Website bloat isn't the explanation. Firefox on the original 2GB Pinephone board is painfully slow even if you have uBlock Origin and Noscript installed. It is slow even to open and browse to a minimalist text-only website with. I'm not sure how much of this is Firefox, and how much is the whole Mobian UI that depends on GNOME components that have not been optimized to save RAM.

It also has a lot to do with the fact that the Pinephone CPU is underpowered compared to anything from 2020 (or almost anything from 2015, really).

Firefox on the original 2GiB pinephone runs just fine (Xorg/i3wm) even on a 1440p monitor with non-JS easy to compose websites (no complicated CSS filters, blur, etc.) with smooth scrolling.

It's only slowed down by storage access speeds mostly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ

And this demo is purposefully using both displays at once to stress the device more. With single display mode there's less demands on RAM, and more bandwidth is available to CPU.

Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqJOs0YwjwY

It is too bad (in the case of parsing) most websites have dynamic HTML structures... I wonder how hard it would be if you had some browser/wrapper that made most websites into wire-frame boxes, text to be simpler to render

You do realize if you use ublock Origin and Noscript that actually degrades your performance because it has to verify to not load that information.

My apologies for not making myself entirely clear: even if you have no addons whatsoever, and you open Firefox and try to navigate to some bare-bones text-only website, even that is extremely slow on the 2GB Pinephone.

However, I would question whether uBlock Origin degrades performance – my own experience running Firefox on low-memory platforms like netbooks and the Raspberry Pi suggests that is not the case. Yes, addons use some amount of RAM, but if they prevent the device from loading a modern advertising-based webpage where the ads and analytics run into the many megabytes and the useless Javascript is CPU-intensive, it seems to work out as a net benefit.

It isn't the Bootstrap-like frameworks that are causing bloat. It's that websites are written as apps these days by people with relatively beefy machines compared to consumers who don't usually buy top of the line hardware every year.

For example, compare Twitter or Facebook to their recent SPA rewrites in React. I can't use either without sacrificing GBs of residential memory. Loading anything on those sites now requires many more CPU cycles than they did before.

Reddit is the worst offender for me. I don’t know if they use react? But whatever they’ve done, it’s horrific. It’s bad even on my top of the line 2020 Intel 13” MacBook Pro (the i7 one)!

Pretty sure they do, or at least they use another SPA framework. I would have mentioned Reddit, but forgot about its rewrite because old.reddit.com still works.