1960s car. Luckily, this was at the time Google Maps redesign its tiles to match Apple’s, so I got what I wanted to begin with, although in a slightly shady way.

I miss Sublime Text and might take it again for a spin (VS Code and Atom felt slow, Nova is delightful but also struggles in performance, even on simple things).

I miss Notes feeling lightning fast.