Yeah I actually considered that while writing my original comment, it's true that even on a low-end smartphone nowadays browsing certain websites is extremely frustrating. That being said is it really reasonable that the modern web requires multi GHz CPUs, GB of RAM and allowing a turing-complete scripting language everywhere to be able to browse most websites? Is it reasonable that the web is so complex now that effectively nobody but a few giant companies can invest the time and resource to write and maintain the millions of lines of code of a modern browser?

Why not? The operating system is the device driver/HAL. The Browser is the operating system. The webpage is the application.

Because not all webpages are meant to be applications. HN need not be an application. Google search results need not be an application. GMail and Facebook might be for better interactivity. At least 90% of the websites I browse everyday are static text with a few pictures (who still feature copious amounts of javascript to work around the limitations of HTML/CSS and to track me and serve me ads).

Would you consider installing and running dozens of random untrusted 3rd party applications every day on your real OS even if they were (somewhat poorly) sandboxed? Because that's what the modern web is like.

I wouldn't mind opting-in to additional "interactive" features for webapps that I want to trust but having everybody (including 3rd parties of 3rd parties of the website I'm browsing) run code on my computer when I'm on some random webpage is just insane when you take a minute to think about it.

HN is fast enough on an old 600MHz A8 processor from 8 years ago. In fact, multimedia aside, basically every static site that doesn't overdo the CSS will be fairly fast on fairly old processors.

Gmail or Facebook aren't the problem. People could be convinced to use desktop apps for them fairly easily (just like they do on their phones). The issue is all the other one-off apps. Users can't be bothered to go and download some random app, so the company runs that app in the browser. You simply cannot fight that level of market pressure.

The web (by that I mean most browsers and most web pages) is designed for hi-end devices. Text-based browsing also ought to be possible, but often doesn't work well in practice because it's not a common use case, and so it's not something that developers consider in the design process.