The pseudo-source view also came (and still comes) with noticeable performance drawbacks. Opening the inspector on a nested element using today's browsers' built-in inspectors (which are implemented in HTML nowadays) can be slower than if you were to do the same thing on the same graph with a Web development extension in Firefox, since extensions were able to use the XUL platform, and that meant being free to implement nsITreeView.
And that's even with the advantage of modern hardware and and the trick where modern development tools will choose to elide elements in favor of showing a message that says that some nodes are hidden, with a button to e.g. "Show all 347 nodes". I just tried this with a 5000-row table, and clicking the "Show all[...]" button in Firefox's built-in developer tools has seemingly no effect at first—the inspector appears appears unresponsive for several seconds, before finally painting the expansion. In programs from 15 years ago running on 15+ year old hardware, on the other hand, this could expected to be nearly instant.
Jamie Brandon recently complained about this sort of thing, comparing the experience of creating an information-dense UI using imgui versus doing the same "on the web" (i.e. in the browser, using HTML):
And that's even with the advantage of modern hardware and and the trick where modern development tools will choose to elide elements in favor of showing a message that says that some nodes are hidden, with a button to e.g. "Show all 347 nodes". I just tried this with a 5000-row table, and clicking the "Show all[...]" button in Firefox's built-in developer tools has seemingly no effect at first—the inspector appears appears unresponsive for several seconds, before finally painting the expansion. In programs from 15 years ago running on 15+ year old hardware, on the other hand, this could expected to be nearly instant.
Jamie Brandon recently complained about this sort of thing, comparing the experience of creating an information-dense UI using imgui versus doing the same "on the web" (i.e. in the browser, using HTML):
<https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/log/0026/>