Comment by panstromek
Comment by panstromek 17 hours ago
> If your tech stack manages to bring that hardware to its knees for basic UI rendering, and requires a lot of optimization effort to run barely reasonably, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your tech stack
Yea, I think this is the problem, but the hard part is that it's largely outside of your control on the web. Alcatel 1 is technically a super computer, but it can't even run its own UI properly. I optimize my websites on it and while laggy, they sometimes run faster than Chrome's UI that displays them, it's crazy.
Running the system + the browser is already way too much and there's almost no perf budget left for the website - and it doesn't help that web tech is inherently sub-optimal in many ways, so you're already pessimized on all fronts. Even a baseline a simple page with almost no content is laggy on this device.
> it's largely outside of your control on the web.
On the web or in the JS ecosystem?
While I agree that even just the browsers are monster applications, usually duplicating (at least) the entire OS they are running on, just usually worse.
However, most browsers are perfectly capable of extremely snappy rendering and interactions, even on low-powered devices.
Let's remember that WWW.app was developed on a NeXT Cube, 25 MHz 68040, probably in the 16-64 MB RAM range (min was 8, but I am assuming it was more than the min), and that was plenty snappy.