Let them eat Megabytes.

Don't know who you're referring to but I wasn't arguing against making usable products. I'm not even a web developer. I merely stated the facts grounded in the real world. Most of the web is dogshit slow. What is more likely to happen from the two: 1) Web-devs starting to optimize their code to run well on old hardware or 2) People upgrade to HW that can run the current web a little bit better.

> used in africa, india, china and most of the non developed world. Do you think these devices are in any means powerful?

I find it funny the moments the HN users try to shoe-horn the poverty of the third world into various arguments, as if that's somehow a consideration for most people in rich countries on how they conduct their lives. Spoiler alert, most people only care about what happens in their surrounding, and in their personal bubble, and that's it, and most app-devs and web-devs care about the userbase they can monetize the most, which is why some app devs, especially in the US, never port their apps to Android as well and are fine with only with the more affluent iOS majority userbase. So bringing up the third world poverty and inclusiveness in such contexts feels deeply ironic to me.

Yeah, I'd like that too, that web-devs and app devs would not discriminate between iOS and Android and all websites would run great on older machines, but that's not the truth. The truth is that most websites developed in the west are not optimized property therefore heavily favor those with modern machines and some apps are even Apple exclusive to the detriment of those left out.

I've seen Facebook offer Lite version of their mobile client and messaging apps but that's only due to their huge userbase in the developing world, which like ou said, owns mostly low-end devices.

Why are websites now less and less optimized? Because people use apps and APIs. Ergo, they're just fetching the data set.

CloudFlare Pages and GitHub Pages are bringing in a new era of fast, static websites. It isn't all doom and gloom. Furthermore, plenty of people are now using static site generator plugins with CMS like WordPress so that there's no database access required for each page load, which is really what slows things down.

Oh FWIW my personal site is static files built with Hugo SSG, and a minimum of JS. I don't think I will ever use a server-side technology for my personal site again. I do think a growing number of users are "seeing the light" in this regard.

Static site hosting with a brand name smashed onto it is a new era? GitHub itself btw is broken on palemoon for one thing. Not here to defend palemoon but it does show one thing: GitHub's frontend is over-engineered.

Not a GitHub Pages user, also not a Palemoon user, so couldn't say, but Palemoon is niche. There's not even an official macOS version.

All owned by the same company. I'd agree about it being revolutionary if it was on some distributed p2p network like freenet, torrent, ipfs etc. But to call some company doing things in a slightly different manner a new era? Come on

And if western web-devs cared so much about the experience of the users in poor countries, why haven't they optimized it already to run better on older devices?

When most people go online they go to consume content on the websites of the biggest corporations like Google, YouTube, Netflix, Reddit, Facebook, TicTok and so on.

That's what most of the internet is for most average consumers.

The fact that indie devs exist who care about well optimized websites doesn't change this.

I have nothing against the individuals doing web-development, it's just a job to eat and pay rent.

I'm sure if I upgraded CPU, things would become a bit quicker and I would perceive the older performance as slow, similar to every computer upgrade from 1990-2010. But it's really not as dire as you're making it out to be.

Also the javascript heavy web is for the most part an entertainment medium. I'm loading a link to Twitter (one of the most pointlessly heavy sites) and it takes several seconds, I'm already wasting time and so wasting slightly more isn't a big deal. If I wanted to optimize that path, I'd just not click the link to Twitter in the first place. Or if I needed to use Twitter professionally, I'd install a responsibly-developed third party client.

(Having said that the M1 is interesting for its low power consumption)

Is it as fast as my M1 MacBook Air? No, of course not. Is it unusably slow? No.

On a daily basis.

It's a matter of perspective in the end. I upgraded from a notebook with a 6th gen Intel chip which I thought was fine to a notebook with a 5th gen Ryzen and the difference blew me away and made me realize how sluggish things were on my older machine in comparison.

There's nothing wrong per se with my old machine, on it's own it's fine, but the newer on is so much faster in comparison, it's night and day for me.

For my parents the old machine is fine not it's own but they're coming from one with a core 2 quad so there's that perspective.

The only common tasks on the Pi4 that have unacceptably slow performance are web browsing and any IO speeds for the primary SD card.