> Occasionally I'll pull out my circa-2008 Dell laptop (which can still run modern operating systems fine) and use it for a few hours to remind myself of this. It mostly does fine until I have to use some unnecessarily heavy website.

But this doesn't have to limit you to html only websites. 2008 (or 2006) js was perfectly fine for most tasks.

Yeah I'm never going to make the argument that HTML alone is adequate in most cases. Light JS, like as you said was featured on most sites of that era, is perfectly fine since the utility added is significant and the drawbacks very minimal. Same goes for images… highly optimized small PNG glyphs and small JPEGs are fine, you only start getting into trouble when loading multiple megabytes of images for purely ornamental purposes. My single core G5 and P4 machines handled such sites with ease, even with the (relative to now) badly optimized web engines of the 00s.

Problem is, light JS and small/optimized images are becoming more the exception than the rule. When devs have ample bandwidth and powerful machines they're much less likely to carefully weigh every dependency and unnecessarily large image.

This, tbh.

In my area the ATT only provides internet that runs 18 mbps maximum. Its infuriating when I am browsing a javascript-heavy website at peak hours and it takes forever to load. I don't think HTML-only is necessarily a good idea, but less javascript for basic things that HTML does well anyway is certainly welcome.

That's the one that kills me. When I am on a barely functional internet connection, and I need to download megabytes of js so that it can then do a fetch for three paragraphs of text.

> Some of us do.

I live in a suburb outside of a large metro area. Not at all considered rural. The only internet provider we had when I moved from my old house to this new suburb was Xfinity (Comcast). The ISP I had previously did not have service in my area and after an exhaustive search, the best I company I could find that WAS NOT Xfinity was a commercial DSL line with a dedicated 5Mbps up and down line for the same cost as and Xfinity line with a 400Mbps up and 15Mbps down. It wasn't even close. I also had to have this company install the line which would've been even more money.

In the end, it was pretty surprising how many areas still only have a single choice for their internet service.

> 400Mbps up and 15Mbps down.

The other way around, I assume?

Yes, you are correct. Thanks for the correction.

To add to this, something occurred to me recently, during a train ride:

I don't know how many high speed connections a moving train has, but when I cannot load a simple mostly text website, then some people on board apparently are doing other things than I am doing on that shared connection. One hunch I have is, that they are downloading many megabytes of bloat JS libraries, while I am trying to just read some text on a website and have mostly JS blocked. Some more might even be watching movies or running big downloads or windows updates or whatever.

Anyway, one result of bloated websites, even if we have high speed connections in our homes, is that we struggle with the shared connection, like on a train. If every Billy needs to load Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and whatnot, it surely is not going to improve the situation for other people on the train. Of course another reason might be, that the train's connection is bad in the first place.