But maybe think about why it was perfectly possible to have functional, fast, and reliable webpages and applications in the 90s and early 00s, despite the fact that our networks and computers were little more than painted bricks and paper-mache by todays standards.
I've been building web stuff since the 90s. Your memory of what it was like is flawed. Sites were slow to load. People complained about images because they took a while to load, and as soon as they completed the page jumped down and you lost your place. Moving from one page to another page on the same site required throwing all the HTML away and starting over, even in a web app like an email client (MSFT literally invented XMLHttpRequest to solve that). The HTML content itself was bloated with styles and font tags and table layouts. Often a tiny article would weigh in at 50KB just because it had been created in DreamWeaver or Hotmetal or something and the code was horrible.
Thr web didn't feel fast back then. It was hellishly slow. I had perf budgets to get sites loaded in under 8s (and that was just measuring the time to a DOMContentLoaded event, not the same as today's Core Web Vitals idea of loaded).
There's no doubt that the web is, in many places, bloated to shit. It's not worse though. It's significantly better. It's just that there's more work to be done.
Its not better if the only thing that keeps it afloat is the fact that broadband is ubiquitous by now (and that isn't even true for most of the world), and hardware got alot better.
The main difference is that many people started using the web after the gamification and bloatation took over, so they are used to adbanners flying in, random videos which start playing, and phone batteries going flat just by looking at a news article.
> It's just that there's more work to be done.
But is that extra work necessary? Look at this threads page on HN. It loads 402 kb worth of content: the html, a tiny amount of JS that isn't even minified (and doesn't have to because its so slim), a small css file, 3 small gifs and the favicon.
That's it. That's all the network-load required to display a usable, information-dense, not hard to look at and performant experience.
I've been building web stuff since the 90s. Your memory of what it was like is flawed. Sites were slow to load. People complained about images because they took a while to load, and as soon as they completed the page jumped down and you lost your place. Moving from one page to another page on the same site required throwing all the HTML away and starting over, even in a web app like an email client (MSFT literally invented XMLHttpRequest to solve that). The HTML content itself was bloated with styles and font tags and table layouts. Often a tiny article would weigh in at 50KB just because it had been created in DreamWeaver or Hotmetal or something and the code was horrible.
Thr web didn't feel fast back then. It was hellishly slow. I had perf budgets to get sites loaded in under 8s (and that was just measuring the time to a DOMContentLoaded event, not the same as today's Core Web Vitals idea of loaded).
There's no doubt that the web is, in many places, bloated to shit. It's not worse though. It's significantly better. It's just that there's more work to be done.