Products · Broad category
Web development
Raised as a usability problem by 60 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 64 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Dev tools are over-complicated for simple tasksUnreviewed
20092026- Web platform is half-baked, forcing developers to rebuild UI parts repeatedly2025-01-23
- Web dev tools are slow, bloated and over-complicated for simple tasks2024-08-30
- Building web apps takes tedious hand-written code, too slow to get work done2023-05-05
Non-developers need hours of docs just to set upUnreviewed
20092026- Web development is convoluted and brittle, needing three languages and huge dependency downloads2021-12-01
- Developers are forced to use npm and complex tooling for everyday web work2018-02-10
- Web development is a nightmare for non-developers; setup needs hours of reading docs2017-08-01
Docs often don't explain how to do things the framework's wayUnreviewed
20092026- Frameworks get in the way with shortsighted design decisions2022-03-06
- Simple layouts and frameworks take beginners days or months to understand2021-11-24
- Hard to work out how to do things the framework's way, and docs often don't cover it2017-06-25
Software and browsers lag behind user inputUnreviewed
20092026- Software and browsers feel slow and laggy in response to user input2021-06-09
- Browser takes about 2 seconds to load 1000 elements, slow UI2019-11-10
- Web UIs feel stuttering and laggy with broken animations2019-04-05
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Layout requires understanding CSS rendering, divs, selectors and z-index instead of simple sane defaults2026-10-04
- Frontend tooling and APIs are so sprawling and inconsistent that agents and people struggle to produce good output2026-07-02
- Writing software by manipulating the DOM and CSS is painful to work with2026-03-14
- Constantly having to relearn new opinionated frameworks and syntax for basic web display2026-03-07
- Too many parts and tools to learn before doing anything2025-12-21
- Web apps built with frameworks feel worse to use than native apps2025-04-15
- Web platform is half-baked, forcing developers to rebuild UI parts repeatedly2025-01-23
- Building basic controls needs fiddly padding, margins and flexbox, unlike desktop toolkits2024-09-22
- Web dev tools are slow, bloated and over-complicated for simple tasks2024-08-30
- Much of the site cannot be navigated by keyboard because links are click-handler divs2023-11-13
- Building web apps takes tedious hand-written code, too slow to get work done2023-05-05
- Stack of badly designed, poorly documented APIs makes web programming harder than needed2023-01-10
- Web app tooling is a hacky mess, not cohesive or easy to use2022-09-05
- Web development is too low-level and fragile, with no standard tools or UI library2022-08-17
- Making anything beyond static pages requires too many hoops to jump through2022-06-23
- Designing user interfaces on the web is harder than older desktop toolkits2022-05-04
- Binding a database table to a paged table view needs many layers of tooling2022-03-16
- Web development tools are fragmented and hard to understand, lowering developer productivity2022-03-07
- Frameworks get in the way with shortsighted design decisions2022-03-06
- Hard to get custom web components' edge cases right with current tooling2021-12-27
- Spinner runs forever or nothing shows when a request fails, confusing users2021-12-19
- Web development is convoluted and brittle, needing three languages and huge dependency downloads2021-12-01
- Simple layouts and frameworks take beginners days or months to understand2021-11-24
- Compiling takes minutes and hot reloading refreshes the page repeatedly, making daily work painful2021-10-21
- JavaScript awkwardness makes the web a poor foundation for building user interfaces2021-08-09
- Software and browsers feel slow and laggy in response to user input2021-06-09
- Centering something in a container was very difficult in CSS until recently2021-03-02
- Simple hello world project requires huge pile of tooling and requirements2020-12-22
- Simple landing pages require too many complex tools and steps2020-09-21
- Simple web dev tasks require excessive rocket-science effort and complexity2020-09-03
- Web development stacks are convoluted, with heavy configuration and verbosity2020-08-27
- Managing dependencies and keeping up with many packages is overwhelming before any code is written2020-06-24
- Web stack is an incoherent mish-mash, making application development unpleasant for developers2020-06-15
- Browser inconsistencies and tooling churn make building web apps frustrating2020-05-27
- Clickable table row workarounds confuse screen reader users and break right-click menus2020-04-24
- Defining HTTP routes by hand feels tedious and dated compared to transparent client-server object APIs2019-11-16
- Must manually restore each tab's URL and scroll position before replaying2019-11-14
- Non-semantic div buttons give assistive technology users a worse experience2019-11-12
- Browser takes about 2 seconds to load 1000 elements, slow UI2019-11-10
- Page script blocks the user from resizing the text2019-07-28
- No standard way to use modules in workers; bundlers need weird workarounds2019-06-15
- Div-based links are inaccessible to screen reader users2019-06-12
- Web tooling setup took a day, with a global TypeScript version silently overriding the local one2019-05-16
- Web UIs feel stuttering and laggy with broken animations2019-04-05
- Hard-to-follow API documentation and HTTPS setup that stays difficult even when repeated2019-01-22
- Tooling setup and configuration wastes weeks and breaks unpredictably at scale2018-12-20
- Must design every UI element from scratch instead of using classic widgets2018-12-14
- Web stack too complex and object-oriented, making application UIs inefficient and painful to build2018-06-13
- Developers are forced to use npm and complex tooling for everyday web work2018-02-10
- Mailbox takes seconds to load because unwanted timeline and notification features are loaded too2017-10-23