With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.
It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.
And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.
Yes they could be faster, but most are still useful at a 5 second load time.
In what is most likely a parallel universe that I inhabit, websites have been getting consistently slower for a while. No amount of edge black magic can compensate for the growing bloat of fonts, frameworks, multiple-dozen-megabytes background videos, and half a thousand requests to ad networks.
I had a cable modem 15 years ago. Pages loaded faster, even though I had 1/10th the bandwidth that I do now.
Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.