I haven’t tested the following claim and not at the computer atm (^U, see below), but divs must be cheap. They’re just structures which a rendering engine walks through and computes hierarchical offsets of via stylesheets.

I’m not arguing for using hundreds of divs, because that’s a sign of engineering insanity imo, but it’s not a performance issue. You can create a static page with thousands of them and (likely) see that it still doesn’t use 250Mb+ neither idles at 30% cpu core.

Added:

damn thing keeps messing with the DOM … web frontend is an insane dumpster fire.

Totally agree with these parts.

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… I just tested 50 div-rows with 200 spans containing numbers from 1 to 199. Total 10k elements, text doesn’t fit on the screen. Bootstrap css+js is imported via CDN.

Mithril.js implementation uses 50Mb of RAM consistently.

A static page with the exact same content uses 71-96Mb depending on the run.

Both use 5-14% cpu when I shake my mouse and 0% when I don’t.

Refresh is significantly faster with Mithril, idk why, probably because static html parser is slow. (Opera, Windows 10, no extensions).

With a single span per row instead of 200 both take 23Mb.

Removing bootstrap from the head inconsistently frees 0-2Mb for both.

maybe they are cheap, maybe not. but lighthouse prints a warning for "excessive number of dom elements" already at 1500...

What browser are you using? Having Gmail open doesn't even use half of a percent of a single core on my machine (Linux, x86, Chromium).

Chrome on an M1 Pro Mac. This is the number that Chrome’s task manager shows me.

I do have a lot of emails, but I think it should only have to worry about 100 of them at a time, so I don’t know why it’s different for me and you. It is possible that my account still receives beta features, because I used to work there, but I remember it being like this for multiple years, since the new gmail came out.

Are you using Chrome through Rosetta? I'm still unable to replicate this on either my desktop or laptop, both of them just idle when I open Gmail and neither will push past 5% usage while I'm opening emails. Your metrics seem a bit odd here.

Same for macOS, Chrome. CPU sometimes jumps to 3%, but that's about it (and I guess that's because it uses slow core).

I have very clean mailbox, though.

Well google use all of their own internal 'frameworks', so you can't really use their web applications to judge the rest of the web.

This used to be true but isn’t anymore. For a while they pushed Angular, nowadays I think a lot of teams are using react. GWT is long deprecated and gone.

I think citation needed on that one.

From what I understand (no special insider information) React is essentially non-existent inside of Google, and NPM is not even available to engineers (be default)

I am not sure how much I can say, because I used to work there. But I think it's OK to say many Google engineers don't particularly like Angular.

It depends what org you're in. Cloud seems to use a lot of Angular, but the rest of the company is coalescing around an in-house framework called Wiz (you can poke around the open sourced jsaction library to get an idea of the design philosophy).

To be fair, gmail was quite great at the time of GWT. Not sure how much use their Clojure “platform” still get, but I think it was very ahead in terms of maintainability of large js code bases (or even ahead as we have it now)

I keep saying the same thing at work on the NextJS / MaterialUI project I’m working on and I largely get blank stares in response.